Music in the Stewartry

Music in the Stewartry I am neither a professionally trained musician, nor a scholar of music, and I have no reason to believe that music in the Stewartry is significantly different from music in any other part of rural Scotland, so why am I giving this talk? I have been an amateur musician for over 71 years and have come to realise how many changes there have been in music-making in the Stewartry in my lifetime, and how relatively few people are left who share my memories of musical experiences in the 1940s 50s and 60s. My talk this evening will be largely an account of events I and my sister participated in or attended, supplemented by archives kept by our mother. It is not a thorough academic study of all possible sources, but I hope it will be a useful record of what I and my family have experienced here over a period of 90 years. I feel privileged to come from a musical background. My mother, was a teacher (Twynholm, Whinnieliggate and Kirkcudbright Academy) an award winning pianist, singer, and an early broadcaster on radio 2DB in the 1920s in Aberdeen. She was also a church organist for 56 years, and her efforts to practice her organ voluntaries, play the piano and cello and to train church choirs and others were strong influences on my sister and on me from our earliest memories. There have been many talented musicians on my mother's side of the family. Her father and grandfather both played the clarinet and the flute, among other instruments, and various aunts, uncles, and cousins were also able amateur musicians. My great grandfather's band in Fraserburgh. He is pictured in the centre (front). My grandfather is behind the bass drum on the right. My father had no aptitude for music, and little interest in it. Like my mother however, he had been strongly influenced by the church. He attended the Congregational church in Eyemouth, the congregation of which consisted almost entirely of fishermen and their families. I enjoyed going to Eyemouth church, purely to listen to the fishermen's enthusiastic singing of "Pull for the Shore Sailor", or "Will your Anchor hold in the Storm of life". My mother disapproved heartily of many of the hymns sung at Eyemouth, and had a particular distaste for Sankey's hymns which were very popular there. My father's and my mother's tastes were very different. When we lived in Edinburgh for a few years in the mid 1940s, my mother had a season ticket for the SNO concerts in the Usher Hall, and my father went off on his own to hear such celebrities as Winifred Attwell performing on her honky tonk piano in the Empire Theatre. !1 In the early 1950s, we had a visit to our then home, Strathdee in Kirkcudbright, from a James Robertson of the USA who turned out to be a cousin of my father (my father and I both were given the middle name of Robertson). On his arrival, he was obviously surprised to see my mother's Bechstein grand piano, and she was even more surprised, when, with her permission, he played it like a maestro. It turned out that he was indeed a maestro, the conductor of the Witchita Symphony orchestra in Missouri, and was on his way to be a guest conductor at a concert in Paris. He had stopped over in London for a few days to have lunch with his friend and fellow-student at the Julliard, Sir Isaac Stern, and had decided to come to Scotland to look up his long-lost relatives. He provided us with a wealth of staggering information about his father, my great uncle, and about a dozen of our previously unknown professional musician relatives in the USA. My father's prestige soared on the domestic front, and my sister and I gained a new and broader understanding of the possible origins of our inclinations towards music. One of my great uncle's many bands in the USA. He, Robert Ritchie Robertson is standing to the left of the man with the straw hat Early Influences My birthplace was at St Mary's Isle, only a few hundred yards from where I now live. The earliest sounds I probably heard, apart from my mother's singing and playing, were the sounds of birdsong, and waves crashing on the sea shore. The old Pye radio on which my parents heard war being declared, was also an important source of carefully selected entertainment, ranging from country d a n c e m u s i c t o s y m p h o n y orchestras. !2 Music lessons I was taught piano and tin whistle by my mother at an early age, but despite making good progress, I never took to the piano. At the age of 7 or 8, I started violin lessons, taught by Mr Priestley (Union Street and later in High Street). For a scrawny youth who was useless at all sporting activities, and especially football, carrying a violin case along some of Kirkcudbright's streets was not a happy experience. I later changed teachers, and went to Kathleen Walker, who was a leading teacher in Dumfries at the time. This involved travelling on my own by train to Dumfries after school, getting a high tea in Oughton's restaurant (where a string quartet played regularly) and returning by train to Kirkcudbright after my lesson, with my homework still to do! Music then was a fairly lonely activity for me, shared only with my family, requiring a lot of effort and not providing a great deal of reward. I then knew only a few other children who played instruments, and most were older than I was. Traditional musicians, tinkers, tramps, and gypsies Traditional musicians did of course exist, but there was neither a venue nor any events that they regularly attended, so there was little or no opportunity to meet them, hear them, or play with them. We lived for some years above the Commercial Bank, on the busiest corner in Kirkcudbright, and I soon became aware of a number of beggars, tinkers, gypsies and tramps who set up their pitches right outside our front door. They included one rag man, who advertised his presence by expertly playing a trumpet attached to the top of an accordion (his left hand played the base part on the accordion and his right hand played the melody on the trumpet). There was also a foul-mouthed and disreputable character who had all his possessions (including his fiddle case) strapped to a bicycle, so heavily laden that he had to push it rather than ride it. None of them stayed for long, as it was the police practice to lift them and transport them to the border with Ayrshire, just beyond Carsphairn, where they became the problem of a different police force. In my teenage years, I remember meeting in a lay-by near Creetown, a uniformed Customs Officer with motor bike and sidecar, with whom I enjoyed a very long conversation. He was based in Stranraer, and clearly did not have a lot to do. He had used the spare time to further his interest in folk music, story telling, and local legends, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of a mass of tunes, tales and local characters. Sadly, I never knew his name, and never met him again. His knowledge was probably lost with him, but he had expanded my horizons. Municipal Bands Like most Scots, my emotions are readily stirred by the sound of the bagpipes, particularly when played t o g e t h e r w i t h t h e d r u m s o f Kirkcudbright Pipe Band, while marching through the older parts of the town. The sounds echoing from the walls of the buildings of the town are inspiring and haunting, and reminiscent of both heroic and tragic incidents in our history. It is a particular achievement of the band to have survived and flourished since 1926, and to have continued to win prizes and attract young and enthusiastic players to preserve their traditions and to grace so many local events. Few other forms of music making locally attract so many youngsters who are prepared to subject themselves to the hard work and strict discipline that is such an important component in successful piping and drumming. !3 Kirkcudbright Burgh's brass or silver band, formed largely from ex servicemen in1919, is long gone and all-but forgotten, although its instruments were passed to Kirkcudbright Academy and were played on a few occasions by the short-lived school band. Brass and Silver bands have always been popular, particularly amongst the so-called 'working classes', and were often funded and organised by mining communities and other large scale industries. Band members were sometimes looked down on by those whose interests lay in music that they deemed to be more sophisticated, but the reality is that musicians in such bands often reached near virtuoso status, playing with degrees of musicianship and technical mastery that were often the envy of many orchestral players. The players in Creetown Band, founded in 1881, were largely recruited from people who worked in the granite industry. The band has not only survived the demise of quarrying, but also seems to have reached new musical heights. Some of their soloists are excellent and it astonishes me that a place as small as Creetown can sustain such a good band.

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