Rediscovering the Sound of Scotland’s Earliest Music

When we set out as Dál Riata Còmhlan we asked ourselves: what does it really mean to play the music of the early Irish and Scottish world? What remains of that sound? What can we hear? What can we revive?

Deep in Scotland's past - long before the bagpipes of the Highland marches and before the strings of the classical harp took their modern shape - the land echoed with instruments and voices that are only partly remembered today. Archaeologists and music-historians point to rock-gongs, hand-bells, horns and trumpets, stone carvings of stringed instruments and the faint traces of musical performance in what survives of the oral and monastic traditions. For example, in one essay, John Purser explores how early Christian hand-bells in the Gaelic speaking regions of Scotland may link back to rock-gong traditions. 

Another piece of that soundscape is the dramatic wind-instrument known as the Carnyx - a grand bronze horn in the shape of an animal's head, used by the Celts and found in Scotland in a version called the “Deskford Carnyx.” 

In our work we take inspiration from these threads. We imagine the triangular harp (clàrsach) in its early form, we imagine whistles of bone or antler, wrest-planks or other early percussive surfaces, the sound of bagpipes in earlier shapes, the wild voice of the carnyx echoing across a windswept glen. We're not simply recreating with museum exactness (though we respect what remains) but seeking to inhabit the spirit of the music: the environments in which it was heard, the line between ritual and daily life, the texture of sound in open places and close walls, the dance of memory and place.

You'll hear in our music moments of charging energy (a horn blast, a rasping pipe) and quiet reverence (harp strings held, bone whistle light in the air). We hope you'll sense the ancient pulse alongside the living present. Because music is not only what was, it's also what becomes.

Thank you for joining us at the beginning of this journey. We hope you'll listen, explore, reflect-and perhaps rediscover your own connection to the sound-world of the early Celtic lands.

- Dál Riata Còmhlan