Fantasia on a Favourite Scottish Air, op. 40

These Variations on a favourite Scottish air op. 40 by Sor (“Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon”) have caught the imagination of the guitar world in recent years, and are well on their way to becoming a standard part of the guitar repertory. They used to be little known, and my performance of them on BBC Scotland in 1972 was probably the first for very many years. In 1978, for the bicentenary of Sor’s birth, I published them in my edition of Sor’s Complete Works for Guitar, and John Williams played them in the celebratory concert in February of that year at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. Alice Artzt included the work in her record Guitar Music by Fernando Sor and it was broadcast several times from that record by the BBC, and since then, whenever it has been played, it has immediately caught the audience’s imagination. In 1982 I published a separate edition of this work with Tecla Editions. The original edition was published by Sor himself in Paris and did not have wide distribution, and only two copies of that original edition are known to survive. The original title was Fantaisie pour guitare seule sur un air favori écossais (Fantasia for solo guitar on a favourite Scottish air).The harmonics in Variation 3 and the Coda are indicated in the original edition only by the word harmonique, without any indication of the strings and frets at which they should be played. In particular it is not specified whether those harmonics are intended to be natural or artificial harmonics.However, in his Méthode pour la Guitare, which was written within one year, or at most two, of the time when op. 40 was composed, Sor expresses a strong preference for natural harmonics over artificial ones. He discusses both, and describes two methods of producing artificial harmonics, but concludes that natural ones are more sonorous and are to be preferred.Moreover, he gives in his Méthode a whole piece written entirely in natural harmonics: like op. 40 it is in D major, and like op. 40 it uses the scordatura of the sixth string to D. All the harmonic notes which are used in op. 40 are to be found in that piece, together with the indication of the precise strings and frets at which they are to be found in their natural form. It is evident,therefore, that the harmonics in op. 40 are likewise intended to be natural harmonics rather than artificial ones, and the frets and strings which I have indicated here for those passages in variation 3 and the coda are the same frets and strings which Sor indicates in his Méthode for the piece in harmonics which he gives there. The piece in the Méthode can be consulted in the edition of that book (in its English translation) which is available from Tecla. In the Introduction, bar 4, slurs have been added to the middle notes of the two chords. In the theme, bar 3, the second half of the bar has dotted rhythm in the original, and has here been altered on the analogy of bars 7, 15, and 19. In variation 3, bar 67, the repeat sign in front of the double bar is omitted in the original edition, doubtless in error, and has here been restored on the analogy of variations 1 and 2.In performance, it may be considered desirable to omit the repeats in the variations, because if all the repeats are played the piece becomes rather long. That is, however, a matter of taste.I suggest that the piece not be played too fast. The melody is a strathspey, and Burns’ words are sad. The English version begins “Lost is my quiet”,and Burns’ words run “How can ye chant, ye little birds, and I sae weary fu’o’ care!” Yet at the same time, the sorrow is dignified by the stately dance form, so that the pace must be kept steady and unfaltering. The “Scotch hop”of the theme is echoed at the end of the piece. More about this piece and about the melody on which it is based will be found in this edition after the music.The melody on which the variations are based is an old one, perhaps English in origin, to which Robert Burns wrote words which were published in volume 4 of the Scots Musical Museum in 1792, and from then on the melody was inextricably associated with Scotland. In setting such a melody, Sor played his part in the fascination of his age with Scotland and with Scottish music. The melody incorporates a “Scotch hop” or “Scotch snap”and is in strathspey rhythm: that is to say, it should be dignified and not too fast. Burns’ version appeared in 1792, as no. 374 of volume 4 of the Scots Musical Museum. Here are the first two stanzas:Ye banks and braes o' bonie Doon,How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?How can ye chant, ye little bird, And I sae weary, fu' o' care.Thou'll break my heart, thou warbling bird That wantons thro' the flowering thorn! Thou minds me o' departed joys, Departed - never to return.The words are newly written by Burns, and the intention which he gave them is clearly indicated by the direction to the music of “Slow and tender”. A girl looks at the landscape, and feels a discrepancy between the gladness of nature and the sadness which she herself knows. The Scotch hop is there, for example in bars 3 and 4, but it is the hop of the strathspey, that slow and stately dance which can accommodate equally well the pomp of a clan gathering and the sadness of Burns’ poem.The origin of the tune to which Burns wrote his words is in dispute. The Scots Musical Museum itself (volume 2, pages 346-8) attributes its composition to “Mr. James Millar, Writer in Edinburgh”. But a much more widely current attribution was to the famous Scots fiddler-composer, Niel Gow. When Gow came to publish in about 1794 a book of Scottish dances called A Second Collection of Strathspey Reels (copy: New York Public Library), No. 1 was this very tune, but under the title of “The Caledonian Hunt’s Delight”. Moreover, that collection as a whole was dedicated to “The Noblemen and Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt”, a fact which gave the tune especial prominence. As “The Caledonian Hunt’s Delight”, and with the attribution to Gow, it has survived to the present day. Yet in fact Gow himself was probably not so much its composer, but rather its arranger, and the source from which it originally came was perhaps not even Scottish, but English. William Chappell, in his Popular Music of the Olden Time, volume 2 (London, 1859), pp. 794-5, gives an eighteenth century English source for it, a version in which there is no “Scotch hop”. According to Chappell, the melody later universally known as “Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon” was not originally Scottish at all, but English, naturalized into Scotland and adopted by Burns and by Gow, and subsequently (its birthplace by now thoroughly consigned to oblivion) taken over by the whole of Europe as a Scottish tune. Sor dedicated these variations in about 1829 to his pupil Miss Mary Jane Burdett, a young lady who, he said, was able to perform them after only 28 lessons with him. He attributed this rapid progress to the fact that she was not only a guitarist but a general musician and specifically a pianist: Un guitariste-harmoniste aura toujours un avantage sur celui qui ne le sera pas. Un talent, même médiocre, sur le piano (le premier des instruments d’harmonie), donne déjà des habitudes en musique très utiles pour la guitare.Je viens d’avoir une preuve de ce que je viens de dire, dans les progrès rapides de mademoiselle Mary Jane Burdett, la fille de M. Arthur Burdett, jeune personne qui touche très bien du piano. S’occupant à perfectionner son éducation, elle se consacre à plusieurs sortes d’études a la fois, tant de nécessité que d’agrément, et par conséquent elle ne peut s’adonner exclusivement à l’étude de la guitare. Mes principes, et la direction que ses idées ont prises par l’habitude acquise de la marche et de la contexture de la musique de piano, l’ont mise en état de jouer en vingt-huit leçons la fantaisie que je lui ai dédiée (oeuvre 40), ce que je n’ai jamais pu obtenir en si peu de leçons d’autres écolières qui ne touchaient pas du piano, et qui, avec la meilleure volonté, s’occupaient exclusivement de l’étude de la guitare; il est vrai qu’elles avaient déjà contracté des habitudes qui empêchent de jouer librement, et que malheureusement on leur avait appris à ne voir que des notes où il faudrait voir de la musique.(‘A guitarist, who is a harmonist, will always have an advantage over one who is not. Even a tolerable player on the pianoforte (the first of instruments to produce harmony), has already acquired very useful habits in regard to the guitar. —1 have recently had a proof of what I have just said, in the rapid progress of Miss Mary Jane Burdett, (daughter of Mr. Arthur Burdett), a young lady who plays well on the pianoforte. Engaged in completing her education, she devotes herself to several kinds of study at once, as well the necessary as the agreeable, and consequently cannot give up her time exclusively to the study of the guitar. My principles, and the direction which her ideas have taken, from being habituated to the progression and contexture of pianoforte-music, have enabled her, in twenty-eight lessons, to play my Fantaisie, opus 40, which l have dedicated to her, —a result which I have never been able to obtain in so few lessons from other pupils, who did not play on the pianoforte, and who, with the best inclination, devoted themselves exclusively to the study of the guitar. It is certain that they had previously acquired habits which prevented a free style of playing, and,unfortunately, they had been taught to perceive only notes, where it was necessary to see music.’) (Originally in French in Sor’s Méthode pour la Guitare, Paris, 1830, pp.74-5. English translation by Arnold Merrick published as Method for the Spanish Guitar in London in 1832, p. 42, available in reprint form fromTecla.). Clearly she was one of his favourite pupils, and it has been possible to find out a little about her. From Burke’s Landed Gentry (1894 edition, p. 249) we learn that she was of the Anglo-Irish landowning gentry, the daughter of Arthur Burdett, Esq., of Ballymany and Ballywater. She was in Paris with her father, finishing her education, a young lady of reasonably high social standing and taking lessons with the principal guitar teacher in Paris at the time, Fernando Sor. Perhaps her origin may account for a certain Celtic connection: we may imagine, perhaps, Miss Burdett singing or playing to Sor a favourite Scottish air of hers, which Sor then set on the guitar. She married later, but only in 1848, by which time she would have been well into her thirties: and her husband was Lieut.- Col. Robert Brookes, of the 24th Regiment, who unfortunately died the very next year, in January 1849, at the Battle of Chilianwallah in the Second Sikh War. This edition comes from the new 2020 second edition of Sor’s New Complete Works for Guitar edited by Brian Jeffery. The Introduction and Index to theentire series are here in nkoda.This new edition is copyright © by Brian Jeffery 2019. Your cooperation is requested in not making illegal copies for other people.Brian Jeffery