The Scottish Medieval Lute
©Rob MacKillop, 2002
[This essay is an outcome of my researches into the medieval lute within Scotland, for which I was granted study leave by the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and the ancient and contemporary oud practices in Morocco and Turkey made possible by a Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Thanks go to both institutions. Other related outcomes include: three commissions (financed by the SAC and the Hope Scott Trust) of new compositions, one for oud (Edward McGuire ~ The Oud Player of Rosslyn), the others for 12 course lute (John Maxwell Geddes ~ The Rosslyn Oud, and John Purser ~ The Old Composer Remembers); my own composition, ‘The Healing’; and arrangements for medieval lute of some of the music mentioned in this text, first performed at Boarhills in Fife, 1st February, 2002.]
Introduction
In October 1996, I recorded a CD called Graysteil, for Dorian Recordings (DIS-80141). The musicians were William Taylor (clarsach and harp), Paul Rendall (tenor voice), Andy Hunter (traditional ballad singer) and Rob MacKillop (medieval and renaissance lutes). My experience of performing medieval music had been minimal and largely based on intuition, but the recording proved seminal and propitious in its choice of venue: Rosslyn Chapel. Lying some ten miles south of Edinburgh at the village of Roslin, is the ancestral home of the St Clair (Sinclair) family, Rosslyn Castle, which is connected via the interestingly named ‘Minstrals Walkway’ to the famous Rosslyn Chapel. The name of Rosslyn is Gaelic: Ross – a rocky promontory, Lynn – a waterfall. The Chapel is decorated in a profusion of engravings which are on the receiving end of much revelatory academic attention. In this essay I shall concern myself only with the engravings of three lutars (the Scots word for ‘lutenist’), with which I made acquaintance during the aforementioned recording. It was these images which fired my imagination, and led me seven years later on a six-week tour of Morocco and Turkey in search of the roots of the lute in Scotland, and to explore the musical connections between Scotland and the Middle East, echoes of which can still be traced today. The essay is in part academic – the objective gathering a facts and folklore – and also partly subjective and intuitive, in the belief that at some point the facts must leave off and the musician must take over. There are two journeys involved here. One, the physical journey in the present to Morocco and Turkey, where the journey was of significantly less importance and interest than the destination, and Two, the less defined journey back in time in which the destination became less significant than the journey itself.
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