Album: Bremner's Guitar Collection, 1758

Album Summary: Robert Bremner's Instructions for the Guitar; with a Collection of Airs, Songs and Duets fitted for that Instrument (1758) is both an instrumental tutor and a diverse collection of graded pieces for the popular 6-course Baroque guitar (tuned in open C). The introductory tutorial is one the earliest for this instrument, containing handy information about contemporary performance practice. The following 35 graded pieces pedagogically work out from simple song and dance tunes to more complex material, mixing together both Scottish and common British repertoire. This ScotMus.com album is a complete transcription of the Edinburgh 1st edition of 1758.

Edition Notes: For this album, I've transcribed Bremner's scores almost completely diplomatically, only modernising the auld-farrant lettering (but not the spelling) of titles and lyrics. My score content and layouts, etc. are faithful reproductions of the original. However, one initial problem I encountered was the incomplete nature of surviving copies of Bremner's book that I've had access to — all of them have lost a few pages here and there, which may or may not be due to the fact that Bremner apparently printed more than one run of his 1st edition while he was still in Edinburgh (I've yet to have a look at the 2nd edition, published in London). To try and solve this problem, I worked from two facsimiles that, so far as I can tell, include all of the original material when you take them both together: (1) a PDF facsimile of a copy in Cardiff Central Library, which I picked up from Rob MacKillop's excellent guitar websites; (2) a photocopy held in the Edinburgh Central Music Library which (I assume) was taken from an original in the National Library. I've yet to pick the various long-suffering librarians' brains about all of this, but I'm already indebted to Rob MacKillop for his generous help and advice while I was preparing my edition — and not least for his polite tolerance of the audio hacks in my sound illustrations, which he kindly judged "not offensive"!

And that aside leads to the biggest problem I had in putting this album together — how to approximate the highly characteristic sound of Bremner's 9-stringed / 6-course Baroque guitar that's tuned in open C (see Bremner's introductory essay, Instructions for the Guitar, especially the section "Of the Scale", and the final two sections on tuning and pitch). Although this instrument was a bit like a big mandolin, it was obvious from my first experiments that running Bremner's scores through either a standard MIDI "mandolin" or "guitar" (ie. the modern "Spanish" instrument) just wasn't going to cut the mustard at all. The Baroque instrument (sometimes called the gittern, cittern, etc.) has a much more resonant, drone-enhanced, warm, liquid, bell-like quality, all facilitated by the open tuning of its 6 string-groups (courses) in 2 stacked C major triads — everything about the instrument is about the harmony and harmonics of C above all else. Indeed, all 35 of Bremner's tunes are arranged in the key of C Major (or its modal neighbours), and in many pieces, he arranges specifically for the sympathetic resonances of C that the instrument's construction and open tuning not only allows but are almost unavoidable (which is also, arguably, a limitation of the instrument). In fact, you even miss a lot of the atmosphere by hacking through some of these tunes on a real modern guitar, let alone a MIDI one (and because of the different tuning, you'll also risk breaking either some strings or some fingers).

So, for this album, I've ventured (for the first time!) into the infinitely more configurable (and thus confusing) world of VSTi technology, rather than just settling for pure ol' witless MIDI per se. I can't say that I've got the sound anything like perfect (it's currently too tinny, and way too brittle at the top), but it's certainly passably-resonant in the lower register, generally a bit more "human" than the average MIDI git-box (including the occasional fret-buzz simulation), and at least that's a start. The VSTi plugin I'm going through my learning-curve with is the fantastic (and freeware) String Thing 2 by the wise cyber-druids of Simple Media. One of these days I'll master its controls and re-work Bremner's album with a bit more techno-timbral flair.

On the performance conventions end of things, I have to admit that I haven't accurately applied Bremner's "instructions" on things like trills — instead, I've just used the standard Finale defaults, which aren't a trillion miles away from Bremner's recommendations anyway. To be honest, by the time I'd recovered from my lengthy VSTi odyssey, I reckoned I'd already given this album more effort than I could actually afford for now. Hopefully, only the most nit-picky guitar geeks will call such details terminally-heinous. But then again, most normal people find most guitarists pretty heinous creatures, too. ;-)

If you want to find out what a real, live Baroque guitar sounds like, then I warmly recommend indulging yourself in a copy of Rob MacKillop's CD of James Oswald's Twelve Divertimentis for the Guittar, another Scottish collection published in the year following Bremner's, and building on its success — you'll find links to Rob's CD randomly appearing in the left-hand column as you surf through my more virtual Bremner album.

My cautious attribution of the album to Robert Bremner junior (rather than his more famous father of the same name) is cribbed from the work of the late great David Johnson, the world-leading expert on eighteenth century Scottish music. In his New Grove Dictionary article on Bremner, David suggested this attribution on the grounds that Robert junior spent time in London studying the guitar under the famous Italian immigrant, Geminiani (New Grove 1980, 3:256). Unfortunately, David doesn't say here whether he knew if Robert junior returned to Edinburgh prior to the 1st edition's publication in 1758 (if not, then the attribution would be less solid, of course). I haven't yet tracked down David's source for this information, so at this point, I can't fully assess the theory. But one way or another, the Bremner business itself opened a second shop in London in 1762, where the 2nd edition of the collection was published in 1765. However, given the fact that Robert senior was the proprietor of the whole family business (including the London branch), and undeniably the primary musical force directing its publishing activities, it's pretty safe to assume that he had a major editorial hand in the guitar collection, regardless of his son's probable involvement. Good internal evidence of this is suggested by the fact that its theory sections are closely related to those in several of Robert senior's other collections that follow the same overall format of instructional introductions followed by tune collections including a fair proportion of "traditional" Scottish material. Indeed, this format is Robert senior's publishing signature. Perhaps a joint attribution would be the safest, but given David's uncanny sixth sense for this kind of thing, I'm more than happy to run with his theory for now.

Acknowledgements: Again, I'd like to thank Scottish lutenist & guitarist Rob MacKillop (the Scottish expert on the Baroque guitar, or guittar as he prefers to call it, after Oswald) for his patient tolerance of my pestering e-mails on various issues while I was working on the early draft of this album, and for his useful comments on the early versions of the ScotMus.com project as a whole. Check out Rob's websites, which can all be accessed from his main one — and don't forget to check out my listings of his CDs of Scottish lute, mandour and guit[t]ar material that you'll find scattered all over ScotMus.com. Guid on ye, Rab! I'd also like to posthumously thank David Johnson for the many invaluable nicotine-fuelled blethers we had over the years about Bremner and his formative place in eighteenth century Scottish music publishing.