A strange round fiddle

Review: Alexander ‘Battan’ Grant, 1856-1942

by

Image – the rondello, from Inverness Museums, in Smartify.org

Art is long, and life is short, alas; people often need to make choices between sport and the arts.  Sometimes, however, folk decide to do both. Soundyngs has posted on at least one previous occasion on the topic of Highland fiddles crafted by self-taught craftsmen, and this week’s post is about the contribution to music in the Highlands by a keen amateur musician whose life was spent, in its happier moments, building and playing fiddles. And, standing in cold water in the River Ness, casting for salmon.

Sandy Battan, also known as Alexander Grant, is celebrated on the home page of the Grantown Museum, which tells us that this local-born man’s “two great passions were fiddling and fishing” (Grantown Museum). His name was derived from his birthplace – Battangorm near Carrbridge –although he travelled widely in his early life, eventually moved to Inverness to run a fishing tackle business in 1887, and ended his days as a tenant farmer at nearby Tomnahurich (Gair, p.5).  A practical man, he created innovate designs for both fiddles and fishing rods.

The shared factor in both good fishing rods and tuneful fiddles is resonance resultant from the vibrational properties of wood.  Grant’s ‘Vibration Fishing Rod’ vibrated continuously along its whole length while casting, and continued to do so when the lure landed on the water, which helped with both distance and presumably attracting fish. Grant also used his empirical knowledge of how wood responded to pressure waves to design violins and cellos.

An article in the unlikely place of The Football Times of 1935 celebrates this keen sportsman’s invention of a disc shaped violin, the “Rondello”, the headline claiming somewhat optimistically that this was “superior to Strad or Crimona’. A similar design apparently also yielded a cello.  The article goes on to discuss why Grant’s understanding of vibrations transferred from the fishing rod to the violin.  Rather against the tide of expert opinion, he decided that the ‘f’ holes in the Italian design produced a sound that was further from the tone of the human voice, clearly his model for the ideal tone.  His quest was to create an instrument without the complex overtones that some might feel give the fiddle its character and indeed depth of sound, but for him, meant it sounded a little out of tune.  The Highland Library and Culture heritage site, AmBaile, has a clip of this article that tells us that the instrument itself is curated by Inverness Museum, and helpfully, both museum and AmBaile also have some audio of this instrument being played (see Further Reading and Listening, AmBaile, Audio).

A newspaper article

Above: ‘Violin Superior to ‘Strad’ or ‘Crimona’ Made by a Well-Known Local Violinist, in Football Times 22 June 1935

Grant also enjoyed playing and was a founding member of the Highland Strathspey and Reel Society in Inverness in 1903, leading it for almost 40 years (see note to  Am Baile, 1932).

A recently published biography of this intriguing character fills in many more details about his life and background.  The publisher, Loch Ness Book Publishing, is not mainstream, and may be the imprint of the author, Sinclair Gair; the frontpage suggests he has previously written other similar books on Grant and other Highland musicians through this imprint.

This is not a polished academic monograph, with footnotes and normal citation apparatus, and a high-level structure.  It is rather a scrapbook of reproduced primary material – photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, excerpts from public talks, strathspey and reel concert programmes, and reminiscences from family, reflecting the author’s knowledge of local museum collections and clearly, friendships with relevant local folk.  Potentially, despite the slightly rough presentation and the rather idiosyncratic ordering of material, the book helps the reader to understand the man as well as the community he lived in, and the character of its traditional music. The approach does lead to quite a bit of repetition in narrative; possibly this had its origin in more than one shorter booklet.

The first chapter focusses on Grant’s biography. Fiddle-making was a part-time pursuit; he had many other paid jobs, including all-round farm labour (ploughing, foresting, shepherding, and more), hairdressing, running a fishing tackle shop in Inverness, and ending as tenant of a farm in his own right (Gair, p.32).  The variety of occupations suggest a man with a restless character, with recurrent health issues that made holding down and developing a career difficult. It’s good that he found happiness fishing in the Ness and making music. A timeline (pp.76 to 78) helps to map key events.

Grant was one of 12 children, some continuing to live around Carrbridge, others joining the army, and still others emigrating to places like Australia.  For him, the eventual move to Inverness seems to have been extremely happy, providing him with opportunities to develop friendships with both amateur and professional musicians (and fish).  James Scott Skinner is notable as an occasional correspondent. Probably the most famous professional fiddler of his generation, Skinner combined a deep knowledge of Scottish traditional music with virtuosic classical technique.  Grant named at least 2 fiddle tunes after the master (Gair, p.18) while Scott Skinner created at least one for him (‘Sandie Grant O’ Battangorm’, see Gair p.58).  The names of fiddle tunes are a good record of social networks in fiddling circles, and its interesting to see here how a fiddling celebrity curated what a modern person might call his fan-base.

Grant kept Scott Skinner’s letters to him, and as Gair points out, these are an important archive for anyone interested in the more famous musician.

Also interesting are the reproductions of Highland Strathspey and Reel programmes, which show the opportunities these provided to platform not just fiddlers but also local singers, dancers, and pipers (e.g. Gair, p.109). One such, from 1932, for example, shows that alongside the fiddling there were song arrangements by Margory Kennedy-Fraser (“The Cockle Gatherers” and “Heart of Fire Love”), as well as material by the ubiquitous lowlander, Robert Burns. These kinds of community events defined what ‘Scottish music’ mean to Highland Scots in the late 19th and earlier 20th century. Given what we know of Grant’s musical preferences, I would further suggest that the richness of the vocal contribution to these concerts reflected his sense that the best fiddler takes their melodic cue from the human singer.

Many programmes also display many different solo singer names, showing that these events were an opportunity for many to stand up and offer something.  As Highland entertainment and social life began to concentrate more around towns such as Inverness, these programmes show how collective music making shifted from the traditional Highland domestic ceilidh house to larger spaces in hotels (e.g. p,115), purpose-built concert venues such as Inverness Music Hall (e.g. p.117) and civic buildings such as Inverness Town hall (p.112). The venues might be more public, but clearly the Highland ceilidh tradition of using music to make and shape communities persisted.

Programmes also show, from time to time, that competitions feature as part of concerts, for playing a strathspey (p.118) or compositing a strathspey and/or a reel (p.119 and 121). This was a community that is aware of its responsibility to pass on and indeed renew tradition.

The final section has more information about ‘tonal and vibrational properties of violins and the physics of harmonic wood’ (p,215ff). For any violin makers, this might be of technical interest, including as it does design drawings for Grant’s fiddles and a section on string vibration and wood response.  An acoustician might be able to judge how perspicacious Grant’s understanding of that art might have been.  For most of us non-technicians, this final section is less fascinating, but does give an insight into why violins are such complex and unpredictable instruments.

This is not a neat book.  Amongst other issues, some of the images are not clearly reproduced and some are consequently hard to read: transcriptions of letters in particular would be very useful, although reading in a good light mostly, but not always, helps the mysteries to yield. Some image captions are confusing: one, on p.113, has dates of both 1932 and 1935 attached.  It would also be enormously useful to have some kind of referencing that tells us where the original documents are held: public or personal collections, with any archive box number.  This knowledge would be very useful to future researchers.  Nevertheless, the bundle does help a reader understand the cultural landscape of late 19th and early 20th century Inverness, as well as encourage both Invernesians and beyond to think about the ‘do it yourself’ aspect of Scottish traditional music making.

As a bonus, there’s quite a lot about fish.

Further Reading and listening

 

Leave a comment

Cookie preferences