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This concert is promoted by Inverurie Music in association with Surround-Sound, a listing of new music events in North-East Scotland throughout the year.

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A Loon o Pairts

Gavin Greig (1856–1914)

Gavin Greig was a musician, author and teacher, who lived and worked in Aberdeenshire all his life. He was born at Parkhill near Aberdeen, the son of Gavin Greig (1833–1881), a forester and estate overseer. Educated at Dyce Parish School, the Grammar School of Old Aberdeen and Aberdeen University, he graduated with an MA in 1876. Although he claimed descent from the same family as Edvard Grieg, the Norwegian composer, and on his mother's side, Robert Burns, the poet, his musical interests were more likely to have been fostered by the evangelical services that were organised by John Gordon for the employees of the estate. Greig was already well known in literary as well as musical circles, when, in later life, he joined an international group of "folklorist" scholars that wished to record and study oral cultures that were on the verge of extinction. In his day, his research was presented in lectures and publications that gained universal respect. The vast collection of folk songs that he compiled with Rev. J. B. Duncan was not published in its entirety until 2002.

In Greig's lifetime it was not unusual for a bright boy, "a lad o' pairts", to climb the social ladder from humble origins. The Disruption of the kirk in the 1840s created another layer of ministers and schools that improved educational opportunities for ordinary people. The North-East had the best educational provision in Scotland. There was traditional respect for learning, and educational scholarships. The Dick Bequest attracted good teachers by topping up salaries to almost double the amount they could earn elsewhere and the University of Aberdeen had an abundance of bursaries to pay for students' fees, subsistence and books. In 1872, Greig sat competitive examinations to gain one of these, coming fourth out of the whole of the north of Scotland.

After his graduation, he attended the Free Church College to train for the ministry. This was a standard career route, but despite an excellent record, he decided to abandon it and marry his childhood sweetheart, Isabella Burgess, in 1878. They were to have nine children. After a year of training in a number of schools, he was awarded his "Parchment" and gained the post of headmaster in Whitehill near New Deer, remaining there until his death on 30 August 1914. He arrived with wife and baby during one of the worst winters in living memory and set about transforming the run-down school of ninety pupils into one of the best in the county.

Greig seemed to be content with teaching in a small school with the help of assistants, which included some of his daughters in his later years. He took a keen interest in improving the teaching profession through the Educational Institute of Scotland, being treasurer of the local branch and gaining a fellowship in 1896 in recognition of his services. One of his innovations was the introduction of music and singing into the curriculum. Locally, he was loved and admired for his wide involvement in public life and was the leading figure in the cultural life of North-East Scotland, especially in its musical activities.

As a performer, arranger, composer and musicologist, Greig was a practising musician throughout his life. He was the organist at New Deer Church, he conducted choirs and brass bands and composed religious and secular music, including seven musical dramas. He edited a collection of 250 fiddle tunes, Harp and Claymore, for the celebrated James Scott Skinner (contributing an essay on the unique form of the Strathspey) and wrote a number of articles about the development of popular song in Scotland. He composed musical dramas on historical themes and published his own arrangements of songs by Burns.

The circumstances that led to his work as a folk song collector were unusual. Aberdeen's New Spalding Club was a society that normally published antiquarian research, but at its 1902 AGM, it was suggested that a volume of the "popular song of the District" might be compiled. The club, on the advice of William Carnie, the conductor of the Aberdeen Glee and Madrigal Club, asked Greig to explore this idea. One might suppose that he was already familiar with his native folk songs. In fact, his eldest daughter, Edith, later confided that her father "knew nothing about them". In 1903, Greig reported back and said that, "given time, the project is feasible". The following year, he was more optimistic, saying that his research had come up with "results distinctly beyond expectation". Finally in December 1905, the club agreed to publish.

Today we would say that Greig was on a steep learning curve as a folklorist. To begin with, he was taken aback by the songs he heard; few could be found in standard collections of Scottish song. In 1912, he said:

"It has been our pride as a nation to think of the Scottish swain and maid singing the songs of Ramsay, Burns, Tannahill & Hogg as they moved about the field or sat by the fireside, or courted in the cornyard. The idea is largely a pious delusion... our peasantry do not sing the songs of the books — the songs of Burns and the rest."

The "songs on the lips of the people" he concluded, transcended regional, national and even international boundaries. Some were working "bothy ballads" and historical ballads of the type that Child had collected, but most of the material was held in common with other singing cultures, even as far away as North America and Scandinavia. Fortunately, as a member of the Folk Song Society, Greig followed the high standards that had been set by collectors such as Cecil Sharp in England. He was scrupulous in his methods of recording and did not allow his musical talents to interfere or make "improvements". "Give exactly what you get" was the motto that guided him and his collaborator. Some of these principles would be taken for granted today:

• Words and tune (or tunes) should be always be heard and kept together
• Different versions have equal status. Those that reflect transmission over time are not "degenerate".
• The use of modes rather than modern diatonic keys should be respected and faithfully recorded.

In 1905, Grieg gained the first of five grants from the Carnegie Trust and the Rev. James Bruce Duncan joined him as a collaborator. Duncan was an ideal choice. He had been brought up in Buchan and had been educated at Grieg's school. What is more, unlike Greig, he belonged to a "singing family" that provided a ready-made source of singers and material. The Spalding Club published Greig's analysis of his research in a 27,000 word article, Folk Song in Buchan, and copies were sent to the other major collectors in Britain. After his death, the Buchan Field Club published his Last leaves of Traditional Ballads and Ballad Airs edited by Alexander Keith.

Greig is less widely known for his literary accomplishments as a poet, novelist and playwright. He had a wife and nine children to support with an annual salary of £128, so contributions to the newspapers were a useful sideline. At first his mainstay was poetry in contributions to anthologies: Edward's Modern Scottish Poets and a re-issue of Whistle Binkie. Later he became a pioneer playwright in native drama. A Main's Wooin' (1909, Peterhead) was first performed in New Deer in April 1894 and Mains Again (1913, Aberdeen) was written in 1897. Mains Wooin' remains a classic of its type to this day. Greig's novels were serialised in the local newspapers, the Peterhead Sentinel and the Buchan Observer. They include Morrison Gray: or Life in a Buchan Schoolhouse (May 1896 – January 1897), The Hermit of Gight; or the Fatal Casket (December 1898 – May 1899) and Logie o' Buchan (1899). This novel is set in the Jacobite '45 Rising and features a real-life figure, George Halket, schoolmaster of Rathen and Cairnbulg, who was traditionally thought to have written the song that gives the book the title.

Greig was not the first to pay homage to the culture of North-East Scotland but he was the first to be highly regarded as a folklorist in European circles. His monumental collection in a decade of over three thousand songs and tunes in collaboration with Rev. J. B. Duncan is one of the finest collections of its type ever made. In the rapid expansion of the industrial era, there were a few that shared his passion for the oral cultures that were embedded in fading agricultural economies. These had to surrender to the advance of the written word and the machines that delocalised society, like the railway and the telephone. Greig's work in collecting this material and disseminating it was not mere nostalgia; it was valuable in its own right and would have vanished had he not tried to capture it. The battle against the machines was bound to be a losing battle — some cultural traits may even imitate machines now — but a giant folklorist like Gavin Greig is not an anachronism. His legacy is a treasure chest of inspiration and idiom for the whole world.

Alistair Massey

John Hearne's new string quartet In Search of Strathspey, marking the centenary of Gavin Greig's death, receives its first performance by the Delmege Quartet in Inverurie on Saturday 15 March 2014.

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