Letters: Rugby pipers hit a bum note on Flower of Scotland

Scotland's rugby team can take heart from their performance at the Millennium Stadium on Saturday, but if they wish to sustain that improvement, it will be vital to identify the factors that contributed to it, the first being the playing of the national anthem.

In Cardiff, Flower of Scotland was played with a refreshing degree of jauntiness, and this in itself may have put an extra spring in Scottish steps. But, more significantly, the Welsh band played the right notes, whereas the pipe band at Murrayfield have been adulterating Flower of Scotland for some time by sharpening the leading note (the "think" in "tae think again").

That note is meant to be a full tone below the tonic, or key-note, giving the tune its modal character. This is not just a matter of musical pedantry – that note is the one with the emotive impact the one that says "don't mess with us"; the one that evokes Celtic immovability and bloody-mindedness.

Sharpen that note a semitone, and we're transported to a 19th-century English drawing room, where some quavering, flat-chested mezzo-soprano is regaling us with diatonically emasculated "Songs of the Highlands".

Sharpen that note, and it opens a chink in the song's armoured resolve, weakens a link in the chain of the melody – the effect is as if the All Blacks were to end the haka in a limp-wristed, Frank Spencerish pose.

This should be the first item on Andy Robinson's clipboard as the squad prepare for their next game: do we plump for a note of defiance, or persist with a note of apology?

JONATHAN REID

Botton Village

Danby,

North Yorkshire