Issue 25:1

Sept/Oct 2001

Feature Article by Robert Maxham

Fiddler Alasdair Fraser—Ancient Voices, Crystal

Truths

For the uninitiated, Scottish fiddle music holds some surprises,

quite apart from the beguiling nature of the tunes themselves. For

example, unlike Sally Goodin, Blackberry Blossom, and Arkansas

Traveler—unlike, in fact, the bulk of folk music and even

Gregorian chant—most Scottish strathspeys, reels, rants, and jigs

bear attributions to the individual composers who fused their local

musical traditions with their charismatic fiddling styles, crosspollinated

by the infectious rhythms of Scottish dancing. This

music, collected, among other places, in James Hunter's anthology

The Fiddle Music of Scotland, is the subject of fiddler-violinist

Alasdair Fraser's projected series of discs exploring three centuries

of a tradition that has, after generations of suppression, acquired

newfound respectability. In his foreword to that book, Yehudi

Menuhin suggested that a "genuine" Scottish fiddler, unlike most

modern violinists, always plays in tune and with "infallible"

rhythm.

"I love that quote by Menuhin," said Fraser in a recent

conversation. "But this business of playing in or out of tune is one

we should talk about. In my exploration of Scottish fiddle music I

encounter an incredible range of idiomatic language. Earlier on,

the rhythmic component was much stronger, and the notes more

coloristic. The idea of playing in or out of tune was different then.

In A, for example, you can play a C or a C♯ or something in

between. In Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where they preserve an

older style, they use the power of that third (and the seventh note

in the scale as well). I've dubbed it 'C supernatural.' People whose

ears haven't been calibrated might say it's out of tune, but if you

ask these guys to repeat it, they'll play the same note—the same

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with Appalachian fiddlers. They're similar to blue notes. And, of

course, bagpipes, so fundamental a sound in the Scottish ear, don't

play in the Western scale—and they don't play out of tune either.

The bagpipe chanter has a very interesting gapped scale. So now

the Western scales are confronting these older ones."

A century ago, Brahms and Liszt similarly brought 19th-century

European rhythmic and harmonic practice into confrontation with

Hungarian folk music, a fruitful dialectic that, a half century later,

Bartok resolved quite differently. "Occasionally I try to go back

and play some of these color pitches. It's something I've managed

to assimilate—that I actually crave sometimes—that

C-supernatural note or an ornament that uses it. It gives the

melody a real punch, a real taste. If I'm wearing my classical

sensibility, it's difficult to go there. Part of the challenge is to

decide when you can and when you can't. In the recording [Legacy

of the Scottish Fiddle], I didn't try. I was more concerned with the

idiomatic playing of early-19th-century northeast Scotland.

Violinistic thinking and Italian influence had already come over to

Edinburgh and gone up the east coast to areas where there were

nice violins and nice rooms to play in and harpsichords or

fortepianos. I began the series there just for the sake of having a

beginning somewhere, and because I grew up hearing a lot of that

music and thinking it was stylistically very rich. These melodies

are so strong, such wonderful vehicles for emotional, violinistic

playing. In the future, I plan to include more of the Gaelicspeaking

world, more of the rhythmic undertow of the great dance

tunes, and to work more with fiddle and cello, which is such a

strong core sound in the repertoire. The fiddle and piano

combination is more recent—19th century—but the earlier dance

band of choice was fiddle and cello—it's a mighty sound. I've been

trying to get cellists to break loose from today's defined cello role

and techniques and find some of the same rhythmic power you

might encounter in Hungarian bowed bass accompaniment or even

in Baroque cello, although sometimes that isn't rhythmic enough

for me.

"Anyway, I want to explore that powerful string combination,

which was so popular in the mid 1700s: the likes of Niel Gow and

his brother, Donald, in Perthshire, so rhythmically exciting in their

playing that eyewitness accounts have dancers leaving the

ballroom because they couldn't contain themselves. That's been

diluted over the years as the music became more complex

melodically and richer harmonically—we sacrificed rhythmic

intensity and nuance. That's one avenue. The other is to

incorporate linguistic associations. That hasn't been talked about

very much. There's a correlation between the way people speak

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and phrase and the way the fiddle tunes represent their music. In

northeast Scotland, Aberdeenshire, there are lots of hard

consonants—very spiky. When you hear them play strathspeys,

you get the same kind of sound. The Gaelic-speaking west coast is

much more lilting, more bagpipe-influenced, with different ways

of leaving and entering notes. I'm just trying to rummage around

and make sense of it all, not really from an academic point of view,

just as an expression of joy in this amazing variety of fiddle sound,

from the very violinistic to the very early, plaintive, and intimate."

Ornamentation is a part of all those distinctive sounds. "When I

give workshops I talk about vibrato. In Niel Gow's Lament on the

Death of His Second Wife, I sometimes play with a big,

full-blooded vibrato, which isn't the way Niel Gow would have

played it in 1740. But these tunes are very resilient: They can have

many incarnations. I also take great delight in playing it with no

vibrato and exposing its intimacy. The ornamentation is much freer

to flow then. These older, idiomatic Scottish ornaments correlate

with the ways Gaelic singers arrive at a note, sometimes coming in

to it through the back door with accented grace notes. These

ornaments really aren't ornaments—the word 'ornament' bothers

me sometimes because they're part of the fabric, and the word

implies that you could play without them. You can't play the

bagpipes without ornaments; it's the only way you can articulate.

Anyway, the Scottish fiddle repertoire offers a violinist or a fiddler

an amazing range, from very rhythmic to very Romantic. Some of

the early-20th-century composers, like Peter Milne and Scott

Skinner, wrote melodies that are so much fun to play—with a big

vibrato and position work. And then you can say, 'That's fine, let's

put that on the shelf and go back to the early 18th century and

explore,' with double tonic melodies and tremendous rhythmic

vitality."

Despite this variety and richness, not only in the Scottish but also

in many other fiddle traditions, there lingers a sense among

violinists that the repertoire is somehow beneath them. "I've fought

that since I was a teenager with a good classical sound—if I could

say that. I used not to fit in. In the company of fiddle-players, I'd

have a good taunt, let's call it that. Then I'd play in the orchestra,

and I'd want more freedom of expression. That led to this

investigative journey. Over the years I've discovered that playing

'properly' often meant playing in a cleaned-up way. When I was

growing up in Scotland, people were being taught to speak

properly and became very confused, because in the playground or

at home they were speaking one way and in school they were

being taught that that wasn't proper. In my young days in Scotland

people were embarrassed by a Scottish accent—you couldn't hear

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the news read on the BBC in a Scottish accent until about 15 years

ago.

Then we had this incredible resurgence of interest in regional

language, dialects, tongues. It was a tremendous discovery for me

when I made the correlation between being taught to speak

properly and being taught to play the violin properly. You read in

James Hunter, for example, that the use of 'hack' bowing—just

plain single bows—was undesirable. It's one of the most useful

bow strokes in the idiom. But in the early 1920s there began to

evolve a 'proper' way of playing strathspeys. As a young Scot I

rebelled against that. When I listened to the old singers and players

I wasn't hearing what I was reading about. So I try to dig it up and

reinvent and reconstruct it and associate it with language and

dance. It's an ongoing project."

That project brings together a wide variety of elements in a grand

synthesis that can sometimes be at odds with what has passed for

the definitive style. "I grew up hearing Rothiemurchus Rant, which

is a great wild strathspey, or, again, Niel Gow's Lament, as played,

for example, by Yehudi Menuhin on a BBC program in

1960—played beautifully, with a big bold vibrato—and no

idiomatic information at all! That was reckoned to be the 'proper'

way: clean and rendered safe. I can sit at the end of the hall and

play for 300 dancers with one fiddle and energize them into the

small hours. You don't need a huge band for that, just to be in

touch with the dancers and feed them the rhythms of the dance. I

think about Niel Gow, who did that; and I think about the strings

he used and how he might have projected. These old tunes weren't

melodically adventurous—but how excited people were getting! It

must have been rhythmic excitement. That kind of rhythmic

nuance, which many cultures have preserved, has become very

hard to find in the West. It's rare to come upon a violinist who's

rhythmically switched on. So I'd put that ingredient in, and all the

linguistic things I hear when I'm playing along with Gaelic singers.

My dad's a piper, so I grew up playing along with him at the

kitchen table. And I'd use a Baroque bow. Once you get into using

different bows, it makes your hands work in a different way, and

you seek different solutions." Did he use a Baroque bow in the

new recording? "No. I might in some of the future ones; but in

some of these early-19th-century pieces I enjoy using the modern

bow at the frog, getting that weight that's become part of the

tradition for the later pieces, whereas I'd use the Baroque bow for

the older style, in the more rhythmically switched-on pieces."

Period-instrument folk have been exploring the Italian Baroque

violin repertoire with great gusto and imagination. But it has

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always struck me that, to create truly idiomatic encrustations of

ornamentation and rhythmic verve, the reconstructors would have

to steep themselves in the idiom in the same way in which Corelli,

Vivaldi, Locatelli, Tartini, and Veracini did—that is, by composing

sonatas in the style. Fraser, who composes Scottish tunes, has

taken that very step into the generative matrix. "To me, it's a

natural evolution. Excellent classical violinists, who can whip off

the Brahms Concerto, come to me and say, 'Tell me how I can free

things up a bit.' It's as though the violin world got on a path and

then hit a brick wall, and everyone turned around and said, 'Did we

miss a turn somewhere?' It became so myopic. For example, the

absence of the improvised cadenza, that celebration of the piece by

the performer. We've allowed ourselves to become shackled. This

fear of making something up is a big thing for a lot of violinists I

meet. I had to push myself through that fear, because I had so

many judges surrounding me. To be dwarfed by the masters of the

past is such a burden."

Ironically, it's a burden that wasn't shared so much, for example,

by Bach's contemporaries as by those who came after him.

"Playing for dancing was a great help. There'd be times when I'd

be playing for a dance, and I'd just make up something and

improvise for the dance floor. And I've composed quite a few

tunes. In this recording, I chose not to use any of them, though,

because I wanted to go back and live that old music. That's the

well I drink from. When I've had my fill I go off and create and

tear at the fabric again. I'd encourage that in any musician. But

violinists have become so paperbound. Fiddling offers a new path

and doesn't limit the player. Once you've added that, you can still

find repertoire in which you get to use your big vibrato and

technique. I now think of the training I had as helping me go

where my heart wants to take me."

As mentioned earlier, the repertoire Fraser plays in his new

recording consists not of anonymous tunes passed down by aural

tradition but of compositions by known composers. "These

composers seem larger than life. The 18th century was the golden

age of Scottish fiddle music. So many people were writing and

creating dances. Robert Burns, you know, was inspired by these

tunes and set his poetry to existing melodies and even went to

meet Niel Gow. These personalities emerged who created what's

still the main repertoire. Nathaniel Gow intrigues me because he

straddled the worlds of the rhythmically aware dance fiddler and

the melodically, harmonically aware violinist and leader of the

Assembly Rooms orchestra. I'm sure he went back home and

jammed with his dad up in Dunkeld playing the old tunes, but

when he went down to Edinburgh he got involved with the fancy

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balls and wrote beautiful tunes like Sir George Clark of Penicuik,

which is very refined and feels just great violinistically—it's a far

cry from some of the old Gaelic provocatively rhythmic

strathspeys. It's not the kind of tune his father would have written,

but Nathaniel was influenced by Edinburgh and the Italian influx

and the joy of this new violin sound."

There's a great wealth, then, of Scottish fiddle tunes and

composers. Why has there been no Scottish school of violinplaying?

"In Scotland, it seems that we've held on to some of the

more traditional ways. Robert Burns chose to set his poetry to

fiddle tunes of the day. He was under a lot of pressure to use more

from the continent. His publisher would send his settings of the

songs to Haydn for arrangements to give them a much higher

profile. But Burns didn't want it. He was vehement—he wanted to

set his poetry to the melodies that resonated with his Scottish

condition. It's interesting that the highest-profile classical piece we

have based on Scottish fiddle tunes was written by Bruch. I'd love

to write or play a Scottish violin concerto actually cut from the

idiomatic fabric of Scottish music. That's pretty much absent in the

Bruch concerto. I love the melodies he chose to develop. But it's

not idiomatically Scottish: You don't have to know Scottish fiddle

bowings to play it. There are definite Scottish ways of playing.

The strathspey is uniquely Scottish, and provides a great

opportunity to create that Scottish sound, to stay in touch with the

linguistic base—consonants and vowels on the violin, ways of

articulating. That's where the Scottish school would be."

Could the connection between fiddling and dance from which

Fraser has drawn such vital rhythmic sustenance become

progressively attenuated as fiddlers find fewer and fewer

opportunities to play for dancers? Might the old fiddle tunes even

stand in danger of becoming stylized concert pieces in the way the

Baroque dances did? "I've been trying to correct that for many

years. There are so many dancers who have never danced to live

music of any kind. Again, there's a fear component. They worry

that it might not all be so predictable as they'd like, so they use a

recording and never taste the thrill of the musicians feeding off the

dancers and the dancers feeding from the musicians. That's one of

the greatest highs I know. It's such a shame: Many dancers can't

crave that because they haven't even experienced it. It's an

educational challenge that involves apparent risk."

In contrast with the fiddle's, the violin's intimate connections with

the dance were severed long ago, although concert works and

salon pieces continued to be written based on dances of various

kinds. "People ask what the difference between the violin and the

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fiddle is. Violinists have assumed that their role is to interpret the

wishes of the composer while, as a fiddler, I consider it my job to

dip into this continuum of idiomatic knowledge and language, to

express myself in that idiom, to communicate my emotions using

that material—to pay my respects to the composers, certainly (not

distorting what they were trying to do), but to include their essence

in this continuum of knowledge. There's a lot more freedom in that

approach, and it's a lot more personal." It's hard not to think of this

as an observation that might have been offered by Paganini, Ernst,

Wieniawski, Vieuxtemps, or Sarasate.

What about Fraser's violin? "The violin I play normally is a Strad

model made for me by David Gussett of Eugene, Oregon in 1990

(if you look on his Web site, you'll find my fiddle there). The

workmanship is just tremendous. His violins are normally bought

by collectors, so he loved the idea of my having one of his fiddles

and actually giving it a good road test. And I love the idea of

playing on a violin that was made by a friend, a violin that I could

take on its journey. I still play that violin most often—but I didn't

use it on this recording. I used a borrowed George Duncan owned

by a friend of mine. I liked the idea of playing this classic core

repertoire on a Scottish fiddle from the period when many of these

compositions were created. It's quite a bold instrument. (There are

two good books by Mary Anne Alburger on Scottish fiddlers and

their music and on Scottish violin-makers.) Anyway, occasionally

I'll choose gut strings. At one point I had an ensemble with

wooden flute and gamba—very vibrant and, in some ways, my

ideal sound. But on the new recording there's a melody, Auld Brig

o ' Don, that doesn't want to go Baroque: It has a more modern

sound, and I get to use my more modern vibrato—I wouldn't use a

Baroque bow for it. Some of these other tunes, like Craigellachie

Brig, have an older rhythmic component, and there's no need for

the kind of nuance at the frog that I would get from a modern bow.

So I could have used an older bow for them and quite enjoyed it.

Lady Charlotte Campbell's New Strathspey is usually also good

with a more modern bow, as is Sir George Clark of Penicuik—I

think Edinburgh was into transitional bows at that time. We have a

painting of William Marshall holding his fiddle and what looks

like a transitional bow."

Fiddling of all kinds seems to be coming into its own once again.

If Menuhin and Stéphane Grappelli's collaborations in the 70s

were among the first of their kind, now Itzhak Perlman and Nadia

Salerno-Sonnenberg, for example, have taken to one or another

kind of fiddling. "When I think back to Grappelli and Menuhin's

duo CDs, Grappelli was full of flourish. He wasn't showing off,

but he had a language—a vocabulary—that sat well with the

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material. I feel that a lot of violinists are ruled by their bow arm; in

other players I hear a phrasing mind and the bow arm is the

servant. What I hear with Grappelli is a wonderful musical fluidity,

with the bow arm as its servant. In Menuhin, I hear the paperbound

musician—doing a very good job, but not having the language.

There's a phrase we use—the music has dirt in it (as in a jazz

musician overblowing to create some dirt), something that comes

from the lower regions of the body, something sexual, expressing a

grittier part of the emotional spectrum. We crave that. In these old

melodies you can overplay the string, create some dirt, create

tension so that when the release, the beauty, comes, with its fine,

exquisite tone, it's so much more of a joy. That's also part of the

rhythmic component—very much in the lower regions, in touch

with the rhythmic self and then soaring melodically: That's my

goal as a player. But now there's an absence of dirt, and we've

gotten to a point at which unclean playing is scoffed at. But I do

come across a lot of violinists who are asking questions."

Alasdair Fraser is certainly asking questions himself. He may be

one of the world's premiere fiddlers, but he was trained at

university as a scientist—specifically, in physics. Why do

mathematics and music, and specifically the violin, fit together so

well, as they did for Einstein? 'There are two things in my nature.

One is asking questions—that's what's led me down this violin

path—as in science: Get inside, find the essence. And then the

search for beauty (this may sound over-Romantic). In Maxwell's

equations, I see tremendous symmetry and wonderful form and

function— the highest thought. It all comes together in the same

way as musical composition for me—the incredible moment of

arrival at some beautiful solution. The highest moments I had

when I was studying physics were those when I was blown away

by the elegance of the thinking. You go into the same place in your

mind to create music—not to interpret it, but to create it. Maybe

there's a type of questioner who enjoys the beauty of that."

LEGACY OF THE SCOTTISH FIDDLE, VOL. 1 • Alasdair

Fraser (fiddle); Paul Machlis (pn); Natalie Haas (vc); Todd

Phillips (db) • CULBURNIE CUL 118D (59:52)

TRAD Miss Dumbeck, Clydeside Lassies. Seann

Triubhais Uilleachain. Da Forfeit o' da Ship. Jack is Yet

Alive. The Smith's a Gallant Fireman. MARSHALL Miss

Cameron of Balvenie. Chapel Keithack. Craigellachie

Brig. Mrs. McPherson of Gibton. Miss Hannah of Elgin.

Major L. Stewart of the Island of Java Reel. Mrs. Major L.

Stewart of the Island of Java. HENRY The Auld Brig o'

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Don. S. FRASER The Beauty of the North. The Ancient

Barons of Kilravock. The Novelty. SKINNER Madame

Neruda. Earl Haig. The Left Handed Fiddler. Rose-Acre.

The Rose-bud of Allenva f e. Mr. A. G. Wilken's

Favourite. The Iron Man. The Auld Wheel. GARDINER

Belmont. HILL Earl Grey. NATHANIEL GOW Largo's

Fairy Dance. Sir George Clark of Penicuik. NIEL GOW

Niel Gow's Lament for the Death of His Second Wife.

MACKINTOSH Lady Charlotte Campbell's New

Strathspey. Lady Charlotte Campbell's Reel. GRANT

Mrs. Jamieson's Favourite. ANDERSON Da Grocer.

HARDIE Jennie Hardie's Reel. BLYTH The Forth Bridge

Reel. MILNE Gillan's Reel

There's fiddling and then there's fiddling. The former grafts

Baroque style and technique (a pungent, strident sonority with

strong rhythmic accentuation, achieved with an older bow hold

and stroke) to a body of traditional tunes that, with the decline of

barn dances as a popular pastime, seem in danger of

metamorphosing into contest pieces. The latter incorporates

19th-century technical advances (a more modern violin tone

warmed occasionally by vibrato and softened by sentimental

portamentos) into a Romantic melodic and harmonic idiom.

Despite the broad historical and stylistic ranges that Alasdair

Fraser's first volume of Scottish fiddle tunes traverses, Fraser

remains a fiddler of the second kind. One reviewer cited in the

press pack, in fact, compared his tone to Fritz Kreisler's in

sweetness. Although it seems closer to Francescatti's or

Rosand's—with a trace of acid preventing it from cloying—the

comparison to Kreisler, who, at least in his earlier years, played

with a rhythmic piquancy hardly ever