OVER the last few weeks we have seen how both amateur and professional musicians played alongside each other in The Edinburgh Musical Society and elsewhere. But for the professionals, however valued they may have been, their status was nothing to compare to the cult of the virtuoso performer or the briefly iconic pop group of today.

They relied on aristocratic patronage for the most part. The only real exceptions to this were the Italian castrati singers who could command large fees and had a considerable following, but they, too, relied on patronage and made a proportion of their living from teaching.

Thus Tenducci taught singing to Thomas Erskine Earl of Kellie’s sister-in-law, Christian Erskine, nee Fullerton. We know this from her recently discovered manuscript of arias, complete with the extravagant embellishments that Tenducci must have taught her. One day I will return to this manuscript because it tells us a lot about musical life in Scotland in the later 18th century. But for now, it’s Gow.

Forget Munro, McLean, Foulis, Kellie, they are still, alas, largely only known to aficionados. But nearly everyone with any interest in music in Scotland has heard of Niel Gow. Gow lived at a time when social status was being increasingly questioned. Notions of equality and liberty and fraternity were to the fore and a skilled musician such as Gow could hold his head up high in any company. But, even so, the status of the professional musician was not that high.

For a Haydn, a Mozart or a Beethoven, living by music was both financially and socially hazardous and they were working in one of the wealthiest environments in the world. Haydn was in servitude for most of his working life. Mozart struck out for independence and paid a terrible price. Beethoven was really the first of the great composers to break free and he did so through amazing force of personality coinciding with a new zeitgeist or spirit of the age fostered by the Napoleonic revolution.

But that was at the start of the 19th century and for an 18th-century man like Gow to hold his own among the aristocracy on whom he depended took, as Burns no doubt knew also, a good deal of moral courage. Here he describes his meeting with Gow: “Breakfast with Dr Stewart – Niel Gow plays – a short, stout-built, honest Highland figure, with his greyish hair shed on his honest social brow – an interesting face, marking strong sense, kind open-heartedness, mixed with unmistrusting simplicity.”

On one occasion when the ladies would not stop dancing although supper had been announced, Gow, who often had to play for over 12 hours at a stretch, cried out in exasperation: “Gang down to your suppers, ye daft limmers, and dinna haud’ me reelin’ here, as if hunger and drouth were unkent in the land – a body can get naething dune for you.”

Niel Gow’s Strathspey Miss Stewart of Grantully is the sort of music he was best at and that was in such demand from the young ladies. It uses only the notes of the bagpipe scale, has as a structural feature the Scottish love of the double tonic, and with its Scotch snaps and dotted strathspey rhythms for which Scots fiddlers have developed their own bowing techniques, it can be said to represent the quintessence of Scottish dance melodies.

Dance was at last coming into its own. The Kirk had so frowned upon it that even the instrument of dance, the fiddle, was denounced from pulpits. Harps were played in heaven, fiddles and bagpipes in hell: by such means do people who imagine themselves superior in morals, taste or culture attempt to do down the creative impulses of those with whom they cannot share, or whose music they do not understand.

But the violin was triumphant on the dance floors of the big houses and the workers’ cottages and the public assembly rooms, and the musicians migrated without difficulty from one to the other, playing as readily at a penny wedding as a society ball, often with an added bass line on the cello. David Allan painted Niel and his brother Donald playing for a Highland wedding, kilts and tartan trews and much else on display.

Elizabeth Grant left us with a delightful account of the impression that music and nature could make on a young lady’s mind, written as though they were almost interchangeable.

The National: Sir Henry Raeburn’s portrait of GowSir Henry Raeburn’s portrait of Gow

IT is a perfect expression of the genuine attractions of the Scottish aesthetic of the time: “On this journey I first remember old Niel Gow being sent for to play for us at the inn at Inver – not Dunkeld – that little village we passed through, and went on to the ferry at Inver, which we crossed the following morning in a large boat.

“It was a beautiful ferry, the stream full and deep and dark, the banks overhung by fine timber trees, a glimpse of a newly-planted conical hill up the stream, only thick wooding the other way. I don’t know whether this did not make more impression upon me than Niel Gow’s delightful violin, though it had so overexcited me the night before that my father had had to take me a little walk by the river-side in the moonlight before I was rational enough to be left to sleep.”

There was often a topicality to the titles of the dance tunes that were composed profusely at this time. Gow’s strathspey Highland Whisky, his slow air Farewell To Whisky, and the strathspey Whisky Welcome Back Again were composed when in 1799 whisky distilling was forbidden on account of a failure in the barley crop. But Gow’s musicianship had no need of topicality to take effect.

“THERE is perhaps no species whatever of music executed on the violin, in which the characteristic expression depends more on the power of the bow, particularly in what is called the upward or returning stroke, than the Highland reel.

“Here accordingly was Gow’s forte. His bow-hand, as a suitable instrument of his genius, was uncommonly powerful; and when the note produced by the up-bow was often feeble and indistinct in other hands, it was struck in his playing with a strength and certainty, which never failed to surprise and delight the skilful hearer. As an example may be mentioned his manner of striking the tenor C in Athol House.

To this extraordinary power of the bow, in the hand of great original genius, must be ascribed the singular felicity of expression which he gave to all his music, and the native Highland gout of certain tunes, such as Tullochgorum, in which his taste and style of bowing could never be exactly reached by any other performer.”

That was how The Scots Magazine recalled Gow in its obituary. Tullochgorum had been a favourite with Robert Fergusson too:-

Fidlers, your pins in temper fix,
And roset weel your fiddle-sticks,
And banish vile Italian tricks
From out your quorum,
Nor fortes wi’ pianos mix,
Gie’s Tulloch Gorum.

A fiddle said to have been Niel Gow’s is kept at Blair Castle. Among innumerable recordings of Gow’s music, Pete Clark recorded a splendid CD of Gow’s works on the Blair Castle fiddle on Even Now, Smiddymade SMD615.

This is what he writes: “The fiddle at Blair Castle bears no inscription other than the name of “Neil Gow” (mis-spelled – Niel always spelled his name “i” before “e”) and the date 1787 ... It is a oughly made Scottish instrument ... Yet in the ballroom at Blair Castle, it sang as sweetly as anyone could have wished ... ”

The National: Niel Gow's cottage in InverNiel Gow's cottage in Inver

WILLIAM Honeyman writes: “Fiddles are like wives; you think your own unequalled but, after looking well about, you find out that there are others.” On this observation, I decline to comment.

Gow was very much a family man and all his surviving sons were musical. We get a glimpse of his tenderness when Andrew was ill: “If the spring were a little advanced and warmer, I would have Andrew come down by sea, and I will come to Edinburgh or Dundee to conduct him home. We will have milk which he can get warm from the cow, or fresh butter, or whey, or chickens. He shall not want for anything.”

Andrew died before his father, and so too did William, whose reel Mrs Dundas of Arniston, is still popular. But the deepest expression of family feeling from Gow reveals another side to his musicianship: “He excels most in the strathspeys, which are jigs played with a peculiar life and spirit, but he executes the laments or funeral music with a great deal of pathos.”

Niel Gow’s Lament for the Death of his Second Wife shows that he had depth of feeling as a composer as well as a performer. In the Fifth Book, which his son published, was printed underneath the lament: “They lived together upwards of 30 years, she died two years before him. She had no Issue.”

It is one of the loveliest tunes ever written. It makes use of the rich tone of the violin’s lowest string, which suited Gow’s style, especially as he held the violin resting as much on his chest as on his left shoulder.

The tune’s second half is unusual. Normally second strains are played twice. But Gow writes his out three times, each time with a slightly different way of ending it, the last one overflowing sorrowfully into the repeat of part of the first half as though reluctant to relinquish her memory.

It is full of tenderness, and grace, and at the very end a beautifully touching little C natural grace-note, a flattened 7th, which fiddle players all too often ignore. Old Bach, blind and dictating his very last composition to his son-in-law, did much the same thing. At the very end of his equally beautiful and dignified farewell to life, in this case his own, he introduces a flattened 6th. In each case the music reveals something very personal with the tiniest of touches.

Niel Gow’s epitaph is as delightfully homely as he seems to have been himself. It reads:

Gow and time are even now,
Gow beat time, now time’s
beat Gow.

It would be a mistake to think of Gow as a virtuoso fiddler. The music he played and composed required little in the way of shifting position for the left hand, and he was not a good sight-reader, though he could pick things up by ear reasonably quickly. He also played in a fairly limited number of keys, though some, like William Marshall and Jamie Duncan were venturing further afield.

Here a fiddling tailor complains: “I’ve keepit dacent company a’ my days and I’m nae gaun to change my ways noo. At this moment Jamie Duncan’s playing ‘Mony Musk’ in four flats, and I say that the man that wad do that is fit for ony kin’ o’ rascality.” There is plenty more to say about Gow, but to bring us to the end of the year and this series of essays, I am going to tell you about Mozart and the Scots. There’s more to that than you might imagine.