The Waterfall Laments

The Waterfall Laments c. 40 minutes

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The Waterfall Laments is a performance work reimagining Cumha Choire an Easa (The Lament for the Waterfall Corrie), an early Gaelic nature poem and pìobaireachd composed by the seventeenth-century poet and piper Iain Dall Mackay – Am Pìobaire Dall (The Blind Piper) – the only widely recognised piper-bard in the Gaelic tradition. The poem adapts the rhythmic and structural conventions of ceòl mòr (the classical music of the Highland bagpipe) into a verbal form, creating one of the earliest examples of pìobaireachd poetry.

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Framed as a dialogue between bard and corrie, the poem expands from personal lament into a meditation on social and ecological change, mourning the erosion of clan-based systems, the weakening of reciprocal relationships between humans and the more-than-human world, and the loss of imagined futures those relationships once sustained. At a pivotal moment, the corrie invites the bard to play his pipes. Following this, the poem shifts into a heightened poetic register, more akin to a moladh (praise poem) than a cumha, conjuring the waterfall and surrounding landscape through cascades of rhythmic adjectives and musical imagery. This verbal flow mirrors the structural development of ceòl mòr, revealing the deep interweaving of poetic and musical form in Gaelic tradition.

This performance embraces the mutability of oral tradition as a creative and critical tool. Drawing on archival versions of both the poem and its linked pìobaireachd, The Waterfall Laments employs Scottish Smallpipes, voice, guitar, reel-to-reel tape, and electronics to fragment, loop, and meditate on the source materials. Canntaireachd-based graphic scores provide performers with interpretive freedom, aligning historical piping notation with contemporary experimental and drone practices. In doing so, the work expands the scope of the poem and pìobaireachd, integrating noise, improvisation, and live processing to place these historic forms in active dialogue with present-day sonic practices.

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By placing oral tradition in dialogue with contemporary environmental concerns, The Waterfall Laments investigates how Gaelic poetic and musical traditions articulate ecological knowledge, and how such knowledge might be understood, renewed, and transmitted through present-day creative practice. It recognises instrumental performance – particularly within the intertwined traditions of piping and poetry, and informed by listening practices such as a’ chluas chiùil – as a medium through which environmental understanding can be communicated. Performed within the situated context of an oral tradition, the work explores a Gaelic acoustemology: ways of knowing and relating to place that are rooted in sound, attentive listening, and the transmission of meaning through both words and music. In doing so, it seeks to examine aspects of Gaelic folklore, culture, and oral tradition through the lens of contemporary sonic theory.

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The Waterfall Laments was originally performed by Matt Zurowski (small pipes, voice, electronics) and Alex Mackay (electric guitar, electronics) at The Reid School of Music, April 2025. 

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Below are a selection of pages from the graphic score for The Waterfall Laments which utilises Canntaireachd and photography to prompt improvisatory musical responses.