Album Summary: "Niel Gow's" A Collection of Strathspey Reels With a Bass for the Violoncello or Harpsichord (1784) is the first major imprint of the Gow family's brand-name (ie. "Niel"). It contains 78 Strathspeys, Reels, Jigs and Variation Sets, all with un-figured bass, most probably arranged by Niel's entrepreneurial son, Nathaniel. It was an instant hit in the ball-rooms, clubs and parlours of the leisured classes, and was soon followed by several expanded editions. In fact, it launched a minor publishing empire whose collections defined Scottish fiddle and dance music for several generations. This ScotMus.com album is a full reprint of the legendary first edition of 1784.
Album Playlist — 78 Tunes
Front-Matter: Title Page (facsimile + transcription)
Edition Notes: This album is a literal transcription from the rare 1st edition copy held at the Edinburgh Central Music Library, whose staff I'd like to thank for their generous assistance while I was researching the source. Layouts have, of course, been regularised according to my 4-bars-per system default. The only real editiorial additions I decided to make were the insertion of track numbers and the occasional clarification of tacit accidentals (all editorial additions are given in square brackets). Unlike the vast majority of modern Gow editions, mine faithfully retains the original bass parts throughout, as well as all the original variations in the longer pieces. Further general information on my editorial methods can be found in my Transcription Policy.
Since the original is un-dated, I've partly taken the publication date of 1784 from one of the wisest and most obsessive bibliophiles in Scottish music history, James D. Brown, heroic Victorian librarian of the Mitchell Library and author of a classic Bibliographical Dictionary of Musicians (1886), which has a usefully-patriotic bias towards Scottish musicians (many of whose professional profiles would probably otherwise have been lost). Although Brown actually gave the date as a circumspect "c.1784" in his Gow articles, my late great mate, Dr. David Johnson gave a more confident date of just "1784" in his ground-breaking work, Scottish Fiddle Music of the 18th Century
According to the information on the Title Page, this album's un-figured bass parts are designed for "Violoncello or Harpsichord". But that mostly turns out to be a far more ambiguous statement that it first seems to be. Amongst several other possibilities, it could mean either: (1) that all the basses are for either instrument; or (2) that each piece is better suited to one or the other. Certainly, contemporary records show that the Gow dance-band apparently always included a cellist (and that they weren't alone in this) — so a cello would seem to be their basic default accompaniment, at least for dance pieces. However, it's also the case that many of the venues they played also had harpsichords (and other instrumental forces) available. It's also the case that Gow collections were popularly used within the domestic musical life of the leisured classes, where harpsichords routinely provided a focus, both for accompaniment of other instruments and as solo instruments in their own right. Equally, Gow collections were also widely used by professional dancing-masters (several are listed as subscribers to this collection), who often used harpsichords for the music in their classes. However, at least for my taste, Strathspeys generally just sound like total mince as harpsichord solos, even though I'm convinced they were often played that way, at least domestically and pedagogically. This is the main reason I decided to mostly just give the basses on MIDI cello for this album's audio illustrations. The other obvious (and, I fully admit, less worthy) reason being that sticking them on cello is just a lot easier than working out the conventional chord-fills for no less than 78 keyboard realisations!
Nonetheless, there are quite a few pieces here, particularly the ones with more complex bass parts, that almost seem to demand a more fully worked-out harpsichord accompaniment. In particular, although many of the Slow Airs and Variation Sets at least work with a cello-only accompaniment, they strongly and idiomatically imply that a full, chordal support would be best. In quite a few places, you'll hear the influence of one of Niel Gows' favourite Italian influences — that unrivalled master of all things Baroque, Arcangelo Corelli. At those moments, the harpsichord issue comes into particularly sharp focus. When time allows, I'll start working towards adding some full harpsichord realisations in the appropriate places. Only in one piece is instrumentation specifically stipulated — "Tail Toddle for the Harpsichord and German Flute by Mr. Nisbet" — for which I've provided a basic realisation of the un-figured thorough-bass part in the audio track (the score itself being presented as given in the source).
Having said all of that, I do absolutely believe that there are also some pieces in this collection whose bass lines are only added for the convenience of the professional dance instructor or amateur domestic harpsichordist (who aren't necessarily accompanying fiddlers), and whose basses can therefore be taken with more than a pinch of contextual salt — and, for the best results, pretty-much completely ignored. I'm talking here of the several examples of "Fiddle Pibroch" that you'll hear here from Track No.2 onwards — uniquely-Scottish Variation Sets that roughly follow or mimic the kind of highly-stylised, accumulative variation techniques of the Gaelic Piobaireachd form that was then beginning to develop towards the famous "classical" genre of the Victorian Highland piping repertoire. These "Fiddle Pibrochs" are showy, often highly virtuosic pieces that also often develop an intense, introspective, meditative atmosphere. A lot of them are definitely composed as solo pieces designed to allow the best fiddlers to display their crafty arts and blow the audience away with a blinding show of professional pyrotechnics. In the performance of such pieces, the maestro's seriously-heroic frown slowly and inevitably disappears behind alarmingly-expanding clouds of rosin dust as the Romantic musical "genius" commands the stage and siezes the laurels of the day. You'd certainly be risking a hernia if you tried dancing to some of these — instead, I strongly advise sitting safely on your bahookie and just letting your ears leap along with the often-cosmic dance of it all. But, fundamentally, although I've included the original basses to these solo pieces in my score editions, I've completely turned them off in my audio illustrations. It's up to you what you do with them, though, of course. Apart from anything else, I'd love to hear some mad fool attempt a few Hendrix-at-Woodstock guitar-scream versions, for example. ;-)
There is, of course, a lot of controversial debate about how the Gows' grace-notes and ornaments such as trills were originally played, let alone how they should be played now. Certainly, as originally written, they don't conform to the majority of modern Scottish fiddling practices. These days, they're considered "pretentiously"-"classical", rather than "authentically"-"Folk" in style. Even a lot of modern "classical" performers replace them with twirls of a more "Folky" character. And there's no denying that it sounds very good indeed when you do that — at the very least, I'd suggest giving it a go. However, I often suspect that this modern performance convention is based on the (largely untested) assumption — or perhaps even fear — that modern audiences wouldn't be able to handle a more complex truth that challenges the modern, commercial version of Scottish music history. This highly lucrative version (let's call it The "Heedrum-Hodrum" Hypothesis) in large part depends on an image of folks like the Gows as "peasant-fiddlers", "untutored natural geniuses", and thus, ultimately, "authentic [ie. working-class] Scots" (despite the fact that in modern money, Nathaniel Gow was a multi-millionaire of a middle-class businessman playboy). But there's a problem that immediately becomes unavoidable when you confront an actual Gow publication and spend even a few seconds thinking clearly about how it presents its music — and these days, "thinking clearly" about Scottish history pretty-much means thinking outside the customary commercial box. However, thinking outside this tiny tartan box is becoming not only almost fashionable in its own right but (in my view) essential — at least it has in other fields of Scottish history. What I hope to do by publishing the Gows here without re-casting them in our own haggis-laden image — in other words, without altering what they actually wrote — is to let you make up your own mind about what this music really means. For now, I'd just suggest that the truth is rarely a simple, single thing. I'll merely suggest that one truth lies in who the Gows were writing and performing their music for, who was buying and using their publications, and what other music was being published and played alongside it — and who auld Niel's favourite Italian fiddler was... ;-)
Acknowledgements: I'd like to thank the staff of the Edinburgh Central Music Library for the generous level of access they allowed me to their rare and well-preserved copy of the 1st edition source. I'd also like to thank early Scottish music specialist and director/keyboardist of Concerto Caledonia, Dr. David McGuinness for casting an extra editorial ear over my rusty thorough-bass realisation of the harpsichord part in No.73 and picking up a couple of pathetically-glaikit errors I'd made in my first draft. All remaining idiocies are entirely my own work — in my defence, I have to admit that this was the first thorough-bass realisation I've had to do since my 1st-year undergraduate class on the Baroque (many thanks to Dr. [now Prof.] John Tyrrell for mentoring that great class — pity I forgot so much of it as the years rolled by!). However, nae dout, it'll be far from the last bass realisation that ScotMus.com will force me into doing, so eventually, I should get the hang of it all again! ;-)