Stan wrote: "Marches should be played at marching speed. Watch people going across the Millennium bridge. They are all going at more or less the same speed. As you play pretend you are marching home after you have escaped a bloody, painful death in a battle you were forced to go to avoid your house being burned. If you are only a few miles from your loved ones, and you see the hills of home you'll start to swing into a retreat march, and my won't the tune go, and be just "right"."
This is, in fact, a good illustration of my suggestion that there are no universal right or wrongs in relation to tempi in Scottish traditional music. Take the march, for example. Functional military marching has always been influenced by the conditions under foot and the situation in hand and therefore the prescribed tempi varied considerably in time and place. The introduction of metalled roads in Scotland, for instance, coincided with the rise of the quickstep and quickest step. Then there were ceremonial marches which had there own requirements. In piping the great period of march composition was not for marching at all but for recital and competition performance with many tunes never intended for marching. The adoption of march tunes into the Scottish social dance tradition further complicated the situation and added to the sheer variety of tempi which can be employed. The retreat march is not, as Stan suggests, necessarily a march time tune which would be marched to - as often as not it was played as part of the evening ritual in the military camp as day duties gave way to night ones. It was not linked to the military manoeuvre of retreating in or from battle but was linked to the idea of refuge and safety in the camp. Some contemporary players, assuming that the retreat march is to be marched to, crank it up to a kind of swaggering, kilt swinging, tempo which robs the airs of the inherent melancholy quality which many possess. I hope this helps illustrate my earlier point. Stuart Eydmann Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
