Pipes & Drums Feature at Dollar Bicentenary/ Thoughts on Donald MacDonald Cuach

Our Dollar Academy correspondent has sent this….A remarkable 243 pipers and drummers gathered at Dollar Academy, Clackmannanshire, over the weekend to kick off the start of the school’s bicentenary year.

With a parachute team arriving with the special bicentenary flag, which will fly over the Old Playfair Building this year, current band members and scores of former pupils (many in mature age ranges) got together to parade on the lawns for a large audience, approaching 2000, of family, friends and visitors from all corners of the world.

The concert performance began with the youngest chanter players (as young as eight) playing ‘Salute to John McNabb,’ the founder of the school two centuries ago. The various bands (Juvenile, Novice A and B and Massed Band) went through their paces in front of the Board of Governors, David Knapman, the Rector of the Academy, and guest, Colonel Johnny Stewart, the Lord Lieutenant of Clackmannanshire.

Two highlights amongst a sparkling programme included all of the former 23 Pipe Majors of the school bands playing the tune ‘The Dollar Boys’ (and girls). Then the pièce de résistance, Australian composer Lincoln Hilton’s ‘Dollar Sunrise Suite’ specially arranged by Pipe Major Matthew Wilson and music master Simon Burbury, a fusion of orchestra, percussion and pipe band. They should record it; it was so good.

The a few moist eyes as the whole ensemble played ‘Highland Cathedral’ as the teenagers leaving the Academy next week made their farewells. The ‘whole band’ photo [above] gives an idea of the scale of the piping and drumming programme at Dollar, and it was reported that each player received a personalised memento made from  part of the ancient red pine tree which grew next to the piping hut and which was sadly felled in a storm last year. The school’s technical team created personalised pieces of art from the timber and these will now adorn desks, tables and mantelpieces the world over. 

Colonel Craig Stewart is to be commended for galvanising his team to deliver the event. If you want to catch up with some of it you will find it all on the various Dollar Academy social media outlets.

This did not set a promising musical precedent for what was to come, and for me it almost put my teeth on edge. Then to the playing of the Donald MacDonald settings. There were efforts to include the ‘redundant’ low As, redundant  because if played as written they  intrude on the percussive rhythm of the taorluath and crunluath movements and the tune/melody.

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However, as leading players they have some responsibility for the music. I could not hear what adjudicator Allan MacDonald had to say in his summing up but I caught the word musicality. Unfortunately there was little music that I could hear in any of the playing. Craig Sutherland repeated the ground of his tune maybe four times. This may have been stipulated in the setting, but as the thing progressed, I thought ‘oh, not again.’  It had a simple sort of melody line and could have been quite attractive musically treated. His, and others’, attempts at the taorluath with intrusive low A notes did nothing but hamper rhythm. This was evident in other movements where the ‘redundant’ low A notes are written.

I was trying to listen to this recording with an open mind and hoping for something even a little bit inspired but whether this is possible or even permissible in playing these settings I am not sure. To me the playing reflected nothing other than reproducing Donald MacDonald’s settings on good bagpipes. Music did not seem to be the pursuit, rather satisfying the adherence to a specific notation with maybe the notion that this would carry the day with a judge who has a reputation for his radical views.

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