William Dixon Manuscript - The Manuscript

The Manuscript

Nothing is definitely known of the whereabouts of the manuscript in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, it had been in the collection of one Charles MacIntosh, of Inver, Perthshire. In 1909, he offered it to Dorothea Ruggles-Brise, threatening to put it on the fire if she did not accept it - she pulled the book out, slightly scorched, just in time. She correctly recognised the music as 'a collection of pipe jigs of the border country'.

The manuscript was more definitively identified as pipe music from south of the border by the piper and fiddler Matt Seattle in 1995; previously it had been considered by some as fiddle music, albeit rather odd. He was able to publish a transcription that same year, with extensive notes, as The Master Piper; this has recently been reissued in a third edition. It was transposed up a tone from the source, to suit modern Border pipes, which are generally notated in A.

The importance of the manuscript as a musical source, apart from its antiquity, is the almost unique nature of the music. Almost all of the 40 pieces in the manuscript are long variation sets on dance tunes - one, Dorrington, running to 14 strains. Much of the figuration is similar to early Northumbrian smallpipe music, but the compass of many of the tunes is 9 notes, from F to g, with no sharps or flats, rather than the single octave of the Northumbrian smallpipes of the time. It thus seems that the music was written either for smallpipes with an open ended chanter, like Scottish Smallpipes, or else for what are now known as Border pipes. Both of those instruments had effectively died out by the mid-19th century, and their repertoire had survived only in fragments, mostly in adaptations for other instruments, such as fiddle, Northumbrian Smallpipes, or lute.