CHANONRY Point is about a mile from Fortrose on the Black Isle. It’s a place that has long held an eerie fascination for fiddler Lauren MacColl who grew up in Fortrose hearing stories about Coinneach Odhar, the Brahan Seer. It was at Chanonry Point that the seer met a horrible end.
According to legend, the seer had been summoned by Lady Seaforth and asked to divine whether her absent husband was safe and well. Coinneach Odhar did rather better – or worse – than that and described in all too great detail what was detaining the Earl of Seaforth in Paris. Lady Seaforth was scandalised but rather than thank the seer for his candour, she sentenced him to death. He was taken to Chanonry Point, put in a tarred and spiked barrel and burned alive.
“I’ve always felt there was an atmosphere about Chanonry Point,” says MacColl, who was commissioned to write a suite of music inspired by the Brahan Seer by the Highland music learning organisation Feis Rois last year. “Growing up nearby it was a place I was quite familiar with, although I visited it quite a few times after I was asked to write the suite to try and get a sense of the seer.”
The prophecies the Brahan Seer made in the 17th century are a huge part of the Highland oral tradition and even in MacColl’s lifetime – she’s in her early thirties – there has been speculation about his prophecies coming true in modern times. When Cal Mac’s MV Isle of Lewis began service in 1995 there were fears that this might fulfil the seer’s foretelling that “The Day will come when the Isle of Lewis will sink beneath the waves.”
“I’d heard about the prophecies since I was quite young and I actually wrote a strathspey about ten years ago called The Prophet as the man himself had long fascinated me,” says MacColl, a Herald Angel winner with the fiddle quartet Rant. “So in that way I was happy, and excited, to accept the commission. On the other hand, though, writing and arranging forty minutes’ worth of music was quite a daunting challenge because I’d never thought of myself as a composer. I’ve written tunes but I wouldn’t have considered that composing because I’d literally write the melodic line and nothing else. I wouldn’t even tell accompanying musicians what to play because they always seemed to just figure that out.”
As the individual pieces of the suite began to emerge MacColl became more at ease with the term composer. Watching contemporaries bring their Celtic Connections New Voices commissions to the stage, she had imagined having to orchestrate her own work to qualify, as it were, but something her late grandfather used to say – “Say yes and worry about how you’re going to do it later” – spurred her on.
“Some of the prophecies, such as the one about the calf being born in the uppermost chamber of Fairburn Tower, suggested rhythms and places associated with the seer suggested their own atmosphere,” she says. “But the biggest challenge in the end was introducing light into what is essentially a very dark tale. I didn’t want musicians having to play, and audiences having to listen to, unremitting doom and gloom.”
Two deadlines – a false one she set herself and the real one when she introduced the music to the other five musicians involved – got her over this hurdle, and when the piece was premiered at Celtic Connections in February it was met with approval all round. It has since been recorded for release on September 1 and will be performed twice more as part of the Blas 2017 celebration of Highland culture.
In writing the suite MacColl added another first. She had set poetry to music before and she works on songs with the group Salt House but she had never written her own lyrics before, or at least lyrics she’s been prepared to share with the public. So the song An Unkindness of Ravens that provides the suite’s final movement could, she says, be the start of something.
The Lauren MacColl Sextet performs The Seer at Seaboard Centre, Tain on Monday, September 4 and at Eden Court, Inverness on Tuesday, September 5. Blas 2017 runs to September 9. Further information at blas-festival.com
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