The term "Celtic" is more precisely applied to a
culture than to a race, a culture which has jostled with its principal
rival, the Germanic, for a place in Europe over the centuries. In the
eighteenth century, the geographic boundary between the two cultures in
Scotland was roughly defined by the merging of the mountains of the
northwest with the lowlands of the southeast, and were distinguished by
their respective languages - Gaelic and "Lowland Scots." The latter
language, now usually referred to simply as "Scots," is a northern
branch of English or Anglian with its own infusions from the low
countries and France and from Gaelic itself.
In Medieval times, Gaelic was the language of the
Scots and was then referred to as Erse (Irish) by the English speakers
of the southeast and eastern ports. In 1363-5 Fordoun wrote:
The manners and customs of the Scots vary with
the diversity of their speech. For two languages are spoken among
them, the Scottish and the Teuton, the last of which is the language
of those who occupy the seaboard and the plains while the race of
Scottish speech inhabit the Highlands and outlying islands. The
people of the coast of the islands, on the other hand, are a savage
and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine,
ease-loving, of a docile and warm disposition, comely in persons but
unsightly in dress, hostile to the English people and language and,
owing to diversity of speech, even to their own nation, and
exceedingly cruel. They are, however, faithful and obedient to their
king and country and easily made to submit if properly governed.
This seems a remarkably perceptive report.
The Norse marauders and settlers of the Hebridean and
West-Highland fringe had some impact on names and no doubt also on
social customs, lore and music, but in these higher arts the Celtic
strain was overwhelmingly the stronger. The first rulers of the united
kingdom of Scotland (844 A.D.) spoke Gaelic. It was the Anglo-Normans
who established the Anglian dialect in Scotland as the language of state
even before it was so established in England, where French remained the
dominant language at court practically to the time of Henry
VIII. King James IV (c.1500) of Scotland, who married Henry's sister, Margaret, was the last
of the Scottish kings to be fluent in Gaelic. It was he, too, who broke
the Norwegian king's hold on the Hebridean clansmen and set up the Earl
of Argyll, chief of Clan Campbell, to erode the dominion of the
Macdonald clan over the Isles. This is the true origin of the well-known
Macdonald-Campbell feud. It is ironical that it was to the Macdonalds
and their associates, adherents to the Roman Church, that James
IV's direct line of descent had ultimately to
look for its support in the eighteenth century. It was from these clans
that a large proportion of the earliest settlers in the New World were
drawn.
By this time (1707) Scotland had entered into an
incorporating union with England while retaining her own church,
educational structure and law. It is to Scotland's control over these
vital institutions that Canada owes so much, a phenomenon which provides
the subject for several other articles in this symposium. It is certain
that when the British government decided to recruit the Scottish Gaels
(or Highlanders) into the British army and form Highland regiments, it
could not have imagined the many ramifications of this which would
develop within the British Empire and its influences on the spread of
Scottish Gaelic culture in the world. Its contribution to the
depopulation of the Scottish Highlands was seen as an advantage. Through
these regiments hundred of Gaels reached North America and remained
there to form Gaelic-speaking communities on lands granted by the
Imperial government. The first really major Gaelic settlements in Canada
began in this way, that in Glengarry, Ontario, being the most
noteworthy. The Highland military tradition in such settlements remained
strong over the years and it is therefore surprising that the tradition
of the great Highland bagpipe as a military instrument did not share
this strength. The Scots, both Highland and Lowland, and the Irish too,
were often led into battle by a bagpiper in centuries past; but it is
the Highland Gaels who cultivated their Great Bagpipe (Piob Mohr), so-called from its size, and its music, for a military role. With
the creation of Highland regiments went the development of the
combination of piper and drummer which evolved into pipes and drums -
the military pipe band - thus founding a new tradition of bagpipe music
for marching which is now as strong in Canada, and as indigenous, as it
is in Scotland itself. Yet one looks in vain to the Canadian Gaelic
settlements for a tradition of piping that reaches back to their
origins.
In the tradition of the Gael, the Great Pipe had its
own unique art music - Pibroch - a theme and variations form of great
variety and subtlety both melodically and acoustically. While Pibrochs
have most frequently been composed to commemorate some warlike
achievements, or lament the death of a hero or a loved one, they are not
restricted to heroic themes. They require great technical skill and musicianship
which is not easily acquired without much study and practice. This has
often called for something like full-time devotion to the instrument,
restricting it, if you will, to professionals. The great patrons of the
professional pipers in Scotland were clan chiefs or lairds and the study
required of such a piper often involved a few years at one of the
special piping schools or colleges such as that of the MacCrimmons in
Skye, or under the tutelage of a master of the art. Conditions in the
pioneering settlements were not conducive to this kind of application.
As for dance music, the fiddle was, in Canada, a more accessible and
less temperamental instrument, requiring less skill to play acceptably.
The principal Gaelic-speaking Scottish settlements in Canada by the
middle of the nineteenth century were well-established in Nova Scotia,
particularly in Cape Breton, Pictou and Antigonish, parts of Prince
Edward Island and New Brunswick, the Ottawa River Valley, the Red River
in Manitoba, and in parts of Ontario - particularly Glengarry, Stormont,
Zorra, Elgin, Bruce and Baldoon. There were others of less significance
and kindred settlements of Lowland and Ulster Scots whose native tongue
was modern English and Scots.
Apart from the distinctions associated with their
respective languages, the Highland and Lowland Scots were - in general -
products of different environments. By the eighteenth century, the
Highlander was predominantly a hunter and fisherman or a crofter picking
meagre crops from a thin and rocky soil. He lived very close to nature,
and was inured to hardship. The cold and wet of the North Atlantic
climate held no terrors for him. The Hebridean, living in the eternal
presence of the sea, on bare windswept islands, remote and magical, was
a different person from the Gaelic-speaking Highlander of the mountains,
of the old Pictish regions of Breadalbane and Strathspey, and both
differed again in some degree from their brethren in the broad moorlands
and glens of Sutherland and Caithness. Their pronunciation of their
common language was different, just as the dialects and pronunciation of
English differed with fine gradations from the borders with England to
John o' Groats, Orkney and Shetland.
Associated with the Gaelic language was an ancient
and rich oral tradition of literature, descended from the great bardic
culture of former days and largely devoted to the legendary heroes of
the race. By the eighteenth century the long bardic epics were preserved
in whole or in part in the mouths of the story-tellers with which every
clan abounded, mixed with a multitude of those folk tales which John F.
Campbell has recorded for us and which Helen Creighton has traced anew
in Nova Scotia. In addition to this was the wonderful inheritance of
song - the work song, the rowing song, the song of incantation, the love
song and the song of live experience. What a treasury was there!1
In eighteenth century Scotland, a notable development
in Gaelic literature was the emergence of Gaelic poets who turned from
the traditional subjects of their predecessors and composed poems on the
themes of their daily life, in the manner of poets in the other European
languages. Some of these poets could read and write Gaelic, but most did
not. Duncan Ban Macintyre, perhaps the most gifted of these, had all his
compositions committed to memory. The Rev. Dr. Stuart of Luss wrote down
many of Macintyre's poems from the poet's dictation and published them
in 1768. Similar collections of other Gaelic poets followed, but much
remained only in oral circulation, for the Gaelic tradition was yet
essentially oral.
In his The Literature of the Highlands, Magnus
Maclean wrote:
At the beginning of the nineteenth century quite
an unprecedented number of Highland bards existed; among others
Duncan Ban Macintyre, Ewen Maclachlan, Alan MacDougall, Alexander
Mackinnon, John Maclean, Donald Macleod, Kenneth Mackenzie, James
Shaw, James Macgregor, John Macdonald, Donald Macdonald, Angus
Fletcher and Allan Macintyre. The splendid renaissance of the '45
had thus culminated in the remarkable result that there was scarcely
a parish or a clachan throughout the Highlands and Islands that had
not its own poet. And yet the noontide glory had already departed
for of the great sons of the Muses, Macdonald, Maccodrum, Macintyre,
Roy Stuart, Macpherson, Buchanan, Rob Donn and William Ross, only
one was still living [Macintyre], the venerable hunter-bard of
Glenorchy, who outlived his peers and died at Edinburgh in 1812.
It was the society which produced this outpouring
which was now breaking up and transplanting itself on the opposite
Atlantic shore. Although the tension which is the mainspring of great
art was present in this experience, the leisure for its expression had
to give way to the unfamiliar tasks of clearing forests and coping with
the problems of survival in an unfamiliar terrain and climate of
extremes of sunshine and ice.
Bard MacLean in Nova Scotia despaired in his
desolation:
Tha mulad diomhair an deigh mo lionadh
Bho'n 's eiginn striochdadh an seo ri m' bheo
Air bheag toilinntinn 's a' choille chruim seo
Gun duine faighneachd an seinn mi ceol.
Cha
b' e sin m' abhaist an tus mo laithean;
'S ann bhithinn rabhartach aig gach bord,
Gu cridheil sunndach an comunn cuirteil,
A' ruith ar n'uine gun churam oirnn.
A hidden grief has overfilled me since I've been
doomed to stagnate here for the rest of my life with little
amusement in this gnarled forest and without anyone to ask me if I'd
sing a song.
That was not my custom in the early days; then I
used to be frolicking at every table, happy and
contented among cultured companions, passing the time without any
care.2
This, however, was a passing phase. MacLean soon
began to appreciate some of the recompenses of the new land, and Charles
Dunn truly observes that if MacLean had written in English he would have
been more widely esteemed as a classic poet of pioneer life. He was the
most versatile and renowned of the Highland poets to settle in the New
World.3
None of the several Gaelic poets who emigrated to Canada was quite of
this calibre. Nevertheless, one must comment on the Rev. Duncan Black
Blair who was inspired to write a number of poems on the Canadian scene,
of which the following is a good example:
Anns a' gheamhradh neo-chaoin
This a' ghaoth le fead ghoineant',
'S bidh cruaidh ghaoir feadh nan craobh,
'S iad for shraonadh na doininn.
Bidh sneachd trom air gach gleann,
'S cathadh teann mu gach dorus;
Ach bidh Ion againn 's blaths,
'S bidh sinn manranach, sona.
In the surly winter the wind comes with its
shrill whistle, and there's a loud moaning among the trees under the
blast of the storm. There's deep snow in each valley and heavy
drifts around every door; but we have food and warmth, and we're
companionable and contented.4
Other Gaelic poets emerged from the new settlements
in some profusion, and the work of the best of them has that same vigour
and unsentimental awareness of nature that was characteristic of the
compositions of the great eighteenth century Gaelic poets.
In contrast, the emigre Lowland Scots writing poetry
in their own tongue were constrained by its associations of "hame and
infancy" and pawky humour. They came to its traditions via the works of
Burns and his contemporary song writers, and imitated these models, but
in a way that often tended to artificiality and the rudest
sentimentality. This corruption of taste was somehow a peculiarity of
their associations with modern English, and the postures of the period.
Modern English was now the dominant dialect for serious literature and
discourse in Scotland although, curiously enough, it made remarkably
slower progress within the legal profession. With its increasing
ascendancy for higher literary purposes since the appearance of the King
James translation of the Bible, it caused the decline of the growing
Lowland Scots literary tradition of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries.
Gaelic has had a much longer run as a working
language and is consequently a more fully developed language than Scots
had a chance to become. But Scots was the language of "feeling" for most
non-Gaelic speakers in Scotland and remains so to the present day
although to a lesser extent than formerly, with the exception of those
brought up within the Glasgow industrial region, in which the vernacular
is a corrupt patois. Great poetry on universal themes has been written
in Scotland in the vernacular Scots tongue, or its literary synthesis,
in recent times, starting with Hugh Macdiarmid's Sangschaw, Penny
Wheep, and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle of the 1920s.
This development has had no manifestation in Canada corresponding to
that which one can trace among the nineteenth century immigrants and
which is the subject of another contribution to this symposium. Gaelic
poetry in Scotland has been touched by this modern movement, its
crowning glory being the work of Sorley Mac-Lean, but this also has had
no impact in Canada - as yet.
The poetry of the pioneering Gael in Canada expresses
the simple wonder of his new habitat and the struggle of the experience
in a more immediate way than the corresponding endeavours in English or
Scots. Nevertheless, being in a minority language, this poetry has had
no apparent effect on the mainstream of English or French literature in
Canada. This does not preclude the discovery of Canadian works here and
there which draw their expression from the Gaelic tradition, just as one
encounters Gaelic constructions and expressions in the English speech of
people raised where Gaelic was indigenous in Canada. That "indigenous"
is not too strong a word is well illustrated by the experiences of that
great Scottish divine, Norman Macleod, when he toured the eastern
provinces in 1841. While proceeding by steamboat from Kingston, Ontario,
to Toronto, for instance, he heard a number of voices from a lower deck
singing a Gaelic chorus. After seeking them out, the following dialogue
ensued:
"Pray what language is that?"
"Gael, sir. ..."
"Is it a language?"
"It's the only true langidge. English is no
langidge at all, at all."
"It must be banished; it is savage."
"It's no you, or any other, will banish it.''
"Pray let me hear you speak a sentence of it. Address a question to
me."
"Co as a thanaig thu?" (Where do you come from?)
"Thanaig mis as an Eilean Sgianachl" (I come from the
lsle of Skye.)
"O, fheudail! 'Se
Gael tha am"
(Oh goodness! He is a Gael!)5
None of these men had ever been in Scotland; all were
natives of Glengarry, Ontario. This did not surprise Macleod; he was
meeting with this sort of thing wherever he travelled in Upper Canada
and the Maritimes and, not long before, he had participated in open air
religious services in Gaelic at Pictou, to which nearly
five thousand people had thronged from near and far. He had never seen
the like in Scotland.
When formal education was introduced to the
Gaelic-speaking communities in Canada the principal use of the language
in the schoolroom was to teach English - just as in Scotland. Thus most
Gaels everywhere came to read and write English better than they could
read and write their parent tongue, the tongue in which they expressed
themselves best, the vehicle of their literature! A considerable
incentive towards literacy in Gaelic, however, was provided by the
publication, in 1841, of a valuable collection of the best Gaelic poets
of the eighteenth century, entitled Sar Obar nam Bard Gaeloch
(Masterpieces of the Gaelic Bards). This was compiled by John
Mackenzie and published in Glasgow. The poems were in the original
Gaelic and the biographies of the poets and an introductory dissertation
were presented in English. Charles Dunn, whose study of the Gaelic
literature of Nova Scotia6 is an
indispensable guide to this subject, tells us that Sar Obar nam Bard
Gaeloch had a remarkable effect on the cultural life of Canadian Gaels,
enticing the curious into learning to read their own language.
The attachment of the emigrant Gaels to their native
islands and mountains was deep and intense. Unlike their Germanic
tormentors, the Vikings of the Middle Ages, the Gaels, as a people, were
not maritime adventurers. Perhaps their internecine feuds, to which they
were peculiarly addicted, provided sufficient release for their
aggressive instincts. In their days of crisis in the eighteenth century,
however, these feuds melted into insignificance and the more civilized
side of Gaelic life enjoyed the greater prominence it so richly
deserved, although observers were usually deceived by the trappings of
poverty.
The Protestant Reformation spread into Sutherland and
Caithness in the seventeenth century but was much slower in penetrating
the remoter Highlands. A Gaelic translation of the Bible was not
available until the late eighteenth century. When the missionary zeal of
the reforming ministers bore fruit, it was with a startling fervour and
earnestness which was quickly reinforced by the anguish of parting from
friends and relatives in the time of wholesale clearances, and by the
resulting desolation. Thus a peculiarly puritanical branch of the
Protestant church made great headway throughout the West Highlands
during the nineteenth century. The Gael was ever close to the
supernatural and wove some of his superstitious propensities into
whatever creed he adopted. Not even the strictest Cal-vinist in the
Hebrides would readily scoff at the phenomenon of "second sight," for
instance. This was the most common and best authenticated form of
extra-sensory perception within nearly everyone's experience. The Gaels
took this with them and their heightened sense of the "other World" to
their new home in the forest and by the sea of new shores. The Rev. W.A.
Ross of Zorra, for instance, recorded that nearly all the superstitious
Halloween rites described by Burns were practised by the Zorra pioneers,
a Protestant Gaelic community.7
The Catholic part of the Scottish Highlands still
embraces the Great Glen, Glengarry, Ardnamurchan, Knoydart, Moidart, and
the islands of Rum, Eigg, Canna, Barra, South Uist and Eriskay. It is
from these regions that the Catholic Gaels of Canada set forth, settling
mainly in Cape Breton, Antigonish, Prince Edward Island and Glengarry,
Ontario. It is among these that the traditions of the Gael have been
most tenaciously preserved in both Scotland and Canada. The relationship
between the Catholic and Protestant Highlanders has been traditionally
cordial and tolerant. The binding force of the Gaelic language was proof
against sectarian hostility. It was a very different case in Ireland,
where Catholics spoke Gaelic and Protestants spoke English. The Rev.
Norman Macleod the elder, father of the minister of the same name
mentioned above and composer of the favourite Gaelic song, "Farewell to
Fiunary" (Fiunary was the name of his manse in Morven),
frequently entertained "old Mr. Cattanach," the local Roman Catholic
priest at Campbeltown, and often provided board for the priest of his
parish in Morven.8 But we can find many
examples of this spirit in the ministrations in Glengarry of Bishop
MacDonell, whose unbigoted acts of Christian charity earned a generous
encomium from the Orange Body of the City of Toronto (c.1835).9
The divisions which developed among the Protestant brethren, however,
were sometimes more deeply felt, and were a vexatious intrusion into
immigrant Highland settlements.
The Scottish Kirk, however, was an influential
democratic power in Scotland, largely taking the place of a parliament.
It was a great force towards literacy - in English - and it produced or
fostered a disputatious body of parishioners, particularly in the
Lowlands, who made "points of doctrine" and consequently philosophy,
theology and science their profound concern. The West Highland
Presbyterians were more likely to follow their ministers and fall under
the spell of repressive piety. Many regarded their misfortunes as
judgements for sinful living, and for these the rejection of all
expression of secular joy seemed only too appropriate. Some of this is
seen in the Gaelic-speaking pioneer settlements of Nova Scotia, and
where it is strong it has had an inhibitory effect, as in Scotland, on
the preservation of the traditional customs, dances and songs. The
Catholic communities have largely been spared this cloud of guilt, but
they have had their puritan devotees too. Nevertheless music and dance
have occupied a paramount place in the culture of all Gaels. The folk
music of the British Isles is predominantly Celtic in origin and no
community in Europe has exceeded Ireland and Gaelic Scotland in the
variety, extent and beauty of its instrumental music and songs.
In both music and dance, Gaelic society developed
sophisticated art forms: the port of the clarsach, the
piobairechd of the piob mor, or great bagpipe, and Highland
dancing. The Gaelic-speaking pioneer communities of North America were
heirs to these, but had little apparent opportunity to cultivate them.
In their recreational life they took inspiration from the smaller folk
forms - the traditional dance music and martial airs
played on both fiddle and bagpipe and the immense resources of song. The
latter included the work or occupational songs which lightened every
task. Communal tasks - such as waulking the cloth and rowing the long
boat -were accompanied by the appropriate songs, usually comprising
alternating lines of solo and chorus. Survivals of this great
accumulation reaching back into distant time are still being collected
in Nova Scotia and the Hebrides. As J.L. Campbell expressed it, "Work in
the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Islands was performed as a joyful
social creative activity, integrated into the lives of the people and
expressing their personalities-. .. their great store of traditional
folksong enriched their lives and lightened their labours."10
That great Gaelic social institution, the ceilidh,
a domestic gathering combining entertainment and conversation, has
survived as a vital characteristic of life in the Gaelic communities of
Canada right into modern times although, recently, it has more commonly
been replaced by public concerts. Public Gaelic concerts, as distinct
from those of the Gaelic societies of the cities, are more of an
institution in Cape Breton than elsewhere in Canada, for it is there
that the Gaelic language has been most tenaciously preserved.
Nevertheless, the visitor to many concerts in Glengarry County, Ontario,
would be excused for thinking that he had arrived in the Scottish
Highlands, for, although English is the language now used, it is the
music, songs and dances of Scotland that dominate the programme. There
are still a few districts in Scotland in which one could summon up a
band of twenty fiddlers at short notice, but it would startle any Scot
today to walk into a hall in Maxville, Ontario, or Sydney or Halifax,
Nova Scotia, and find a score of fiddlers who had never seen Scotland,
crowding onto a platform to play reels, hornpipes, jigs and Strathspeys
with all the love and fervour in the world. This, in large measure, is
the very stuff of Canada, let alone of Scotland, in the experience of
thousands of Canadians.
Traditional Scottish dance music can be categorized
under two generic heads - reels and jigs. The sub-categories of reel to
which special names have been given are: rant, Scottish Measure and
Strathspey.11 The common-time hornpipe which has been a great favourite
in New England and in the Maritimes is a class of tune which was
developed from the Scottish Measure in the eighteenth century and was
widely used as the vehicle of theatrical character step-dances at that
time and subsequently. The Irish hornpipe has a different rhythm and
style. Prior to the vogue of the new hornpipes, the name was given to a
step-dance measure in 3/2 which was a favourite in England, in the
Scottish border country and to some extent in Ireland. The common-time
hornpipe, so called, was widely used in Scottish dancing schools for a
character dance called Jacky Tar and for Country Dances. It was clearly
a relative, a mutation, of the traditional Scottish rant, although many
of the stage hornpipes named after dancing masters (Fishar's, Durang's,
etc.) are obviously not Scottish in origin at all. The different classes
of jigs are not so clearly differentiated and, although they form the
bulk of the corpus of Irish dance music, they are hardly less essential
to the dance music of England and form a considerable component of that
of Scotland.
The jig cannot compete with the rant and hornpipe in
the affections of Canadian fiddlers, nor can the Strathspey, still less
the slow Strathspey so much enjoyed by Scottish fiddlers. This certainly
has something to do with the prevailing dance forms and also the
fiddling technique. The self-taught, uncultivated, traditional fiddler
uses a very short bowing action, vigorously scraping out the tune with a
stroke to each note and producing but very small sound. The more tutored
fiddler has acquired the advantages of a more varied bowing technique
and larger sound, although in some cases at the sacrifice of what the
Scots call "pith and birr." The long bow is most advantageous, if not
essential, to the slow Strathspey. As already remarked, the Cape
Bretoner's partiality for rants, common-time hornpipes and, to a lesser
extent, jigs, is undoubtedly due to the prevailing tradition of
step-dancing which has also given rise to the name of "clog" for a
particular class of hornpipe tune, the "Scottish
Measure.''
A considerable proportion of this body of dance music
has been composed by fiddlers - and pipers - within the past two hundred
years. It remains a living tradition and nowhere more so than in the
regions of Gaelic settlement in Canada, particularly in Cape Breton,
Glengarry and the Ottawa River Valley. More than that, each region has
developed its own characteristic style of fiddling as well as its
favourite versions of old tunes and even favourite tunes of its own.
Hence certain characteristics distinguish the typical fiddler from Cape
Breton from his counterpart in Glengarry or by the Ottawa River. The
same could once be said, and to a lesser extent can still be said, of
fiddlers in Scotland itself, and of fiddle and pipe tunes. The printed
music collections, improved technique, and the disruption of the old
communities have conspired towards greater uniformity in Scotland.
Nevertheless, there is a clear difference between the Irish and Scottish
styles, and mainland and island styles, of performing the same tunes,
and no less a difference in the technique of the instrumentalist.
The Cape Breton fiddlers often seem to form a bridge
between the Scottish and Irish styles. There is, too, a difference
between the Cape Breton and Nova Scotian styles recognized by the
cognoscenti. In addition there are the related musical traditions of
Acadia and New England in which fiddling plays an equally prominent
role. In all of these regions rants and common-time hornpipes reign
supreme. It is fascinating to hear the transmutations of Scottish rants
and even of Strathspeys, suitably renamed, by French-Canadian fiddlers,
among whom Jean Carignan, a Quebecer, takes pride of place. Another
offshoot of the Gaelic tradition in fiddling in Canada is what is called
"Country Music," the "hoe-down" square dance idiom, very different from
the Scottish tradition of fiddling which is its natural progenitor. This
subject has not yet been studied and treated with the scholarship it
deserves and the different styles of fiddling are not so easily
discussed on paper in any case. The "Scotch," Cape Breton, Nova Scotian,
Acadian and "Country" styles of fiddling are identifiable and have their
respective devotees.
The most distinctive characteristic of the Scotch
style is the absence of the drone effect of frequent doubling with the
open string common to the other two styles. Double-stopping,
staccato, and what some call the "skirl" - a quick figure or
arabesque employing the four working fingers - are also distinctive
characteristics of the Scotch style. The Acadian style bends all tunes,
even if they be Strathspeys or Scottish Measures, into an impetuous
filigree of graceful notes. The accents of the tunes - Scottish tunes
though they be - are changed, making them no longer Strathspeys, etc.
This style is at its best with rants and hornpipes. Indeed, one is
tempted to say that it was uniquely devised for these rhythms. In the
hands of such an artist as Jean Carignan the effect is incomparably
exciting. In other categories of Scottish dance tune it is not nearly so
effective and, in any case, to the Scottish ear its accent is"wrong."
The same can be said of the "Country" style which now rather
predominates in Canada.
The social dances brought to Cape Breton by its
Gaelic-speaking settlers were several variants of what are now called
the "four-handed reel" and the "eight-handed reel," or, in Gaelic, the
Ruidhleadh Bheag ("small reel") and the Ruidhleadh Mor
("big reel"). These dances comprised eight bars of travel in a circle
alternating with eight bars of setting to partners, either in a line or
in a square. The setting took the form of hornpipe stepping -
trebles and beats, brushing and heel and toe movements - a style of
dancing for clad feet, and of which little trace survives in Scotland
but which is certainly essential to Irish dancing. Nevertheless there is
sufficient evidence in written record and within comparatively recent
memory to confirm the Cape Breton round reels as authentic survivors of
a favourite dance form of the Hebrides and contiguous parts of the
Scottish mainland at the time of the large scale emigrations.13
Stepping was commonly employed for
setting in country dances in the rural communities of the Scottish
Lowlands and was certainly taught by itinerant dancing masters in
Ayrshire and Galloway in the early nineteenth century.14 The
term "Country Dance," it must be pointed out, refers to a specific
longwise dance form characterized by a system of progression by which
each couple has an opportunity of leading through the dance as "dancing
couple" in regular sequence. There are "Scottish," "English" and "Irish"
Country Dances, differing more in technique than in figures and, of
course, in music, although there are large scale mutual borrowings.
Country Dances are performed to all classes of reel,
hornpipe and jig and were popular in the rural and formal ballrooms of
Canadian and New England towns in the nineteenth century. American
ballroom manuals called them "Contra-Dances," a name appropriate to
their longwise formation of male and female ranged in opposing lines, in
contradistinction of the couples facing each other in square formation,
which, incidentally, is the original contra-dance formation.
Other than by providing tunes, there was no Scottish influence on these
dances. The technique was mainly stepping; but the ballroom manuals of
the period leave no doubt that hornpipe stepping was appropriate only to
vulgar assemblies.
The so-called "Square Dance" is a rustic form of the
Quadrille, which was a more decorous dance and, originally, one
demanding much classical dance skill and a large repertoire of steps.
The Square Dance has therefore been referred to as a "country dance,"
but this is not the same as "Country Dance" with capital "C" and "D."
The Scottish Country Dance which emerged from the Lowland dance
assemblies of the eighteenth century was unknown to the Gaelic
immigrants of Canada. If the latter encountered Country Dances in their
new home it would be through the social dancing of their neighbours who
had derived them from America or England. Nothing replaced their own
reels and music in the esteem of the Gaels in both Scotland and Canada.
The Country Dance, as it evolved in Scotland, took on
a character influenced by the technique of the Scotch Reel in its Atholl
and Strathspey forms. It was a favourite social dance form of many
Lowland regions and has been introduced in strength to Canada since the
1940s through the work of the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society,
founded in 1923. There are now numerous groups of devotees of Scottish
Country Dancing in Canada, providing and receiving continuous
instruction in the art. Many new dances in the idiom have been devised
in Canada, even by native-born Canadians, and have found a place in the
repertoire, but these can scarcely yet be considered a uniquely Canadian
strain of the genre. It is a notable fact that some of the most
accomplished exponents of the art, dancers and musicians, are resident
in Canada and many are Canadian-born. One of the Canadian bands which
provide music for the great Scottish Country Dance occasions is
acknowledged to rank with the best in the world.15
The style of this dance, while energetic, is
controlled and courtly in the ballroom. It is slowly being accepted in
the Gaelic regions of Canada where, except for its music, it has no
roots. It puts a premium on a limited range of dancing skill in the
style of Highland Dance - a Gaelic source -and, above all, it provides
an incomparable opportunity to dance socially to all categories of the
traditional dance music played in the Scottish style.
The dramatic or mimetic jigs and reels which were
once an essential feature of every ceilidh in the Scottish West
Highlands and even of like occasions in the non-Gaelic southwest16
were a vague recollection among some old
people in Cape Breton and the Hebrides in recent times.17 The
milieu which preserved these very simple performances, with their
connotations of ancient ritual, has passed away. This is not to be
confused with what is known as Highland dancing.
What we call Highland dancing, today, is really a
cultivated art form which has developed from Gaelic culture's traditions
of music and dance. It is analogous to the development of ballet - or
the associated cultivated dance forms of the sixteenth
century French court - from the raw material of the folk. But unlike its
European analogue, it belonged to the folk and developed within the
folk. Its centre of development was the central Highlands of Scotland
and its social expression was in that dance known in the eighteenth
century and later as the Highland Reel - for three or four dancers. A
peculiarly elegant and sprightly form of its varied and exacting
technique was fostered in the Strathspey and contiguous regions of the
northeast Highlands, and from its variety of steps developed the
enchainments which were later given such names as "Highland Fling."
It is not our purpose here to enter into the details
of the nature and historical development of Highland dance. For this,
the reader is referred to the relevant works cited in the notes. Suffice
to say that the eighteenth century was a "dancing" century in Scotland -
and elsewhere - if ever there was one, and that dance served as much for
exercise as diversion among even the Highland soldiery of the period.
It is a curious fact that Highland dancing is not
indigenous to Cape Breton or to Nova Scotia generally nor to Prince
Edward Island. Although one sees much of it in these provinces today, it
has there little history prior to the early years of the present
century. By contrast it seems to have had a longer run in the Glengarry
settlement where living memory and tradition regard hornpipe stepping as
an intrusion. If this is true, it could very neatly be explained by the
fact that Glengarry was heir to military traditions which included
Highland dancing.
One would look to Glengarry also for a tradition of
military piping, but historians have not been interested or
knowledgeable in this and there is no visibly greater interest in piping
in Glengarry than in many other regions of Ontario. The great vogue of
female pipe bands in Nova Scotia underlines the relative weakness of the
tradition there. It is appropriate at this point to mention that the
great strength of pipe bands in Canada lies in Ontario where there are,
at time of writing, three of the best bands in the world. These are
civilian bands. Civilian pipe bands now greatly excel military pipe
bands, and they are constantly pitting themselves against one another in
competition at the many Highland games which have long been
characteristic of the Canadian scene.
The modern piping and dancing competitions began with
the efforts of the Highland Society of London, England, founded around
1780. The Society comprised a large number of Gaels of the military and
other professions who were imbued with a nostalgia for the associations
of their language and who wished to take action to preserve it and its
literature, and, not least, their great inheritance of bagpipe music and
dance. Gaelic clubs and Highland societies which sprang up wherever
Gaels congregated sought affiliation to the the Highland Society.
The first of these, in Canada, was initiated by Bishop Macdonell in
Glengarry in 1818. The institutional meeting took place at St. Raphael's
on November 10 of that year, on which occasion the charter was presented
by Simon McGillivray, one of the vice-presidents of the London parent
body, to William
McGillivray, Angus Shaw, John Macdonell (of Gart),
Henry Mackenzie and the Rev. Alexander Macdonell, forming the original
committee of application. The Society extended its mandate to include
the relief of distressed Gaelic immigrants. Grants in aid of the
production of scholarly works on the Gaelic language, the collection of
Gaelic poetry, and prizes for Gaelic scholars and pipers were
established. After some years of usefulness the Society suffered a
decline on account of the death or removal of its founders and, after a
brief restoration under Macdonell of Gart, the decline continued until
the Society came to an end around 1870.18 Meantime, in 1842, another branch of the Highland Society
was founded in Hamilton, Ontario, on the instigation of Sir Allan MacNab
and Sir Charles Bagot. There was, too, a Celtic Society of Upper Canada
at this period. Gaelic clubs and Caledonian societies are still active
in most Canadian cities, but now exist primarily to bring Gaelic
speakers together for social diversion.
The original Highland Society of London sponsored the
first Highland bagpipe competition in 1782 and extended premiums to
dancing a few years later. The modern Highland Gathering dates from this
period, but did not extend to Canada until the second half of the
nineteenth century. All the Gaelic settlements in Canada now conduct
important annual Highland games, and numerous others, if less important,
are found wherever Scottish sentiment exists. Competition piping and
Highland dancing are now extensively developed from coast to coast, with
a multitude of native Canadian dancers and teachers reinforced by the
continued influx over the years of skilled devotees from Scotland
itself. Like all athletic competitions in general, Highland dance
competitions were originally for males and thus a male character was
placed on competition dance. The first competition dances were the
Highland Reel, the Strathspey Twasome and, a little later, the Gille
Callum. In more recent times, the Gille Callum has been
joined by a Highland Fling and the Seam Triubhas and, since World
War I, girls and women have largely dominated the activity.
Highland games, Highland dancing and pipe bands are
now so characteristic of the Canadian scene that they are for many as
much Canadian as they are Scottish. They are primarily maintained by the
Canadian descendants of Scottish immigrants and their attainments are
salutary, the standards achieved being comparable to the best anywhere
and often better.
Turning, now, to the less obvious manifestations of
Gaelic cultural influence in Canada, we are faced with a dearth of
scholarship. Poetry we have touched upon; what of the related art of
imaginative prose - the novel? Students of Canadian literature have not
been at pains to identify Gaelic influence on Canadian writing, yet one
suspects that writers imbued with an inheritance of Gaelic manners,
taste and expression would be influenced by it, as was Niel Gunn in
Scotland, for instance. The mention of Gunn, a native of the county of
Caithness, where Gaelic, Scots and Norse elements meet, turns one's eyes
to Canada's Farley Mowat whose family came from the same
region of Scotland. Is Farley Mowat in this tradition? He is
recognizably closer to it than he is to English models; but this subject
deserves closer study than anyone has yet been able to give it.
Much the same has to be said of the visual arts.
Scottish painting is not well known in Canada, yet the Gaelic (or
Celtic) influence on Scottish painting is considerable - love of colour,
light and design. People familiar with the work of the
"Scottish Colourists" of the earlier part of the present century
find parallels in the aspirations and tastes of the Canadian Group of
Seven. Are they both manifestations of Gaelic tradition? The Celts are
nothing if not artistic. The great Scottish architectural genius,
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a Gael in the great Celtic tradition of
design, has attracted the interest of Canadians but this is as yet a
very peripheral aspect of Gaelic influence in Canada.
While it is in the arts that one naturally seeks
Celtic influence with greatest expectation, there is more than a
probability that Canada has derived at least one of its national games
from the Gaels, namely, ice hockey. The most popular Scottish Gaelic
game is shinty, played with sticks or clubs and a wooden ball. In some
parts of the Highlands the word shinty was corrupted to "shinnie," and
it is an interesting fact that "shin-nie" was played upon ice in Canada
before the word "hockey" was used of the game. Ice hockey has been so
widely adopted in Canada, however, that apart from the name of its
progenitor, the Gaels have not retained identity with it as, for
instance, the Scots as a whole have with that other great Canadian
winter game, curling.
Curling has been a much loved game in Scotland, at
least since Medieval times, and although it was, and is, particularly
popular in the central Highlands of that country, it was really a game
of the Lowlands as its original technical terms reveal. The earliest
established curling club in Canada was created in Montreal in 1807,
largely supported by the Scottish officers of the garrisons. Soon
thereafter, similar clubs began to form in other towns, as, for example,
Quebec (1821), Kingston (1820), Toronto (1836), Fergus (1834), Galt and
Guelph (1838), and Halifax (c.1838).19 Soon it followed Scots - Gaels and Lowlanders alike -
across the continent, until now it is a game which Canadians have made
peculiarly their own, while paying salutary honour to the game's
origins, with tartans, blue bonnets, bagpipes and conviviality. The game
of frozen winter locks and ponds in the open air has become a game of
indoor arenas and artifical ice and its language, wonderfully poetic and
expressive in Scots, has comparatively recently been replaced by prosaic
English in Canada; this is a loss.
If Highland games and dancing, Gaelic mods, bagpiping,
fiddling, ice shinty and, to some extent, curling, cannot testify to the
strength of Gaelic cultural influence in Canada, one cannot ignore the
many war memorials surmounted by kilted soldiers. Surely these are a
visible reminder to every immigrant that to be Scottish is also, in a
very deep sense, to be Canadian, and especially if the blood is Highland
and dreams are of the Hebrides.
NOTES
1. Cf. J.F. Campbell, Popular Tales of the West
Highlands (Paisley: A. Gardner, 1890-1893), 4 vols.; H. Creighton,
Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (Toronto: Dent, 1932);
Maritime Folk Songs (Toronto: Ryerson, 1962)
2. Charles W. Dunn, Highland Settlers: A Portrait
of the Scottish Gael in Nova Scotia (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1953), p. 58.
3. Ibid., p. 60.
4. Ibid., p. 63.
5. Donald Macleod, Memoir of Norman Macleod
(Toronto: Belford, 1876).
6. Dunn, op. cit.
7. W.A. Ross, History of Zorra and Embro (Embro,
1909).
8. Macleod, p. 26.
9. J.A. Macdonell, Sketches of Glengarry
(Montreal: Foster, Brown, 1893), p. 327.
10. J.L. Campbell, ed., Hebridean Folksongs
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 16.
11. For a fuller discussion of this see George S.
Emmerson, Rantin' Pipe and Tremblin' String: A History of Scottish
Dance Music (Montreal: McGill-Queen's, 1964), pp. 267-285.
12. F. Rhodes, "Dancing in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia,"
in J.F. and T.M. Flett, Traditional Dancing in Scotland (London:
Routledge, 1964), pp.267-285.
13. See George S. Emmerson, A Social History of
Scottish Dance (Montreal: McGill-Queen's, 1972), and Rhodes, loc.
cit.
14. Ibid., p. 157-60.
15. Stan Hamilton's band, essentially comprising Stan
Hamilton (piano), Robert Frew and Robert Brown (accordians), all raised
in Scotland, supported by drummer and bass.
16. Emmerson, Social History pp. 231-39.
17. Rhodes, loc. cit.
18. MacDonell, pp. 326-7.
19. John A. Stevenson, Curling in Ontario:
1846-1946 (Toronto: Ontario Curling Association, 1950); John Kerr,
Curling in Canada and the United States (Toronto: Morton, 1904).