Folk, Jazz etc: Six centuries on 'Reid Harlaw' holds lessons that we still haven't learned

SCOTS can be preoccupied with historic battles lost and won, rather than with the challenges of the here and now. However, battles do inspire some memorable music, perhaps none more so than the Battle of Harlaw, the 600th anniversary of which falls on 24 July this year.

The ballad The Battle of Harlaw is well enough known, but as an impressive new double CD from the American fiddle piobaireachd specialist Bonnie Rideout demonstrates, the musical legacy of this bloody engagement, for which both sides claimed victory, remains a rich one, six centuries on, including various ballads and piobaireachds.

The album, Harlaw: Scotland 1411 features Rideout with collaborators including pipers Alan MacDonald, Paula Glendinning and Barnaby Brown, harpists William Jackson and William Taylor and singers Andrew Hunter and Elizabeth Stewart, some of whom also played on her recent stunning album Scotland's Fiddle Piobaireachd Vol 1. And they'll be performing material from both recordings tonight at St Andrew's in the Square in Glasgow, as part of Celtic Connections.

The new album has been produced by musicologist and broadcaster John Purser, and includes a narrative CD in which he discusses the battle, along with commentary from Professor Alan Riach of Glasgow University and musical excerpts, very much along the lines of Purser's acclaimed Scotland's Music radio series.

Purser describes the battle, fought on a site just outside Inverurie in Aberdeenshire, as "a disaster of epic brutality that solved nothing but left an indelible mark on the people's consciousness". It tends to be regarded as a conflict between Lowland and Highland, but history is rarely that simple. The opposing forces were led by "Black Donald", Lord of the Isles, and Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar. Both men were Gaelic speakers, and were second cousins, disputing the Earldom of Ross, which was in the event retained by Mar, but MacDonald's son was given it later, after King James I was released from captivity in England in 1424.

"What's particular about this battle is the amount of music it's thrown up," says Purser. "Everybody knows about Bannockburn, but there's not a single piece of music that you can be certain was heard at Bannockburn, not even (the supposed] Bruce's march, Hey Tuttie Tattie, whereas for Harlaw we have several pieces of music, some of which are from very close to the period, others unequivocally connected with the battle."

Among them, the CD offers a superb rendition of the well-known Harlaw ballad from Elizabeth Stewart, who also recounts a ghost story told in her traveller family, who once camped on the battle site - though not for long.Andrew Hunter, too, makes a rare foray into the studio to record the earliest known version of the ballad, a song infused more with compassion than with the swagger of the later version: "Grit Pitie was to heir and se / The Noys and dulesum Hermonie, / That ever that dreiry Day did daw …"

Listening to these, or to Allan Macdonald's intoning of the brosnachadh, the fierce Gaelic incitement to battle, or to the piobaireachs sounded so eloquently on fiddle and pipes by Rideout and MacDonald, is rather like receiving signals from afar, transmitting through the ages something of the fervour, as well as the tragedy and pity of a conflict which was essentially about pride, paid for by the many hundreds whose blood caused the battleground to become known as "Reid Harlaw".

Rideout, for her part, suggests that there's a certain irony in engaging with music associated with of this six-centuries-old carnage as we approach the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and war remains a universal blight: "What have we learned?"

• Bonnie Rideout with Allan MacDonald and Friends perform at St Andrew's in the Square, Glasgow, tonight as part of Celtic Connections. For further information, see www.bonnierideout.com