The 17th-century Scots artist whose music fell on 'a deafen’d ear'

NOWADAYS men have their “man caves” – or their “men sheds”. If you are wealthy enough, your cave can be a castle. If you are a poet, your castle should be lost among trees, hanging over a river gorge and conducive to introspection. If that’s what you are in need of, I can offer it to you vicariously in the form of Hawthornden Castle, and you don’t even have to wax poetic as it has all been done for you by William Drummond of Hawthornden.

On November 14 I wrote about Geraldine Mucha and mentioned her settings of Drummond. The sonnets she chose to set were not about music. Drummond, however, was also a musician – as we shall see, a lutenist; and he too liked his place of solace and inner peace.

Hawthornden Castle is called a House these days, but with its pepper-pot turrets and perched on the edge of a cliff below which flows the River North Esk, I think it can very reasonably claim to be a castle. If we were to sneak inside one evening in the early 17th century, what might we hear filtering down the narrow stairs from the owner, William Drummond’s study? You’d hear him singing, or maybe talking to his lute. We don’t have a tune, but we can easily imagine one as we have loads of lute tunes from back in those days.

That fine Scottish lutenist, Rob MacKillop, has this to say: “The two main things to keep in mind about the lute repertoire – one is that there are over five hundred tunes, mainly Scottish and that form really the bedrock to a lot of traditional music we hear later.

“The other thing is that they appeared at a time that could hardly be more revolutionary. We’d lost the court – it’d gone south and a hundred years later we lose the parliament; and in between those two tremendous significant dates, we have this outpouring, this flowering of amazing music which we find in these manuscripts … ”

Early evidence of the distinctiveness of Scottish music can be found in the lute repertoire. The Rowallan Lute Book of c.1620 offers several examples. A leading Scottish music historian, James Ross, said of one of them: “It’s typically Scottish. It doesn’t go anywhere.” That remark was not intended negatively. On the contrary: the anonymous tune is out there in its own space and time with its own set of co-ordinates.

It’s not alone in these characteristics, having a number of counterparts in the early Scottish lute repertoire. “They have the gift of saying much with very little” – as the fine American lutenist Ronn MacFarlane has written. And they are not like anything else.

In 1620, the same year as the Rowallan Lute Book was written down, music credited to “Jacopo Re Di Scozia” by the Italian poet Tassoni is described as, “una nuova musica lamentevole, e mesta, differente da tutte l’altre – a new kind of music, plaintive and melancholy, different from all others”. That’s how Tassoni concludes his chapter on ancient and modern music. Plaintive and melancholy. Perfect for Drummond and perfect for so many of our tunes. Here goes:

“Sound hoarse sad Lute, true Witnesse of my Woe,
And strive no more to ease selfe-chosen Paine
With Soule-enchanting Sounds, your Accents straine
Unto these Teares uncessantly which flow.
Shrill Treeble weepe, and you dull Basses show
Your Masters Sorrow in a deadly Vaine,
Let never joyfull Hand upon you goe,
Nor Consort keepe but when you doe complaine.
Flie Phoebus Rayes, nay, hate the irkesome Light,
Woods solitarie Shades for thee are best,
Or the blacke Horrours of the blackest Night,
When all the World (save Thou and I) doth rest:
Then sound sad Lute, and beare a mourning Part,
Thou Hell may’st moove, though not a Womans Heart.”

Now I am not going to be drawn into the matter of whether women’s hearts cannot be moved. Just be miserable along with Drummond and you’ll do fine. But how can you make a lute sound hoarse? I refuse to believe it can be done. Poor young Drummond pining for love and not even his lute will reproduce the agony of his heart.

Drummond was a romantic melancholic retiring poet. I have no doubt he will have had recourse to the tunes I Long for the Wedding and I Long for Thy Virginite – though such thoughts must also have been more than tinged with sorrow, for his fiancée, Euphemia Cunningham of Barns, died shortly before they were to be married around 1615. This is how he described her:

“O sacred blush, impurpling cheeks’ pure skies
With crimson wings which spread thee like the morn!
O bashful look, sent from those shining eyes,
Which, though cast down on earth, couldst heaven adorn!
O tongue, in which most luscious nectar lies,
That can at once both bless and make forlorn!
Dear coral lip, which beauty beautifies,
That trembling stood ere that her words were born;
And you her words! Words! No, but golden chains!”

Golden chains? Was she holding out on him? For Drummond they were chains that were to lead beyond the grave. The inescapability of loss. Here, once more, his lute was the true witness to his woe.

“My lute, be as thou wast when thou didst grow
With thy green mother in some shady grove,
When immelodious winds but made thee move,
And birds on thee their ramage did bestow.
Sith that dear voice which did thy sounds approve,
Which us’d in such harmonious strains to flow,
Is reft from earth to tune those spheres above,
What art thou but a harbinger of woe?
Thy pleasing notes be pleasing notes no more,
But orphan wailings to the fainting ear,
Each stop a sigh, each sound draws forth a tear:
Be therefore silent as in woods before,
Or if that any hand to touch thee deign,
Like widow’d turtle, still her loss complain.”

“It’s an odd thing in Scottish music that most of the music is in the major key, which is usually what your school music teacher would describe as a happy interval, but the Scots have this incredible talent for turning it into a sad miserable interval and there is a melancholy which I suppose is in a lot of lute music – the Elizabethans certainly had made a lot of hooha about the melancholy in their music and it’s true. But the Scots had a particular quality of melancholy which certainly Drummond picked up on and you hear it a lot in this Wemyss manuscript – wonderful, wonderful music.”

That’s Rob MacKillop again, talking about another of the lute manuscripts. Drummond’s melancholy, however, did not prevent him from having a mistress (by whom he had three children) and, later, a wife, by whom he had a further nine, so his views of the immovability of a woman’s heart don’t bear too much scrutiny.

Don’t imagine all lute music was melancholy. There was Aderneis Lilt which is a bit nutty; and then there’s The Gypsie’s Lilt which repeats the weirdest of chords again and again, casting “the glamour” over us as the gypsies did over Lady Cassilis with such success that she ran away with them; and then there is Wo Betyd Thy Wearie Bodie. In my old age, I take that one very personally. It goes round and round and round and round – but somehow it doesn’t weary. I wish I could say the same of myself. However, there’s another one called The Canaries and it sings so brightly and sweetly you’d really have to be very, very miserable for it not to cheer you up.

Beyond the immediacies of this life there lies death.

Is there music in Heaven? Of course there is. Just across the river gorge and a little up-river from Drummond Castle are Roslin Castle and the 15th-century Rosslyn Chapel. Drummond will have known them well, not least the angel musicians carved at the tops of two of the finest pillars in that most extraordinary of structures. Angels are supposed to play harps, but there is no harp shown in Rosslyn: the nearest is the lute.

The lute and the harp often shared repertoires.

In this final sonnet I have chosen, the lute becomes a model for the whole of creation: but what really makes this poem so moving is that Drummond senses the “deafened ear” of Mankind, failing to honour the beauty of the whole, the music of nature, the music of the spheres.

“God, binding with hid tendons this great All,
Did make a lute which had all parts it given;
This lute’s round belly was the azur’d heaven,
The rose those lights which he did there instal;
The basses were the earth and ocean;
The treble shrill the air; the other strings
The unlike bodies were of mixed things:
And then his hand to break sweet notes began.
Those lofty concords did so far rebound,
That floods, rocks, meadows, forests, did them hear,
Birds, fishes, beasts, danc’d to their silver sound;
Only to them man had a deafen’d ear:
Now him to rouse from sleep so deep and long,
God waken’d hath the echo of this song.”

“God waken’d hath the echo of this song”. But it is up to us to awaken that echo, and if any one of our poets has managed it, then William Drummond of Hawthornden has. Is his melancholy justified or is it merely a mannerism of the times? If it is mannered, it is beautifully mannered, and also very moving. But how on earth would a man of such sensibilities have survived looking out on the state of the world today?

If you want to get an idea of the music Drummond was very probably playing, there are several wonderful recordings of Scottish lute music. Here are three of them:

- Flowers of the Forest – Rob MacKillop, Greentrax, CDTRAX 155

- The Scottish Lute – Ronn MacFarlane, Dorian DOR 90129

- Lute Music from Scotland and France – Jakob Lindberg, BIS CD-201