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It took Francis O’Neill 60 years to collect and publish 1,500 Irish dance tunes in a volume known throughout the world for the last 50 years as “The Book”.
It has taken only 17 years for Skye music teacher Christine Martin to collect an estimated 4,000 Scottish tunes and songs. In less time than that, Martin has managed to publish the vast majority of her 44 volumes of music. All of them have been printed in the Highlands and Islands and distributed around the world to a burgeoning number of Celtic musicians.
How could one woman, a performing musician, a mother of four teaching three days a week, accomplish all of that from a croft in Breakish? She had some help in the beginning, but so did O’Neill. He had what he called a jury of some of the world’s best ex-patriate Irish musicians living in Chicago. Notwithstanding Martin’s prodigious capacity for work, chalk one up — this time on the positive side of the ledger — for the magic of technology.
Surrounded by the tools of modern technology, Martin and her husband, Alasdair, operate a music publishing house called Taigh na Teud, or Harp String House, and a website
(www.scotlandsmusic.com).
But it hasn’t always been a walk in silicon park. It started with a talent for music and hard work as a schoolgirl violin student in Ayrshire. An Irish fiddler who lived across the road from her childhood home in Cumnock turned her taste toward traditional music, and she went on to study at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. After graduation she and her husband, a fisherman then, moved to Tain to find work and to begin a family.
In the 1970s, when she was a music teacher for the then Highland Regional Council in Easter Ross, she found time to perform with the band Gizzenbriggs. Then it was on to a band called Iolaire and a series of bands touring the Highlands, including Fuaran and Clamjamfrey. The height of her performing career may have come with a Celtic rock band called North Rising, which opened sometimes for Runrig.
Her future seemed to sneak up behind her in the early 1980s, though.
“People kept asking me,” she said, “‘Can you write down that tune for me’.” And, unlike many musicians, she would write them down. In 1983, she finally began writing them down seriously. Oh for the magic of the computer in those days. “When I first started,” Martin said, “it would take me a whole winter to transcribe by hand all of the tunes for one book.”
Between teaching, raising four children, and performing, her volumes of traditional dance tunes and songs of the Highlands and Islands were few and far between. The first volume bore the name of her company, “Taigh Na Teud”. Since she is a harper, it was a compilation of traditional tunes for the clarsach.
In the following years she managed to write out hundreds of tunes for the four volumes of “Ceol na Fidhle”, which have become a popular source for Highland tunes for Celtic musicians around the world.
In those first years she had some help from fellow musician Anne Hughes in gathering the tunes. Hughes is co-author on the “Ceilidh Collections” and “Session Time” books.
After that the first computer came on the scene. It cost £11,000 and had only two megabytes of memory. But finally she had a software program on which she could type tunes. Still it was a matter of printing each page and giving the pages to the printer. Today she has multi-gigabytes of memory in the latest of computers, which can print a whole book to a CD that can be handed to the printer — all of which cost no more than £4,000.
Martin still has an attraction to some of the drudgery of transcribing music. She uses the same music transcription program in what appears to be her labour of love, which only incidentally involves the computer. “Many of the inspirations of my books have come from my teaching and involvement with young people and the need to make Scottish music more available to them through attractive books and fun learning material,” she said. “I get my material from many sources: old books, former pupils, my own family of musicians, albums and the radio.”
So life may be getting a little easier now that she has a database of tunes on her website and a search engine for those who reach her site. “It’s useful to anyone searching for an elusive tune or for music shops who want to tell a customer which to buy for a particular tune,” she said.
Martin refuses to take all the credit for the successes of Taigh na Teud.
“Alasdair was a bag net salmon fisherman for eight years,” she said, “and after that he trained as a librarian. “When we got the opportunity to move to Skye he enrolled in the two-year course in computing studies through the medium of Gaelic at Sabhal Mor Ostaig. That was when we became a computerised company, with all the benefits that have ensued.” The benefits, she said, were living on Skye, owning a croft and sending their four children to school to learn Gaelic.
Meanwhile, despite their relative geographical remoteness, the Martins and Taigh na Teud have probably done more than most to bring the musical culture of the Highlands and Islands to the rest of the world. Scottish and Celtic musicians need only to point and click to learn that new volumes are rolling off the press, including “The Patrick McDonald Collection” of pipe tunes originally published in 1784 and a new volume of “Ceol Na Fidhle”.
As the company has grown, the Martins have been faced with marketing decisions and questions they need to answer, while Internet technology is changing so rapidly. International booksellers have recommended that the formats and design of their books and cover are redesigned to appeal to a world market. “Local people like the simple designs of our first books,” Martin said. “But now we’re told that Americans prefer the more modern graphic designs.”
But the big question facing them on their Skye croft today is one they share with the worldwide music publishing business: how can they sell their thousands of tunes — tune by tune — using the internet?
“Right now,” Aladair said, “ it doesn’t make sense to sell one tune — say, for a pound. It’s not economical to use the present system of Internet charging by credit cards for such a small amount.”
But several decades ago, it didn’t make much sense to try to run a world-wide music publishing company from a croft on Skye, did it? |
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