JOHN Purser opens a new series on Scotland’s earliest music to rejuvenate us in the dark of winter and the unknowing time when the future is held in the balance ...

MIDWINTER. It’s a time when time itself is in the balance. A time when we look back as curiously as we look forward. For a brief pivotal spell we too are in the balance, going nowhere, like many of our most beautiful Scots tunes.

They don’t have to go anywhere. They are where they are, you are where you are. The more linear thinkers among us might describe its being like young hunters who have lost the camp – only they haven’t. They are not lost: it is the camp that is lost. Is that lateral thinking, or is it circular thinking?

There is music for this state of being. Its’s a favourite tune of mine that “goes nowhere” and is called Da Day Dawis – the day dawns. It was associated with the winter solstice and the dawn of lengthening days. Da Day Dawis was collected in Shetland some time before 1822 when it was first published in Hibbert’s Description of the Shetland Isles.

“Long before daylight, the fiddlers present themselves at the doors of the houses, playing a tune called the Day-Dawn, the interesting association of which thrills every soul with delight … This tune has long been consecrated to Yule day, and is never played on any other occasion.”

That’s interesting, that apparent taboo on playing it out-of-season. How far back does it go? How far back before 1822 does the tune go? None can say, but my guess is at least late medieval times.

The tune is full of gentle curlings round one note, followed by the octave leap so characteristic of early ballads. It demonstrates well the economical use of musical motifs in the Shetlands and is still in the repertoire of Shetland fiddlers.

Its mysterious unwinding and return, from which it seems it can never escape, never come to a conclusion, are indeed timeless and outstandingly beautiful. I remember asking the Shetland fiddler, Chris Stout, to record it for a radio programme. Here’s what he had to say of it:

“I always think that it’s a very poignant tune that seems to have a – very much a sense of looking forward and looking backward at the same time, neither happy or sad, it’s just got that very special quality about it, that’s why I love it so much. Beautiful tune.”

Have we any idea just how lucky we are to live in a culture which still cherishes such beauty? Sometimes I wonder.

Time and again one is halted by the astonishing variety of our melodic inheritance and grateful that so many of our people have honoured it in the remembrance.

The image of the sun entering Maes Howe at the mid-winter solstice is spectacular. But it is at sunset, not sunrise. Is it a farewell? A homage to Memory?

Or could it be a “good riddance” to the shortest day? Where I live, we face east. Ours is a sunrise house and at this time of year we know who will be waiting for us at the gate at first light: the cows.

New Year’s Day is when we start to feed them unless the weather has been really hard and we have had to start feeding early.

This year, with the recent snow, it was early.

The cattle are our nearest company. Some mornings they arrive with snow on their backs, or the hoodie crow perched on their coarse hair, hoping to find a swollen tick or two, and the blackbird and robin at their feet looking for seeds from the hay.

As we feed them, we talk to them and they know us better than you might imagine. It’s perhaps for that reason that one of my very favourite poems is Robert Burns’s The Auld Farmer’s New-Year Morning Salutation To His Auld Mare Maggie – on giving her the accustomed rip of corn to hansel in the New Year.

There appear to be some very silly and downright ignorant people around who are denigrating Scots. Well, let them read that poem. It is one of the most lovingly composed works in any language – but it is broad, broad Scots from start to finish.

Not to show off; not to assert; just simply because that’s the language in which it was thought – that’s the language of the old farmer; that’s the language his old horse knew.

If this were not a newspaper, generous though it is with space for the arts, I’d be tempted to quote all 18 stanzas.

Here’s just three – you can go to your collected Burns, read the whole poem and get it ready for Burns Night. Please.

“A Guid New-Year I wish thee, Maggie!

Hae, there’s a rip to thy auld baggie:

Though thou’s howe-backit now and knaggie,

I’ve seen the day

Thou could hae gaen like ony staggie

Out-owre the lay.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Thou ance was i’ the foremost rank,

A filly, buirdly, steeve and swank,

And set weel down a shapely shank,

As e’er tread yird;

And could hae flown out-owre a stank,

Like ony bird.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The sma droop-rumpit hunter cattle

Might aiblins waur’t thee for a brattle;

But sax Scotch miles thou try’t their mettle,

And gart them whizzle

Nae whup nor spur, but just a wattle

O’ saugh or hazle.”

EIGHTEEN stanzas for an old mare? It’s the least he could do. They’d worked together for 29 years.

That’s a good age for any horse, and that’s an unrivalled companionship.

How far back can we go in search of Scottish New Year music? At least as long ago as the early 13th-century and Hac In Anni Janua. This is a three-part song from the St Andrews Music Book.

Singing in three parts was the very latest thing in Europe and this particular manuscript is the single most important collection of its kind. Hac In Anni Janua was written to be sung in the New Year as a kind of New Year’s resolution. and it celebrates the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ, eight days after His birth. A good few of us may have sensitive feelings on that matter and I was tempted to leave you to figure out the Latin for yourselves but no, I’m duty bound to ensure the moral message is made clear to all – so here goes and don’t blame me. I didn’t write it.

Any which way, the music romps along in three parts, dancing with fun, which must tell us something about something.

“On this threshold of the year

In this month of January

Let us turn to our work

Assisted by our virtues.

Joys are mutual,

Vice has been silenced

The evil ways of wicked men

are reproved.

Circumcision of the flesh

was not without mystery

even for the son of God -

giving us an apt meaning:

to remove all superfluity

by rooting out vice

on this threshold of the year.”

That was 700 years ago and, as you can see, transcribing this early music was no easy matter. Many religions still practise circumcision but whether you adhere to one of these or not, there remains one central aspect of our Scottish celebrations that is as morally worthy as Hac In Anni Janua.

The New Year is heralded in around the globe, but around the globe it is a Scottish song that brings folk together, singing out-of-tune, not knowing the words, swinging their arms in the less-than-time-honoured places, and generally making it their own.

No doubt a good deal of this international fervour arose out of our somewhat mixed contribution to the British Empire and its lingering influences – but this is one influence of which we may be proud – that is, if we uphold its sentiments. Of course I mean Auld Lang Syne. The extraordinary thing is that something of its – yes, let us call it purity– survives in even the most unexpected of contexts.

The National:

Nobody has sung Auld Lang Syne to its old tune more simply and beautifully than Mairi Campbell – but she sang it thus for, of all things, Sex and the City; and there, as it does for a million people in New York’s Times Square at New Year, or for countless millions more world-wide, Auld Lang Syne, with either of its tunes and however badly remembered or sung, speaks to our humanity.

It is not just the words.

The same tune is used for their own lyrics by the Japanese among others, drawing upon Robert Burns’s ideas of memory, friendship and conviviality; but the tune is always there.

Perhaps the Japanese are drawn to it because it matches their own affection for the pentatonic scale, in which mode our earliest example of the song is essentially set. It comes from the Balcarres lute book of 1690, setting the words ascribed to the Scottish poet, Sir Robert Ayton (1570-1638).

It was my alas-no-longer-with-us colleague Kenneth Elliott who made this transcription, and you will see from Aytoun’s words that Burns was a great reworker of beauties from the years gone by. Auld Lang Syne indeed.