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MusicNote on the use of music in Sunset Song Music is clearly of importance to the inhabitants of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Kinraddie: he frequently cites tunes and quotes from songs his audience wouldn't necessarily know; and the fact that he prints a transcription of the piper's rendition of 'Flouers o' the Forest' implies, perhaps, the novelist's dissatisfaction with the silence of his art. At no point, however, does he invent music: all the songs and tunes that he cites existed, might easily have been known by the characters who sing them, and have some significance, however slight, in the context of the novel and at the point at which they are mentioned. Most obvious in this respect is the lengthy list of songs sung at the wedding of Chris and Ewan, almost all of which treat with love or lust; though this procession of folk songs is more than anything else a demonstration of a community enjoying its own company and entertaining itself in the only way it easily could in the days before radio, amplification and in the absence of funds for professional musicians. 'You hear feint the meikle of they old songs these days', says one character near the end of the play. Perversely, of course, Gibbon has done his bit to preserve the 'old songs' in writing Sunset Song, but his point is that in a pre-Great War world, communications are such that homespun and home-grown has yet to be rendered (apparently) unsophisticated in the face of 'songs about Blue Babies' imported from the world at large. This must have seemed especially so at the time of publication of Sunset Song, coinciding more or less as it did with the advent of 'talking pictures'. So how to use Gibbon's attitude to music in the context of a stage adaptation of the novel? Well, Long Rob sings 'Ladies of Spain' in the book and so he does on the stage, and this use of the music is the most obvious way of using the music: Gibbon quotes a tune, Alastair Cording uses the incident in the play and we sing the song or play the tune. At the wedding, however, we haven't the time to provide more than a snapshot of the proceedings, so choices have had to be made about what to include and what to leave out or imply, what music is most important. Part 1: Music
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