The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel. David Gange
chance to talk with experts in aspects of Orkney and to plan Hoy properly.
On the third day, I set out in low wind but thick fog and rain. Visibility was poor and the waters starkly contrasting. In most regions of the sea, glossy and slowly rolling waves were gentle and rhythmic; but crashing cross-rhythms resulted wherever rock challenged the will of the water. Listening was my chief tool of navigation through the mist, and I was soon immersed in the patterns that lapped the edges of my boat. By the time I reached Hoy’s cliffs, I was surrounded by the boom of breaking waves, listening hard for corridors of silence through the noise.
I took one break during the day, in the only major breach in Hoy’s western cliffs. This wide bay is ‘the Orkney riviera’ of Rackwick, a collection of eighteen crofts and a schoolhouse where generations of Stromness folk once took summer holidays. My landing was through surf, and the launch back out from the beach of boulders was challenging. Rhythm was everything: processions of breakers a few feet tall alternated with short spells of waves at least twice their height. The troughs between waves revealed rocks beneath the water: obstacles that would make it hard to meet the waves head-on. If a spell of large waves and deep troughs appeared when I launched, my situation would be perilous: I sat listening for almost an hour, trying to find patterns and make predictions.
This day-long need to listen intently might, elsewhere, have been a chore. But here it felt like an opportunity. Hoy’s waves have perhaps the most famous patterns and rhythms in the north-east Atlantic; hearing their refraction through art had been, twenty years earlier, the start of my engagement with the islands. My dad was a violinist in the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Manchester, where the resident composer was Peter Maxwell Davies, known universally as Max. In my teens, Max had given me lessons in playing his Orkney-inspired music. Until he passed away shortly before my journey began, Max was one of the most significant composers of his era, and Hoy was pivotal to his career. Before he found Orkney, he was the enfant terrible of British music, scandalising metropolitan audiences. In 1971 Max moved to the most remote croft on Hoy, high on the cliffs above Rackwick Bay and a few hundred yards from where I’d landed today. From here he took a leading role in Orcadian life, founding the St Magnus music festival, developing a new Orcadian musical style and evangelising Orkney to global audiences. Each year, my dad’s orchestra would travel to the St Magnus festival and Max would come to Manchester to conduct works inspired by these waters.
To say that these works were ‘inspired by’ the sea doesn’t do justice to the ways in which the Atlantic soaks them through. What separated Max from his peers was his sensitivity to the soundscapes of his environment. He arrived on Hoy in flight from the aural clutter of the city, but his new life wasn’t defined by an absence of noise. It took place in a soundscape that proved far more provocative than he could have imagined. Surf rolls in on both the right and left of the home he chose: the sea and wind here are constant and inescapable but infinitely various. Gradually, Max realised their potential not as surface details, but as the generative force of his art. The sea became his answer to the puzzle that faced all writers for orchestra in the twentieth century: how to compose in ways that resonate with audiences without retreading the classical patterns of previous centuries. Most new methods, such as the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schönberg, proved to be rewarding games for composers but too abstract and cerebral for their patterns to be evident to listeners. Max’s epiphany on Hoy was that the movements of the sea contained a balance between regularity and randomness that was ideal for generating music. Wave forms and sea rhythms were familiar enough to root listeners in experience, yet complex and alien enough to cause shock, wonder and revelation.
Max’s seascapes are far from gentle and reflective, conjuring instead the roaring ocean thrashing at the Rackwick cliffs. Every cross-rhythm and complexity at the intersections of seas is intensified rather than simplified. These works are reminders that the ocean is only occasionally a soothing, pleasant place, and they capture the persistence of its presence in the Orcadian soundscape. When I listen to them now I’m drawn back into coastal nights in the sleeping bag, when the sea roared far louder than traffic outside any urban window. What the day sounds and feels like on Hoy is defined by the mood of the ocean. When the wind is up and the swell rolls in, the water’s power is impossible to ignore, even from inside a house or the island interior’s moorland. Ocean might be the background to all Orcadian life but it is the foreground to the sensory experience of Hoy. Tim Robinson, assiduous chronicler of the shores of Connemara, has perhaps done more than any other author to capture the noise of Atlantic coastlines in which, he states, ‘only the most analytic listening can separate its elements’. Robinson’s writing on this theme draws on the instincts developed during the training as a mathematician and career as an artist which predate his immersion in ocean soundscapes. These challenging sounds,
are produced by fluid generalities impacting on intricate concrete particulars. As the wave or wind breaks around a headland, a wood, a boulder, a tree trunk, a pebble, a twig, a wisp of seaweed or a microscopic hair on a leaf, the streamlines are split apart, flung against each other, compressed in narrows, knotted in vortices. The ear constructs another wholeness out of the reiterated fragmentation of pitches, and it can be terrible, this wide range of frequencies coalescing into something approaching the auditory chaos and incoherence that sound engineers call white noise. A zero of information content.11
But no prose could pick out the order in the apparent incoherence of water-noise with the precision and richness of slowly unfolding symphonic music. Max was an obsessive observer, with the pattern-finding skills of a mathematician (there were far more books about maths than music in his home) and he studied these waves intensively over decades. As well as forming his music from the patterns of waves and of seabirds spiralling into the sky, Max filled his music with artefacts of the Orkney soundscape. Curlews, gulls and features of the weather suddenly emerge from the orchestral background. And fused with themes from the natural world are eight millennia of Orkney poetry and story. His subject matter included the runic inscriptions at Maes Howe, the tale of St Magnus, told as the story of a pacifist Viking, and the 1980s battle against the exploitation of Orkney uranium. His close collaboration with George Mackay Brown became the warm, social counterpoint to the cold inhuman ocean in an output of over a hundred musical seascapes.12 And, like the Rousay crofters, he reworked millennia of Orkney history for present purposes.
Max isn’t alone among Britain’s leading composers in being drawn to Orkney: there’s something about these complex waters that seems uniquely inspirational for music. Once I reached the south of Hoy, the mist cleared into a rich, bright evening. To the south-west, I could see the Scottish mainland. A dazzling white shard on the horizon was the lighthouse at Strathy Point. Its old engine room is now the home of the composer Errollyn Wallen. Born in Belize, overlooking the islands in the Caribbean Sea, Wallen now lives at the other end of the Gulf Stream, on the Scottish coast overlooking Orkney. In a song cycle, Black Apostrophe, inspired by Scotland’s Caribbean connections, she set the seafaring poetry of a Bahamian-born sculptor, Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose life had also followed the Stream. Finlay had briefly been a labourer on Rousay: an instinctual link to his maritime childhood pulled him north from Edinburgh in the 1950s.13 To both Finlay and Wallen Scotland is a sea zone and Orkney distils its archipelagic state. Given the power of water to this verse and music perhaps ‘aquapelagic’ is a better term: these island assemblages are defined by what lies between them. When Finlay left Orkney, he tried to take the waters with him.14 He named the windblown ash tree by his inland window ‘Mare Nostrum’ (Our Sea), noting ‘Tree and Sea are the same in Sound.’ He referred to Nassau as his birthplace but Rousay his ‘birthplace as a poet’. The rest of his life was lived in lowlands, but the boats and tides of Nassau and Rousay infiltrated all he did.
Wallen set two Finlay poems in Black Apostrophe. One was ‘Fishing from the back of Rousay’ which begins a thousand miles away where rollers, loud, relentless and unpredictable, ‘Originate, and roll – like rolling graves – / Towards these umber cliffs’. They crash into land among weed-robed rocks, ‘like sloppy ice (but slippier)’, where limpets are the only frictive aid against a sideways slide into waves ‘that rise and swell / And swell some more and swell: you cannot tell / If this will fall (Boom) where the last one fell / Or (Crash) on your own head’.
Like Finlay’s, Wallen’s sea