About the piece
Vocables for a bagpipe lament commemorating Red Alasdair (†c. 1630), son of Donald of Laggan, chief of the Glengarry MacDonalds, from the canntaireachd of Iain Dubh MacCruimein (c. 1732 – 1822).
Composed by Barnaby Brown drawing on sources available at https://pibroch.net/ps100. The vocables are an interpretation of those transcribed by Niel MacLeod of Gesto (1828). The pitches and rhythms draw on three further witnesses: Colin Campbell (1797), Donald MacDonald (1826), and Angus MacKay (1830s).Â
For an introduction to pibroch, canntaireachd, the history of this piece, how this score was created, and questions of performance, see the video https://youtu.be/YddE9lxYFp0.
The vocables in this piece invite singers of any experience level to enter this beautiful and historic tradition in an intuitive, embodied way. The sheet music uses the International Phonetic Alphabet to make historical Hebridean pronunciation visible and reduces the music to a framework that is not to be taken as scripture, but to serve in mobilizing musicianship. A lot more information is contained in the video recording – no music reading required – with the caveat that the composer would be sad if performers imitated the recording slavishly. Please seek to understand the sense of the music and sing from the soul!
What you are buying
You will receive a full score (PDF) for 2 voices (solo or choral) – two roughly even groups of mixed voices in any octave – and any kind of drone, together with a reference recording to support learning.
As pibroch is performed in a highly elasticated pulse regime subject to cultural idioms that are outside most people’s experience and training, the recording offers an intuitive way to absorb the style aurally, much as it would originally have been taught.
Composer
As a singing piper, composer and archaeomusicologist, Barnaby Brown fosters a higher quality of connection with others across place and time. He composes pipe-led choral dances, breathing life into Ancient Greek literature, and propels forward our understanding of the very earliest musical evidence through practical experiment. He was the singing priest in the film Outlaw King, reconstructing medieval Scottish psalmody. Works written for him include Noli Pater by Sir James MacMillan (2015) and Il sogno di Marsia by Dario Marianelli (2022). His doctoral research at the University of Cambridge examines the technical language of Scottish Gaelic pipers found in sources 1751–1838, and his historically-informed approach to pibroch performance led to three Edinburgh International Festival appearances. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and co-founder of Lotos Lab.