Northeast Scottish Fiddling

Douglas Lawrence and Hector MacAndrew

Before continuing our adventures in Northeast Scotland, I’d like to invite you to take advantage of my holiday offer, a 20% discount on a paid subscription to this column (10 days left!). Not only does it support my work, but it also gives you (or your gift recipient) full access to well over 100 of my articles here about the music, culture and landscapes of Scotland.

If you missed last Monday’s article, well, I did too! We were traveling, seeing the last of Scotland for a bit, and spending a little time somewhere else -- see if you can guess where, from these photos, which start with a picture I took from the window of the plane as we took off from Inverness, and the other two taken in that mystery place, the last one just a few hours ago!

In my last article about travelling west from Aberdeenshire into neighboring Morayshire, we visited the Fochabers area, where the great fiddler, composer, butler, house-steward, mechanician, clockmaker, athlete (and more), William Marshall was born. He worked for 30 years at nearby Gordon Castle, and continued working for the Duke and Duchess of Gordon as a factor before retiring to a spot near Craigellachie Bridge.

Several times on our music & walking tours, we were fortunate to have a visit from the great fiddler Douglas Lawrence, one of the best, if not the best, representative today of the Northeast style of Scottish fiddling.

I won’t try here to verbally describe the various styles of fiddling in Scotland, but I can provide a bit of context. A summer school started in the 1970s at the University of Stirling divided Scottish fiddling into three main areas: Shetland, Highland, and Northeast. However, additional fiddle styles could be identified, and there are noticeable differences within each style as well, usually linked to particular players who influence the ears of dancers, listeners and musicians in their area. For example, fiddlers from different islands in Shetland have their own characteristic tempos and styles; Border musicians have their own repertoire of tunes; and a number of players in the Highlands and Outer Hebrides have had their own ways of playing, often blending Gaelic song or pipe music into their repertoire. Some of this Highland fiddling is closely related to the music of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where some 25,000 Highlanders emigrated during the Clearances.

The Northeast style of Scottish fiddling, however, is easy to identify as distinct, and is unique in the world. I will describe it more, with audio examples, in an upcoming post on another of my Substack publications, called Learning Fiddle and Other Musical Musings.

For today, I’d like to share a video of Douglas Lawrence to give you a taste of this style. We met up with him on a few of our music & walking tours when we visited Huntly, near Huntly Castle, and a few times we saw Lawrence in Findhorn, where he is based part-time.

Findhorn is known by many as the home of a spiritual community that helps people focus on self-discovery and environmental sustainability. Somehow their techniques, whether spiritual or practical or both, allow them to grow very healthy vegetables, such as 40-pound cabbages and 60-pound broccoli!

But Findhorn is also a resort with lovely beaches, and we were able to make use of a community hall there to listen to Douglas Lawrence talk about Scottish fiddling and play some amazing, passionate, and flawless renditions of traditional Scottish airs, marches, strathspeys and reels.

The great classical violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999) was smitten by Northeast Scottish fiddling. He undertook to learn the style, wrote an introduction to James Hunter’s influential tune collection, and ended up judging some fiddle competitions. Here’s a link for more info about Menuhin’s interest in Scottish fiddling. Most fiddle competitions in Scotland of the past century have focused on the Northeast style, particularly as exemplified by Hector MacAndrew (1903-1980), who was regarded as the premier Northeast fiddler of his day. At the end of this article is a link for you to listen to MacAndrew play a Marshall strathspey and a traditional reel, after briefly discussing the brilliance of William Marshall’s music (which we talked about last time).

A great deal can be gleaned and enjoyed from hearing MacAndrew’s interpretation of tunes and medleys. To my ear, however, because techniques of recording and reproducing music have improved so much since MacAndrew’s day, I find that Douglas Lawrence’s recordings represent an even higher quality of playing for listening.

There is a common confusion about classical influences on Scottish music. Some folk enthusiasts even dismiss Scottish Northeast fiddling as being primarily classical and not traditional, but these presumptions tend to come from the fact that many people have only been exposed to a few fiddle styles, as selected by popular media.

One time, I was asked to play fiddle for a group of Scottish dancers at a banquet held for the Boston Pops Orchestra. This placed me in the strange position of playing solo fiddle in the Northeast Scottish style for an audience comprised of some of the best of classical violinists, with conductor Arthur Fiedler sitting ten feet away eyeing my bowing style.

They seemed to enjoy the show, and afterward, when I spoke to some of the violinists, they assured me that they could not play that music because of its unique ornamentation and timing. Those great violinists certainly did not regard Scottish fiddling as classical! As mentioned above, I’ll save more discussion about this fascinating fiddle style for another of my Substack publications, Learning Fiddle and Other Musical Musings.

Below is a Northeast-style pipe march for you, as played by Douglas Lawrence. The tune is called “MacLean of Pennycross.” I took this video on my phone during one of Lawrence’s performances for a group of our travelers, and unfortunately missed a few notes at the beginning of the tune. But the rest of the tune is there, and I offer this to you with Douglas’s permission. Enjoy!

Finally, here’s a link to a YouTube performance by the legendary Northeast Scottish fiddler Hector MacAndrew. He starts with a brief discussion of the brilliance of fiddler/composer William Marshall.

I’ll be taking a break now until January. As they say in Scotland, please enjoy the “festive season”!