Image: The Remains of St Fillans Priory, by Andrew Bowden – https://www.flickr.com/photos/bods/3724892950/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94461645
Modern traditional musicians are creative with traditional repertoires, finding, arranging and renewing tunes to fit contemporary performance opportunities. I was looking for examples of Scottish music themed around Scottish saints and found a slow air to St Fillan in a volume of harp music arranged by Karen Marshalsay, using a tune she found in the Gesto collection, first published in 1895.
St Fillan is an 8th century saint who sits at the intersection of history and legend, living during the early years of Scottish Christian conversion, reflecting the saint’s work particularly in Perthshire, where Strath Fillan bears his name. He also was active inter alia, in Fife, leading worship in a cave in the East Neuk village of Pittenweem. Seemingly, his left arm was particularly venerated for its power to heal, saying to have glowed with spiritual light imbued from copying scripture. He is associated with many springs and wells in Scotland, possibly overwriting earlier local pagan associations.
Whether or not Robert the Bruce had leprosy or some other disfiguration is open to debate (see Kaufman and MacLennan). However, he did have an interest in hospital foundations, and supported a monastery dedicated to St Fillan at Kirkton on the banks of what is now called the River Fillan, seemingly receiving a loan from there of the saint’s arm bone, which he waved over his army on the eve of Bannockburn (see Stuart).
A slow air from the Gesto collection called “St Fillan’s Monastery”, is associated with that story. Also, as Marshalsay notes, a further story recounts that William Wallace left the regalia of Scotland in the care of the monks there, so that it could be safely recovered after Wallace’s execution by the English and used to further validate Robert the Bruce’s claim to the Scottish throne (Marshalsay, p.3, 2021).
If you are interested in early anthologies of Gaelic songs and music more generally, a good place to start might be Robert Dunbar’s essay on this within The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Traditional Literature, which, although it is mostly interested in poetic and song lyric sources, mentions (p.54) some early printed music collections:
- Patrick MacDonald of Kilmore’s Collection of Highland Vocal Airs (1784) one of the earliest sources for notated Gaelic music (entry on the HMS database). A modern edition, available from Taigh na Teud, has helpful notes which explain which of these tunes might have been associated in memory at least with harpists (see Patrick Macdonald)
- Eliza Ross of Raasay (see Soundyngs’ earlier post on this collector)
- Simon Fraser of Knockie The Airs and Melodies Peculiar to the Highlands of Scotland and the Isles (1816);
- Alexander Campbell’s Albyns’ Anthology (1816);
- Finlay Dun (attrib.), Orain na h-Albain (c1848), lyrics translated into English.
Additionally, Frances Tolmie’s pioneering work on Skye has been mentioned before by Soundyngs on several occasions, appearing in print from 1911.
But to Gesto. The 1895 Gesto collection was compiled by a local doctor Keith Norman MacDonald, of Sleat in Skye (Dunbar, p.58), and contained dance tunes, music for fiddle and pipes, and some songs. Again, a modern edition is available from Taigh na Teud, but there is also a digitised copy of the 1895 edition reproduced in Leipzig, German, hosted by the National Library of Scotland – see here. This shows how Macdonald set this material up for amateur players at the time, arranging the tunes with simple piano accompaniments. As a visiting doctor, Macdonald was a well-known figure in the local community (Bennett, p.41), and the anthology was the summation of a 40-year interest in song collecting.
St Fillan’s Monastery – the slow air arranged by Marshalsay for clarsach – is on p.33 of the Gesto anthology, which also included a footnote about Wallace and the hidden regalia of Scotland.
MacDonald added 2 printed notes to his collection in 1898 and 1902, responding to Frances Tolmie’s work, and in 1901, a collection of Puirt-a-Beul (Gaelic ‘mouth music’ used for dancing). Again, the good folks at Taigh na Teud have a modern (2012) edition of the Puirt-a-Beul music, edited and with notes by William Lamb; while the 1901 edition was notated in the then-popular amateur sol-fa notation, Lamb’s modern edition uses staff notation, and has English translations alongside the Gaelic for those less confident in Gaelic.
MacDonald’s collections were already ‘mediations’ using different forms of notation on oral material. In that context, Marshalsay’s arrangement for harp shows how traditional musicians are continuing to reimagine this material for new performance contexts, translating it to sit under the fingers and in the ear of her own practice, and demonstrating how oral material moves to print and back again to practice.
Listen to Karen playing St Fillan’s Monastery along with The Rhymer’s Reel, a new composition by herself, taking its name from Thomas the Rhymer, the legendary harper who went off to Elfland for 7 years with the Elfin Queen – see in Further listening below.
Further Reading and Listening
- Margaret Bennett, “A Song for Every Cow She Milked”: Sharing the Work and Sharing the Voices in Gaeldom’, from The Phenomenon of Singing International Symposium 6 (Royal Scottish Academic of Music and Drama, 2007)
- Robert Dunbar, ‘Vernacular Gaelic Tradition’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Traditional Literature Sarah Dunnigan and Suzanne Gilbert (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp:51-62
- M H Kaufman, W J MacLennan, ‘Robert the Bruce and Leprosy’, in The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 30(1) (2000):75-80.
- Keith Norman MacDonald, The Gesto Collection of Highland Music (Leipzig: Oscar Brandstetter, 1895)
- Patrick MacDonald, The Patrick MacDonald Collection (Taigh na Teud, 2000)
- Karen Marshalsay, The Clarsach Collection: Scottish tunes arranged in traditional style V3 (Edinburgh: Marsharp Music, 2012)
- Karen Marshalsay website
- Karen Marshalsay, ‘St Fillans Monastery’ with ‘The Rymers Reel’ in her album The Road to Kennacraig (Temple Records, 2019) on Spotify or get the whole album on Bandcamp with information on individual tracks here.
- John Stuart, ‘Historical Notices of St Fillan’s Crozier and of the Devolution of King Robert the Bruce to St Fillan’, in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 12, (Edinburgh: Neill & Co, 1876-77)