Matt Zurowski, Edinburgh School of Art

The Waterfall Laments is a drone-focussed performance work reimagining Cumha Choire an Easa (The Lament for the Waterfall Corrie), an early Gaelic nature poem and its associated pìobaireachd composed by the seventeenth-century poet and piper Iain Dall Mackay, Am Pìobaire Dall. The poem translates the rhythmic and structural conventions of ceòl mòr into verbal form, creating one of the earliest extant examples of pìobaireachd poetry. Framed as a dialogue between bard and corrie, it expands from personal lament into a meditation on social and ecological change, anticipating the weakening of reciprocal relationships between humans and the more-than-human world and the loss of imagined futures those ties once sustained.

Drawing on archival versions of both the poem and its associated pìobaireachd, The Waterfall Laments considers the mutability of poetry in the oral tradition as a provocation for practice-based research. Using Scottish small pipes, voice, guitar, reel-to-reel tape, and electronics, the work fragments, loops, and reflects the poem itself while examining the various technologies employed to sustain oral and ecological knowledge – poetry, music, canntaireachd, and tape. In doing so, the piece investigates historic forms through experimental sonic practice, integrating canntaireachd-based graphic scores alongside elements of drone, noise, improvisation, and live processing.

Using The Waterfall Laments as a primary case study, this presentation examines aspects of the Gaelic oral tradition through the lens of contemporary sonic theory. I ask how existing Gaelic poetic and musical traditions articulate ecological knowledge, and how such knowledge might be amplified through practice-based research. I explore how performance practices and pedagogy within the intertwined traditions of piping and poetry relate to the natural environment, and I consider the importance of listening practices associated with the supernatural, such as a’ chluas chiùil – practices that might enable us to open up to more generous modes of listening with the Gaelic landscape.

This is with the aim of working towards a Gaelic acoustemology – after Steven Feld – as a way of knowing and making meaning that begins with the attentive practice of “listening to histories of listening” and unfolds through sound, words, and music in relation to place and culture.