The Little Tree
A tribute from half a lifetime ago to Martyn Bennett
Today marks 17 years since Scottish musician Martyn Bennett passed away. Martyn was 33, a year younger than I am today.
This was half a life time ago for me. I was 17 when he died, and in many ways I can point to his death as one of the more formative moments that has happened in my life.
Martyn’s music changed the way that I began to perceive and navigate the world.
I come from a very musical family and the traditional music of the Scottish Highlands has always been a key part of my life. It’s always been there for me. Whilst Martyn’s music introduced me to and gave me an appreciation to the various worlds of classical music, electronic and techno music, the musics of various parts of Scandinavia, the Middle East and Central Asia it also opened me up to a much deeper and more meaningful world within my own tradition here in Scotland.
“Bothy Culture,” the first of his albums I came across, starts with the brave new sonic world of “Tongues of Kali,” a fun pipe tune mixed with all sorts of breakbeats and Punjab musical references. The sleeve notes describe it as “a party tune with a pile of twaddle over the top.”
Initially I was drawn to the “hooks” of the big, electronic beats and mixes and the exotic fusions of musical traditions from around the world with the fiddle, bagpipes and whistle. I was drawn to the newness of it and the party tunes were the ones we would play most.
But there was something much deeper going on than I realized in this album and all of Martyn’s albums. The album’s centrepiece is an recording of the great Gaelic poet Sorley Maclean’s seminal poem “Hallaig,” read by Maclean himself and set to music. With it, Martyn managed to get 15 year olds like me going out and getting our hands on copies of Gaelic poetry and then discussing it with each other. And for all it’s seemingly new musical ideas, the album finishes with two and a half minutes of that most traditional of forms: unaccompanied piobaireachd, the magical but inaccessible classical tradition of the bagpipes.
It was through Martyn’s music I discovered the world of Piobaireachd; the ethereal Gaelic Psalm singing of the Presbyterian church in Lewis; the ancient song and storytelling traditions of Scotland’s Travelling Peoples; the radical poetry and ‘carrying stream” traditions of Maclean and Hamish Henderson; the music of the William Dixon manuscript, the oldest known collection of pipe music in the British Isles; the vast audio archive collections of the School of Scottish Studies, now released digitally by Tobar an Dualchas; and the incredible Ethnography work of Margaret Bennett, Martyn’s mother.
His music was both an invitation to reach out to new ideas, new possibilities and new places and also a window to look deeply inwards and understand the richness and depth of some of our own, oft overlook traditions right here.
I cried very hard when he died. He had been a hero to me throughout my formative years as a teen for so many reasons. He had helped me connect to a tradition I grew to love deeply and through this music, connect with and meet some of my closest friends. In a large part it’s thanks to people like Martyn, that traditional music has become something young people want to engage with, and often this has led to a greater connection to and love for the places they live. This music allowed them to begin to connect to their place in a different way. But then being grounded in their own tradition these young musicians gained a passport to be able to go out into the world and connect with other people from other places in a different way.
As a 17 year old, I spent a long time trying to understand why I felt so affected by Martyn’s death. I came across the image of the Celtic Tree of Life, where the branches of the tree not only are mirrored by its roots but they intertwine. This image seemed to represent to me what Martyn’s music was about.
I used Martyn’s death and this image of the Tree of Life as the starting points for my Higher Art project and eventually made a little illustrated, fable type story called “The Little Tree.”
The idea in the story is actually pretty neatly summed up by Martyn’s own writing on the cover of “Bothy Culture:”
“There is a dichotomy in this music, a gentle old tradition of the land and the sea against the neon technology of our growing Urban culture. The tunes are of an old style: Scottish, Irish, Swedish even Islamic. The beats and mixes are of a new style: Garage Breakbeat, Trippy, Hip, Drum and Bass. I hope when you listen or dance to these tunes you get a sense of your own roots. If you push back the pressure of Urban development for a second you might remember where you came from. Go climb a mountain and see.”
The storybook’s been gathering dust in a storage box for half a lifetime, but I thought it might be a good day to put it out there.
