Puirt-à-beul

Reviews:

‘outstanding […] of the first importance in the study of Scottish music and social history’ (Scottish Gaelic Studies), ‘a major contribution’ (Cothrom), ‘enormous added value’ (The Scotsman), ‘imaginative and thorough’ (Scottish Studies)

'This newest edition of Puirt-à-Beul renews our insight into the musical form and expressive voice of Gaelic Scotland' (Julie Fowlis)

'One wonders what Dr Keith Norman MacDonald would make of this elegant edition of the book that he produced around 1901? Its subject-matter was rare in his own time, and we must not expect so much of someone who did not have the resources and knowledge that we now have. Will Lamb begins with an excellent definition of the genre, giving Puirt their proper place as art at long last. The book contains not only every word and note that was in the original, in a pleasanter format, but the texts are translated into English, and the names of the tunes are given as titles known to instrumentalists. That is only a hint of the treasures that Dr Lamb has culled from books and manuscripts from many centuries and places. MacDonald’s book is long out of print in any case, and the new Puirt-à-Beul should be a matter of great satisfaction to singers and instrumentalists alike.' Morag MacLeod

My research on the nature of Scottish Gaelic performance culture has focused mainly around seanchas or discourse on tradition and the semiotics of words contained in such discourse (Falzett 2007-2010; 2010; 2012).  However, as John Shaw has argued, much can be learned by applying such contextual knowledge from the field to the analysis of verbal art forms (i.e. songs, stories, etc.) themselves: “Ideally, informants’ perceptions may eventually be correlated with analysis of texts—permitted variants and other materials—to form a coherent description” (1992/1993: 40). Therefore, this paper hopes to provide insights regarding the dynamic relationships between language and music in varied performative contexts of Scottish Gaelic cultural expression. This will be done by examining the role of ‘genre reinforcement’ (Shaw 1992/3: 38-40) in two Scottish Gaelic versions of ATU  503 (The Gifts of the Little People): one from Kate Dix of Berneray, Uist and the other from Donald (Danny) Cameron of Malden, Massachusetts, who grew up in Beaver Meadow, Antigonish County on the Nova Scotia mainland. In turn, the association of these two versions to the dance-tune ‘The Bob of Fettercairn’ and a related port-à-beul  version of it, beginning with the phrase “Cuir dhachaidh e,” will form the basis of our examination here.

The second part of this paper looks more abstractly at the symbolic nature of the narrative and examines the language contained within various Scottish Gaelic recitations of it. The Gifts of the Little People is well attested throughout the Gaelic-speaking regions of Scotland, Ireland and Nova Scotia. Lillis Ó Laoire’s (2009) groundbreaking discussions on the semiotic significance of this popular narrative have elucidated our understanding of its relevance to the inner mechanics of Gaelic aesthetic criteria and modes of transmission. Following Ó Laoire’s approach, the narrative’s aesthetic symbolism will be further explored through the lenses of emerging theoretical trends in the study of metaphor and other tropes from various scholarly disciplines, including cognitive linguistics and anthropology. This will incorporate a discussion concerning embodied understandings of abstract thought as demonstrated by the seemingly intangible nature of the aural and its ability to be made sense of through its associations with more concrete forms of sensory-motor experience, including vision, motion, and taste.