The musical connection between Scotland and Poland

The National

21 hours ago

I gave a talk on Scottish music, with an interpreter. The next time, Simon Thoumire was there and he had no interpreter. He had not a word of Polish and his audience knew little English. It mattered not.
Simon took out his melodeon and, looking a bit like the wee laddie beloved of all aunties and grannies, proceeded to make excruciating sounds by playing all the notes simultaneously.
Music archeologist Anna Gruszynska Ziolkowska, farmer Kazimir, and horn maker and player Simon O'DwyerThe look of pain on his face, not to mention puzzlement, was enhanced as he tried to escape this chaotic experience, sometimes seeming to free at least part of the sound, other times only compounding the misery.
It was worthy of the great comedians of the silent cinema as, ever so gradually, he found his way towards coherence and rationality, by this time his eyes glinting with mischief and the Poles totally in love with him.
When order was at last clearly established, he launched into a jig so fast and dazzling that it felt as though all breath were suspended.
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On another occasion, the Scottish traditional music group Iron Horse played in Poznan's main square and later in a cellar bar which served the roughest vodka known to man, along with sundry other substances known to the police. Jacek had determined that Scotland's culture was going to reach even the cellars of his city – and it did.
The audience was all young, all seated cross-legged (I don't recall any chairs), but initially shy of their own pleasure. I was in the kilt and Annie Grace, the lovely lead singer and piper, grabbed me to dance and soon everyone was dancing. The energy was exhausting as, being kilted, I was in high demand and had to relinquish lovely lass after lovely lass to gather breath and vodka.
I have written about Jerzy Pietrkiewicz already but didn't know at the time that I was going to be visiting the part of the world where his novel about the Scottish composer Tobias Hume was mostly set. It came about in 2002, organised by music archaeologist Anna-Gruszynska Ziolkowska, in pursuit of knowledge of the ligawka or long wooden horn that used to be played in that part of Poland.
We started off in Warsaw in a hotel which was a relic of Communist Party days, of vast uniform drabness. The long walk into town was past an open-air museum of military equipment. Much was being rebuilt, but the enthusiastic reception of the students to whom we gave forth on matters music archaeological made up for that.
Anna and her husband invited us to their flat for dinner. They were respective heads of their disciplines, high up in the academic world and with international reputations.
Their flat was tiny. The living room was the kitchen, dining room and bedroom. The remaining bedroom was for their nearly grown-up children. The corridor housed the bicycles and the dog. There was also a narrow bathroom.
Dinner was delicious. Nothing got in the way of anything else, and the company made it the happiest of evenings. We were all chastened by the modesty of their living. How spoilt we were – and are.
It was December and the time of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on the eighth of that month. It is also the date of my wife's birthday, from which Jerzy Pietrkiewicz would, I have no doubt, drawn some auspicious conclusion.
As far as eastern Poland and the ligawka was concerned it was an important day, for on that day the musicians traditionally celebrated the conception in the church itself and the service was observed in the presence of a bishop.
A ligawka The Feast of the Immaculate Conception is nothing to do with Christ's conception – it is to do with the conception of the Virgin Mary herself, and one of the chief proponents of its significance was the great Scottish philosopher, John Duns Scotus, who came from Duns in the Border.
It has to be a mystery and so has a place of honour in the mystical calendar of Christianity, and is celebrated with the full panoply of costume, incense, and devout observance.
No greater contrast can be imagined between the magnificence of the church and the dispiriting appearance of the town.
The buildings were rundown, paint peeling everywhere, and the only bar was frequented by unemployed men, young and old, stretching cold beers from early morning to noon.
The church, on the other hand, was as richly embellished as the robes of the priests, mostly fat priests, and the paint was brilliant, fresh whites and blues and golds and reds. There were many candles, and the whole was beautiful – sustained at what expense and to whom? But the sound of the ligawkas at the proper moment in the service brought the whole building to life, and one sensed the community's pride in this, their real contribution to the service.
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One night we took part in a concert of traditional music which featured a wonderful singer from the southern mountains. Her voice had such a powerful long-distance penetrating edge to it that I had to ask her how she kept her vocal cords from injury.
She replied that the technique took years to develop. The sound was not harsh, but stunningly beautiful, like the call of a wild animal, modulated by reason. I sang myself – Ion-do, Ion-da – the song of a selchie returning to the sea and calling up its people. I asked for the Polish word for 'seal' and was told 'phoca'.
A little Polish boy overheard this backstage and, with the greatest delight, ran about shouting out 'Phoca, phoca, phoca!' with every intention of shocking everyone – until he was duly silenced.
I love mischief but fortunately his interpretation didn't reach the ears of my audience or I'd have been dead in the water.
One day they had a big ligawka-playing competition. Full national costume. Participants of every age. One little boy so small the instrument had to be held up for him, but he had the puff to get a reasonable sound out of it.
Playing skills were not well developed but perhaps that was one of the consequences of the Nazis having banned the instrument because they were being used for long-distance signalling.
Some people say music and politics should be kept separate. Well, that might be an ideal but there isn't a hope in hell of it.
As for the ligawkas themselves, they were made locally by splitting sometimes two-metre-long limbs of timber and hollowing them out conically, often ending with a steep curve and an animal head.
The farmhouse to which we were taken to meet one of the makers was in flat land, harried by a vicious north-easterly wind, the whole of the area being under frozen snow.
It was bitterly cold and, even with the superior warmth of the kilt I was wearing, the cold crept up past my knees.
The farmer, Kazimir, kept a variety of animals, including llamas, and he showed us round his workshop and the farm buildings. In the farmhouse, a spread of food all produced by themselves – bread, sausages, cheeses – was set out upon the table and we were told we must consume it all. We had at least added a bottle of vodka, and everything, all delicious, duly vanished.
Presiding over the room from her chair of state was Josefa, the champion bread maker. I had noticed an old rotary hand mill – a quern – mounted on a wooden frame in the barn and asked if she ground her own meal.
She had no English and I no Polish, so all this conversation was conducted through an interpreter and was laboured and not easily understood.
So I started to sing an old Gaelic quern song while imitating the motion with my hand, and Josefa's eyes lit up with instant recognition. Yes, she used to, but no longer.
I was told, when it was time to leave, that Josefa wanted me to stay. In my heart I keep for her a red rose.
Josefa Years later the wonderful Polish Theatre of the Goat came to Scotland and a group of them visited me in Skye to pick my brains, and the brains of those much better qualified on Gaelic music and song.
What they planned was so ambitious that I truly doubted whether it could be done. They were going to bring to an Edinburgh Festival audience the sounds and, above all, the inner essence of Gaelic song, in particular psalm singing and lament.
They sat with rapt attention in every corner of my cramped study, spilled out into other rooms and sang and played, never intruded to insist on anything, but listened and learnt and enjoyed and shared.
Their composer was the ever-kindly Maciej Rychly and, miraculously, he and they brought the world of Gaelic music, which they had studied with such humility, to a fervent life in St Giles' Cathedral. Such intensity comes only from the heart, and many hearts were torn. Brigh a' Chiuil is on YouTube.
What is it then about Poland and Scotland that seems to bring us together, time and again?
I have no answer, but in the quiet daydreams of old age I imagine Jerzy Pietrkiewicz, who is – or is not – no more, smiling the answer to himself, somewhere between Andalusia and outer space.