Featured image: Fyvie Castle Music Gallery (author’s own photographs)
“Domestic music-making” means different things in different homes. Soundyngs learnt recently of a Scottish musician who owns multiple harpsichords and who doesn’t live in a castle. Well done that chap, although if you do own a castle, it would certainly make owning multiple harpsichords a bit easier. This post isn’t going to do more than scratch the surface of this topical iceberg, but if you are visiting Scottish castles and great houses, I would encourage you to have a look at the facilities people installed for music-making. A hundred years ago, the Edwardian aristocracy developed home-entertainment spaces which had ample space not only for several instruments, but also for seated audiences.
Let’s look at three such houses: Marchmont House, Fyvie Castle, and Dunrobin Castle. Architecturally, these date from very different periods, but all have music rooms developed in the early 20th century for a new level of musical luxury. Comparing the instruments present shows that this generation of wealthy owners shared a taste for the latest thing in mechanical gadgetry: not harpsichords, but organs.
Marchmont House
We start in the Scottish Borders, some 40 miles south of Edinburgh. Marchmont House itself dates from the 1750s, a time when Scottish melody and continental Italian harmonies were combining in what David Johnson famously called the “Scots drawing room style”. However, the music room is not from the original build. It dates from a period of rebuilding supervised by Scottish architect Robert Lorimer (1914-17), and is a creative re-use of the old stables.
Installed as an oasis of harmony in the period of the 1st World War, the rebuild included the installation of a Norman and Beard (Norwich) pipe organ. The then-owner of Marchmont House, Robert Finnie McEwen, was a friend of the composer Charles Villiers Stanford, a leading figure in the so-called British musical ‘renaissance’. Stanford, and later in the 1920s the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, are known to have spent time in the house and to have played the organ.
Lorimer’s design for the wood panelling in the music room had been intended for Rowallen Castle, another great house with a prodigious musical past (Leach, 2020), but transferred readily to its new site, creating a unique space with warm, resonant acoustic. Today, the house is still in private hands, and only occasionally open to the public; it can be booked for private functions, including a summer course run by the Samling institute for early career musicians.
Fyvie Castle
Built some 800 years ago, Fyvie Castle near Ellon in Aberdeenshire is considerably older than Marchmont, and is today owned by the National Trust for Scotland and open to the public on a daily basis throughout the year.
Fyvie’s music collections have been surveyed by Roger Williams (Emeritus Master of Chapel and Organist at the University of Aberdeen), as part of a larger project looking at the music collections in National Trust properties, particularly in the North East. See his project website ‘Music in Scottish Castles and Country Houses’ in Further Reading.
Atop one of the castle’s towers (really more of a ‘wing”) – the Leith tower, built in the 1890s by Glasgow architect John Bryce – is a substantial music room, with a very unusual 1905 pipe organ. Its console comprises a self-playing mechanism that allowed aspirant organists who might not have been at the top end of the musical renaissance skills profile to reproduce musical favourites using punched rolls of paper which work like a kind of early binary code i.e. computer programme. The pipework for the organ itself was, like Marchmont House, built by Norman and Beard.
It’s unusual to find a self-playing interface with a full-sized pipe organ, although these were popular with “player” pianos and harmoniums at the time. An article by Sarah Burnett describes a recent concert on this restored instrument by Roger Williams, and the cosmopolitan tastes of the Forbes-Leith family, who owned and redesigned this part of the castle in the early 20th century, drawing on substantial reserves of American steel money to do so.
Today, a grand piano is clearly the main instrument used for functions (see featured photograph at the head of this post).
The photograph below shows the organ roles for the ‘symphony organ’: if you look carefully you can see what kind of music would have been enjoyed around 100 years ago when this was in full song.
There was clearly a long history of music making at Fyvie, even before the 20th century. The castle collections include an early square piano built in 1782 by German piano builder Adam Beyer (Williams, Fyvie Castle instruments ), a survival from the earlier age of Scots drawing room music. Additionally, the University of Aberdeen library holds the Forbes-Leith collection, donated in the 1930s, which includes amongst other family papers some early Scottish music and popular continental material.
Like Marchmont, the music room and its adjoining spaces can today be booked for private functions. On the day we visited, clearly a wedding was pending.
Dunrobin Castle
Our third and most northerly castle, Dunrobin Castle near Golspie in Sutherland, is, like Marchmont House, still in private ownership, but this time with a claim to long-term continuity albeit dynastic “renewal” through marriage: the Earl of Sutherland claims on the castle website that his family have been there for over 700 years. Like Fyvie Castle, it is regularly open for public tours. It’s a complicated building, with an old medieval tower buried deep in the central core, now surrounded by the fantastical turrets of a mid-Victorian rebuild undertaken by architect Charles Barry for the 2nd Duke of Sutherland. A substantial fire in 1915 saw architect Robert Lorimer also involved in some rebuild work.
The first instrument encountered by visitors to the house is a 1904 American-built ‘Aeolian orchestrelle’, sitting by itself on the first floor, at the head of the grand staircase. Like Fyvie, the residents of Dunrobin liked to have the latest musical gadgets, compensating for perhaps lacking a resident fully-fledged organist in their household.
The orchestrelle is a large and curious thing. Like the Fyvie mechanical instrument, this uses a mechanical interface to play from pre-programmed rolls of paper. It is a much smaller instrument, however, a chamber organ, with brass pipes ranging from 8 to 2 foot in length, albeit impressive enough for domestic performance. A display note by Kevin McElhone (1999) explains that although the pre-punched rolls dictated the notes played, a player could control loudness, speed and therefore to some extent, expression. Positioned in the hallway, it might have been a curiosity on formal occasions, to be talked around and about.
Further into the reception rooms, we come into the Dunrobin music room (thus currently designated). The Dunrobin music room is not really a purpose-built acoustic space, unlike Fyvie and Marchmont. Rather, it is a big drawing room, which happens to have instruments in it. This is one of several interconnecting drawing rooms, with fine views of the sea, and a piano sitting at one end. Modern visitors do not encounter a functioning entertainment space, as the room is filled with display cases with items showing the many ways in which wealthy families might be patrons of local music, including a bugle from local militia regiments. The family in times past could call on the services of a local piper, needless to say, and the service these players did for formal balls are commemorated by wee dance cards listing their play lists (see below, from 1928).
And, there’s a fiddle – without any particular information about date or provenance – on display, to complete the ‘dressing’ of this space. Despite the American chamber organ, this family is more concerned to project their connections with Highland musical culture. This isn’t a simple story, as readers aware of the complicated relationship between the Sutherlands and their tenants impacted by the 19th century clearances will know. For anyone interested, the National Library digital holdings include a Highland reel called Dunrobin Castle, in Anderson’s Pocket Companion of the Most Approved Highland Strathspeys, Country Dances, etc (Perth: c1820) – digitised in the National Library from the Glen Collection Glen.42 p.74 – enjoy!
To conclude: while there doesn’t seem to be a single survey of late 19th / early 20th century development of musical spaces and resources in Scottish great houses, it is clear that this period saw a massive injection of capital from a range of industrial sources, be these American steel (Fyvie) or British coal (Dunrobin), which included attention to spaces for music. Scottish architects such as the prolific arts-and-crafts master Robert Lorimer, and John Bryce of Glasgow, were given opportunities to design unique spaces in which music might be played and enjoyed by those at the apex of society. The extent to which this is ‘Scottish music’ or rather ‘music in Scotland’ could be discussed, but either way, these spaces introduce new sounds in their specific localities.
Further Reading and Resources
- Sarah Burnett, ‘Unique Organ Revived at Fyvie Castle’, National Trust for Scotland, 22 April 2024
- Forbes-Leith Collection, MS 2308 University of Aberdeen Library
- Katrina Faulds, Jonathan Frank and Christopher Scobie, ‘Mapping Historic House Music Collections in the United Kingdom’, chapter 8 in Sound Heritage: Making Music Matter in Historic Houses, ed. J Brooks, M Stephens, W Thormählen (London: Routledge, 2021) – mostly draws upon English National Trust Collections, but helps frame a wider British context for this Scottish activity
- David Johnson, Scottish Fiddle Music in the 18th Century (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1984) – for discussions of the original “Scots Drawing Room Style”
- Simon Leach, ‘Marchmont Moments’, in Organists’ Review (December 2020), 26-29
- Lindsay Macbeth Shen, Robert S. Lorimer – Interiors and furniture design, PhD dissertation, University of St. Andrews (1994).
- Roger B Williams, Music in Scottish Castles and Country Houses website
- Dunrobin Castle: website
- Marchmont House: website
- Fyvie Castle: website
- And for those interested in purer kinds of historic pipe organ – see Sowne of Organ for instrument surveys and events