Book Review: The Big Music, by Kirsty Gunn

One of my favorite literary truisms is this: you can render words as music, but you can't render music as words. It has a corollary: if you doubt the veracity of the latter clause, by all means give it a try -- the effort confirms the impossibility.

I've tried it, numerous times (e.g. a novel called Blue Oboe). This book tries it and serves as further testimony to the impossibility of rendering music as words. As such, then, it is a failure -- as it has to be. But it fails delightfully, suggestively, and informatively. Its failure is the failure of everyone to live forever. Yet live we do.

The Big Music is the English translation of the Gaelic term (ceòl mòr) for the "classical" solo music of the Great Highland Bagpipe. It is absolutely and completely a thing apart in Western music: although it can loosely be described as a theme with variations, it lacks the propulsion of a "beat." Yes, some variations do come close to allowing you to tap your foot to them, but even those defer to the piper's internal sense of how that rhythm can be manipulated to keep with the theme of the overall piece -- a lament, a salutation, a challenge to fight. In other words, it apotheosizes the musical principle of rubato applied to the telephone game: play it the way your teacher's teacher's teacher's teacher -- and so on back to the far misty mountains -- felt it.

This novel attempts to render in words this kind of music. It takes the organizing principle of this music -- the statement of a theme and its embellishment -- as its own. The reader sees this at the very outset: the table of contents shows it explicitly.

The result is easily summarized. The fact that it includes spoilers is of no consequence, any more than looking at a written piece of music spoils its actual performance.

The theme is the flight of a dying (demented?) old man up a Highland hillside, with his baby grand-daughter in his arms, in a deranged effort to reach a remote hideaway where he can conclude the composition of a piece of Big Music, a "lament to himself." It is obvious that the baby's life is in the balance, but she is rescued and returned to her mother and grandmother by the prompt actions of the baby's step-grandfather. Subsequent variations broaden the scope of the story. First, the family background is pushed out and back to previous generations, so that -- to give just one example -- the demented old man's fraught relationship with his own father is brought into play (the father is the son's bagpipe teacher, but his pedagogical methods include the infliction of corporal punishment; the son leaves "never to return," but return he does -- after making a success of himself in London -- but only at the funeral of the father, in a kind of inverse (perverse?) retelling of the parable of the prodigal. Next is the elaboration of piping culture itself: the father operates a piping school in the remote Highland house where the entire story takes place; it achieves some prominence in the promotion of Big Music. Finally there's the story of the Highlands, particularly how the family at the center of the story manages to hold on through the Clearances.

Of course this easy summary leaves out a whole, whole, whole lot. Which is one reason why, if any of this piques your interest -- particularly if Scotland or bagpiping interest you (a significant portion of the book is given over to the minutiae of piping) -- you should read the book.

I myself was drawn by the thought of the challenge of rendering "Big Music" as a novel. My own conclusion is that, with its broadening-out narrative, it would better be entitled "Nested Parentheses." Further, in the telling, the successive embellishments overwhelm rather than highlight the theme, which sometimes in the telling can barely be heard. Those embellishments themselves contain too much interest and variety to simulate Big Music, which is hypnotic in its repetitiveness.  

The book, then, is both a noble effort and a complete failure, but in the sense that Roland in the Pass of Roncesvalles succeeded even as he failed. Failure is irrelevant when the effort is redeemed by a legacy.

And the legacy of this book is -- should be -- a deeper understanding of many things: bagpiping and its culture, the history of Scotland and the Highlands, and even such very broad subjects as social structure, with its standardized family, gender, and class roles. Having read some commentary on the book (including an article in the Scottish Literary Review), I would advocate something that so far no one has mentioned: that the book should be read as a symbolic fable of Scottish independence: deep roots are established (by way of piping culture), but economic and social forces spin succeeding generations far away -- even as far as New Zealand, where author Gunn is from. Nonetheless, the pull of identity is so strong that even those -- like the baby-snatchng protagonist -- sucked into the British  sphere (as represented by London) return to their highland home to try to figure out a way forward that is manifestly Scottish. After all, doesn't the big music always, always return to the original theme? Some say that this means the "tune" is cyclical and thus never-ending. I say rather that the tune returns to itself and ends where it began, only all the wiser for its experience.

Book Review: The 1619 Project

The temptation with this book is to wade into the controversy it has stirred and try to knock down or reinforce those tangential arguments that have sprung up from its seeds. A salient example is whether or not the Dunsmore Proclamation -- issued by the British governor of Virginia and promising freedom to slaves who would escape their masters and fight as British soldiers -- was or was not a casus belli for Patriots. That is, did the prospect of Black slaves literally shaking off their chains provide the jolt that blasted into war with Britain the American colonists figuratively shaking off theirs?

Much as I'd love to get into this, this cat is going to pass on the catnip. Such niche controversies are irresistible to historians, the public intellectuals who feed off of them, and so on waaay down the idea chain to the bottom-feeding politicians who have cult minds to feed. But, no matter their relative importance, they tend to take on lives of their own and in doing so not only overshadow, but -- worse -- substitute for the thing itself: the far-ranging "project" that this book represents. 

It feels very much like the controversy around the Dunsmore Proclamation -- which appears right away in the book, in its first essay ("Democracy" by Nikole Hannah-Jones) -- got people sidetracked to the point that they didn't read the whole book. It became the gravity-sucking black hole for the 1619 project as a whole, such that judgment rendered on Dunsmore became judgment rendered on 1619.

This produces a toxic effect well known in the book review world, especially when the book impinges on the political sphere: the loudest judges of a book are most often those who haven't read the book.

A book must be judged as a whole. If a book is on trial, the only jury of peers possible is comprised of those who have read the entire thing. I understand that this is something of a technical point, but it is a cardinal one. It is why public libraries, when considering a challenge to a book that it owns, insist that the challenger check off the box on the challenge form that says "I read the whole book." If that box is not checked, the challenge goes nowhere, and rightfully so.

(The worst offenders against this rule are probably politicians. In my own state of Tennessee they've recently been doing it a lot. Pulling isolated passages out of a book to shock the unwary public is a fool's game that's been getting so much play in TN that the playing field is now a sea of mud. Good for slinging maybe; not so much for clear thinking.)

In the case of The 1619 Project, all of the controversial hoopla obscures the solid weight of the series of essays that comprise it, each one given a chapter and focusing on subjects such as capitalism, citizenship, self-defense, punishment, inheritance, music, healthcare, and progress. The content of the essays generally mixes history with current, statistics-driven economics, criminal justice, and sociology. Taken together, the essays present a family portrait of American Exceptionalism: You Can't Say This Shit About Anybody Else in the Whole Wide World. If I were asked what makes the USA exceptional, I would answer, "Read this book and find out."

So many Americans don't want to look at that entire family portrait. They want to pull the Dunsmore Proclamation out and fuss about it. In so doing they are like Holocaust Deniers who focus on a mere sliver of fact and refuse to consider the entire mountain of evidence.

There is much more to be said about this important book and about how it should prompt a serious discussion of race-based reparations, but how -- for political reasons -- it probably won't. It all makes me lament that I'm not a secondary school American history teacher. I would focus on the core ideals that make for American citizenship. In doing so I would explore how those ideals have been realized -- or not. I would emphasize not the Civil War, but Reconstruction, and show how this was an opportunity to re-start the American Project, how it succeeded up to a point, only ultimately to fail, abandoned by white America. And then again how the Civil Rights movement returned the civic struggle to where it had been cut off, succeeded up to a point, but, oh no, is it failing again? Did it ever really have a chance to get to the heart of these civic matters, which is the lives of people impacted by the economic and cultural forces of capitalism, punishment, inheritance, and healthcare? So where are we, students -- today -- with American Exceptionalism?

It is those questions -- the questions of now -- that The 1619 Project forces us to consider. With its depth and breadth, its comprehensiveness meets the challenge of the time. If only its comprehensiveness will be allowed to be shown. This is very much a live question in "the land of the free," where political forces actively combine to suppress the circulation of the book's ideas, primarily in the context of secondary education, but -- even -- also in publicly-funded higher education.

One possible reason for the white-hate of hysterical blindness is that the book ends -- in a chapter entitled "Justice" -- with a call for reparations. I would guess that the percentage of white Americans supporting reparations today is about the same as the percentage of white Americans who favored emancipation and racial equality in the 1830's: in other words, the single digits. No matter. That will change. More and more white Americans will ground their understanding of American Exceptionalism on the realization that American-style racism is not generic "racism" but a particular disease with particular manifestations that must be fought with specific remedies, that American-style capitalism requires (has always required) governmental intervention if it is to be made humane, and that the "blue line flag" is an out-and-out representation of American police-state, race-war fascism.

But first The 1619 Project's ideas must get out there. And it is to stifle and slander its ideas that have become top priorities of conservative America, which more and more often avowedly and explicitly embraces the anti-democracy that resides at its conservative heart. 

American democracy is still a Future Project. The 1619 Project  will help get us there. It is only a start, particularly concerning reparations -- an exceedingly complex and challenging political issue that, after all, only occupies the final chapter of the book. I only wish I could live long enough to see the Solomonic leader emerge who can solve that issue successfully, but I doubt I can hold on until 2119.

Book Review: Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia

This coffee table artifact seems to have been engineered more as a flotation device for daydreamers than as a book for readers. It is illustrated with a beautiful, effective mix of landscapes painted and photographed, along with reproductions of historic print media (e.g. popular press lithographs, ballad sheets). However, more noticeable to the actual, would-be reader is that, heavily illustrated though the book is, it is even more heavily sidebarred -- to the point that the sidebars occupy or dominate page-spreads, sometimes for pages at a time, leaving the narrative to trickle through, or worse, be dammed. With as many resulting reservoirs of information as there are in this book, you'd think TVA was behind it rather than the UNC Press.

It would be interesting to see how the main narrative -- or, to use the book's language, the "carrying stream" of meaning for the book -- would read if it were read straight through, without the flood control program, as a Book I, leaving the rest to be collected as Book II (The Sidebars).

Much of Book II is taken up with transcriptions of interviews gathered by authors Ritchie (hers is the Caledonian voice of NPR's Thistle and Shamrock) and Orr (college president and organizer of an annual "gathering" of Appalachian musicians in Swannanoa, NC). These interviews deserve better than to be flotsam for interpretation, such as is the result of this book's layout. These are the voices of the thing itself --   Jeannie Ritchie, for example, fount of Cumberland folksong, comes across as entirely and refreshingly open and curious as she is herself accomplished and creative; or Rhiannon Giddens and Dom Flemons, who have reclaimed an African-American banjo tradition. The thing itself shows itself to be as astoundingly inventive and versatile as Doc Watson -- whose musicianship encompassed multitudes -- as it is faithful to a generational inheritance, like seventh generation storyteller Sheila Kay Adams from Sodom Laurel, NC. It takes what it can from what it can get and then gives it back; it keeps, but it also transforms.

It isn't too much of a stretch to say that one's ears perk up for these voices, which speak out of their own lived experiences in music (mostly). And what an array of participants: not only Appalachian farm family scions (as it were) like Ritchie and Adams, but also outsiders both Southern (fiddlencyclopedist Alan Jabbour, a classically trained violinist of Syrian ancestry from Jacksonville, FL) and Not (any of the Seegers). And then there are the Old Country counterparts, some of whom were fired with interest in their own regional musical traditions after hearing it first in its Appalachian echo.

For the most part these voices don't invoke labels. Everyone is folk; everyone is part of the carrying stream. The labels are the job of Book I (The Narrative), which gives an interpretation of the conveyance of music from the Britannic Isles, disguised as "Scotland and Ulster," to North America, disguised as "Appalachia." Along the way others were involved, primarily the Irish, Welsh, English, Germans, native Americans, African-Americans (never the French except back when they were known as troubadours, and that was actually before France, so it's okay), but only in a tangential way that did not sully the bloodline of the actual carrying stream, whose headwaters lie somewhere in Aberdeenshire and flow to Alpharetta, GA (among others) by way of Glasgow, Ulster, Philadelphia, and Sodom Laurel.

But wait a minute. Alpharetta is not in the "north Georgia mountains" as p. 212 would have you believe. Alpharetta is an Atlanta suburb in the radial web that encompasses Marietta. Fiddlin' John Carson country. There's hills enough, and once upon a time you could've been a hillbilly there, but it's not the mountains.

The Scots-Irish did go down there, too, of course. They didn't all wind up in the mountain fastnesses digging ginseng. Some of them even disappeared into urbanity, establishing churches and colleges, but for the most part theirs was a rural, farm life. And in general, back in "settlement" times, what farmers wanted down in Georgia was land, some of it Indian land. If only there was some way to get it. Turns out there was: just clear out the Indians. Just do some Highland Clearances, but over in America, with the Scots-Irish as the lairds and the Indians as the crofters. But who's going to get it done? Why, ol' Scots-Irish Andy Jackson, who turns up in the book with all of one mention as "the seventh president."

But why speak of such depressing times when we have such enlivening music to consider? Well, for one thing there was a documented surge of land-hungry settlers across the frontier between 17oh say60 and 18make it25 who refused to settle for less than the clearing out the native Americans, and these settlers were Scots-Irish, in considerable part.

Which this book admits in a sotto voce sort of way on p. 217: The Scots-Irish, "themselves displaced and migratory over generations … in turn encroached into native lands in the southern Appalachians. They also gained sustenance skills from the Cherokee, circle dance moves and other steps to blend with their own musical traditions, and sometimes life partners. Whether they felt empathy as the Cherokee were deported from their ancestral homelands, we can only imagine." 

We can only imagine?????? Isn't that what, ahem, history is for? The interpretive job of saying not only did the so-called Scots-Irish not care what happened to the Cherokee, they actively militated for the eviction of the native population? Do we not want to follow the Scots-Irish across the Lower South to Texas, feeding their land hunger with African slaves? Apparently not. We want to keep them safely in the mountains (now including Alpharetta), where p. 223 says slaveholding "was much less common than in the eastern coastal areas of the South" -- in other words, no big deal.

Moreover, p. 223 goes on to say, "the Appalachians provided a pathway in the slave's escape to freedom."  Mirabile dictu! The mountains have agency!  No human intervention necessary!

No way you can pin anything as nefarious as race-based chattel slavery on those wily Scots-Irish. They even acquire further innocence-by-association because their kissin' confreres the Highland Scots married into leading Cherokee families often enough to be dignified in these pages as "Scoto-Cherokee" chiefs.

You could write a song. If you do, please don't say that Daniel Boone was a "Scots-Irish adventurer" as this book does on p. 158. In fact Boone came from a family of Quakers from Southwest England (Devon).

I'm starting to think this book has some kind of Ulsterior motive. But what's the membership of this club? Are the non-Ulster Scots in or out? Robert Burns is in it for sure, but didn't his ilk wind up in the Tidewater or the Low Country? As in, not the Appalachians? Not to mention that by Burns's time -- and honorary member Walter Scott's for sure -- the Ulster Scots had already named Goose Pimple Junction in the Wild West of the Holston Territory and were siring dulcimers with German spouses, or they had moved on and were re-enacting jousting scenes from Ivanhoe on their Mississippi plantation grounds while someone played The Last Rose of Summer on the parlor piano.

Which instrument, by the way, seems not to deserve mention in a book that gives pride of place to A.P. Carter of the Carter Family, who was as much a miner as any of coal-focused SWVA neighbors except that his lode was out-of-copyright piano songbooks. Ah, but the presence of songbooks would require literacy on somebody's part, and we know no one among that bardic folk was ever musically literate, right? Except for shape note hymnals, printed music in this book is never the engine of folk music transmission, which must seemingly always be oral or aural (think radio). Rather, insofar as printed music has a connection to folk culture, it must always be a spinoff, such as the publications that accompanied the songcatchers' activities so well-documented by this book.

Seemingly these collections never entered general circulation until the Red-wing Folk Revolution that produced the likes of Pete Seeger, an internationalist who refused to buckle under to the racism shared by those Appalachian musical traditionalists whose cause was, at bottom, the Anglo-Saxon race. Mutatis mutandis (Latin for "hey presto"), now that tradition wants to be labeled Scots-Irish.

Yet this label -- even when limited to the narrower set of people represented by those families responsible for preserving ballads and stories -- obscures an ethnically-more-complicated reality. For example, the book gives plenty of attention to the accomplishments of song-preserving heroine Jane Hicks Gentry of Hot Springs, NC, but never says that she and her kin the Hickses were both Welsh and English. Scots-Irishness is the default. In a region so beset by stereotype, it is important to know the ingredients in the hodgepodge. Otherwise we get the kind of sloppiness that assumes Daniel Boone to be Scots-Irish because he was a "adventurer" in "the Appalachians."  

Speaking of dulcimers, though, the book gives them a cultural significance and a breadth of distribution that they might not in fact have had. Crafting the instrument seems to have been a family-based cottage industry in a few scattered areas -- Galax, VA, or Viper, KY, where Jeannie Ritchie's family lived, her father being one of the widely-scattered craftsmen who earned a few dollars extra selling dulcimers with his produce. But instrument "censuses" of the region show a wide disparity between the ownership of fiddles -- the real musical powerhouse of the region -- compared with dulcimers, rare by comparison. It could both be true that, growing up, Ritchie saw one in everybody's house in her neighborhood and that the instruments were a relative rarity in the region as a whole.

In what is probably an inverse proportion to patterns of popular ownership, the lap dulcimer gets ample discussion, the autoharp gets some, but the harmonica -- in terms of mass distribution one of the most popular instruments ever -- only gets a couple of passing mentions. One of these is in connection with the Bristol Sessions of 1927, the so-called "Big Bang" of country music, at which "harmonica soloists" recorded, but the book is silent on the subject of the music performed. This is a missed opportunity, because it turns out there was a real vogue for harmonica music in the region, due to its unequaled ability to mime animal sounds -- baying dogs, cackling hens, and braying mules -- and its capacity in the right hands (er, mouths) for replacing the fiddle as a duet instrument with the banjo (the fiddle-banjo duo is appropriately characterized in the book as the mainstay of popular music in the region in the pre-radio years). One such banjo-harmonica duo was George Pegram and Red Parham, regulars on the festival stage of Asheville, NC, traditional music impresario Bascom Lamar Lunsford, one of the book's musical heroes.

So much is just plain smoky in this book, just like the Scots-Irish being "embraced by the surrounding mountains" (p. 173) after being whisked down the Wagon Road into their whisky haven. It is all a matter of projection, pointing in the direction of the southern mountains, today's no-less-misty "Appalachia." What about those Scots-Irish who stayed up north in Pennsylvania? Do they not matter anymore because their fiddle hornpipes didn't show up to audition for Country Farm Time? Did they not contribute -- negatively speaking -- one of the formative occasions in the young American republic, the whisky rebellion? Weren't they the ones behind the lyrics "ain't paid no whisky tax since 1792"?

Ah, yes, Copper Kettle, that "old song" (p. 172) and by implication that Scots-Irish one. In fact, Copper Kettle is exactly as old as I am (68), having been composed in 1953 by a Texan whose French last name carries an Anglicized spelling: in other words, hardly old by people standards and a mere stripling by song ones; meanwhile as bastardized in terms of cultural parentage as anything in north America.

They'll catch you by the smoke. Not that anybody cares. After all, it's the music that really counts, and there's enough poetry and musical exaltation in this book to send you soaring into the empyrean while all around is the postmodern swidden of mountaintop removal and drive-through culture, compliments of the local power structure that tolerates it. Dare we call it Scots-Irish? Not me. I take my cue from über-Appalachian Dolly Parton whose foreword (advertised on the cover!) lays out a Parton line that is explicitly English, except for the ones who "may have gone to Scotland." As it happens, there is a perfectly good word available: British. 

In the end, the book assures us that whatever climate catastrophe the future holds for our descendants, there'll be some good songs to be sung as long as they can score at least 19% Scots-Irish on the initial Ancestry mitochondrial DNA test, only to turn up 95% British Isles on subsequent genetic fine-tunings. Regardless, just be sure to call them "Celtic." It is today's "hillbilly," a marketing term with as much credibility as Cocoa Puffs have nutrition. What the hell, it sells!

It's too bad that the many inspirational stories in this book -- and as I mentioned earlier, there is a multitude -- should have to be floated with ballast that uses a glittery "we are the world" flag to wrap an irreducible nugget of ethnic essentialism that is intellectually indistinguishable from racism. It's almost as if UNC Press doesn't have access to historians or anthropologists. Maybe UNC Press is right. What do scholars know about selling books?

The Power of Music, 1872 chromolithograph by Philadelphia lithographer James Fuller Queen, p. 147. Placement in the book implies an 18th-c. Scots-Irish backcountry parlor. The fiddler is African-American.

 

My Ukrainian Lents

 It just occurred to me -- on this last Mardi Gras eve -- that all my Lents are Ukrainian.

At least, they have been for almost as long as I can remember. It seems odd in a way: I have no family connections to Ukraine; I've met maybe one Ukrainian in my entire life; I know very little about Ukrainian culture. So why Ukrainian Lents?

It all has to do with dyeing Easter eggs. Here is the background: My father -- an atheist as only a lapsed-Irish-Creole-Catholic can be -- was also ironically enough an enthusiastic Easter egg artist from the moment that he had a family with whom to create Easter egg art. For a while he experimented with covering eggs with colorful tissue paper or string, but he finally (by my teen years) he hit upon the technique that would dominate the rest of his life, a "wax resist" technique that produces colorful, intricate Easter eggs known as pysanky.

Pysanky as we learned about them were Ukrainian. And the time to make them is Lent. If you wait until Easter, you're too late. The technique requires inscribing designs in melted wax (using a stylus) and preserving those designs in varying colors by sequential washes of dye, until finally the wax is melted off and the colorful design is revealed. The process is painstaking and time-consuming. While it's possible to complete a design in the course of an evening, it's better to stretch the process out over a few days. There are lots of places online where you can learn more and order supplies, which are pretty basic. The stylus is the only really specialized tool; the most basic kind -- a little copper cone tied with twine on the end of a stick about the size of a pencil -- has an archaic, bronze-age vibe. 

One way to think about it: there's no need to give up anything for Lent when you take up something this difficult. It also carries baggage of a sort that contributes to the weight of the season.

The baggage is a Ukrainian folk story that says everyone should do at least one pysanka a year in order to prevent the serpent that encircles the world from squeezing it tighter. I have done my at-least-one pysanka a year for quite some time now. I'm not the artist my father was; nonetheless I find quite enjoyable the lengthy process of conjuring a design, executing it, and reveling in the surprises of the "reveal." Also, doing pysanky enforces patience and encourages a deep, focused meditation on the vast themes of Easter unlike any other activity I know. I never make an egg without hoping that in some small way I'm loosening the serpent.

My Ukrainian Lent feels especially real this year.