Under the Microscope: Sleepy Maggie
By Ånon Egeland
Translated by Lucy Moffatt
All the melodies in the Jew’s harp repertoire of Angus Lawrie appear to have been drawn from his bagpipe repertoire. This kind of reliance on a more widespread and prestigious instrument is something we in Norway are familiar with – although in our case, the fiddle is the most important source of repertoire.
There’s one crucial difference, though: whereas the fiddle offers endless possibilities for intonation, the nine notes of the Scottish bagpipes lie close to the harmonic series from 7 to 16 (excluding 14) – in other words, the traditional tonal resources of the Jew’s harp. The three drones on the bagpipes are tuned to the tonic (overtones 1, 8, 16 etc) in two different octaves, and both the compass and the low 7th make it easy to transfer music from bagpipes to Jew’s harp. On older bagpipes, the 4th (counted from the tonic) is even tuned up roughly a quartertone, which makes the tonal resources of the two instruments even more similar.
‘Sleepy Maggie’ is a very popular Scottish reel, especially on the bagpipes. Angus Lawrie recorded it twice: once as part of a set consisting of two marches, ‘Dornoch Links’ and ‘Locheil’s Away to France,’ a strathspey called ‘Mac Lennan’s Overcoat,’ ‘Sleepy Maggie’ and ‘The King’s Reel;’ and the second time as a stand-alone melody. The transcription below is largely based on the latter recording.
There are only small differences between the two versions, and both have the same strikingly distinctive feature as the standard bagpipe version: the third of the melody is notable by its absence – or near-absence, at least. Angus Lawrie does hit the note fleetingly on just a couple of occasions, few enough to suspect a bum note. The 7th measure could easily be played the same as the 1st measure, and the second beat in the 9th and 11th measures seem slightly hesitant. Perhaps it’s just a slip – could he actually be trying to play the standard version? Considering the prominence of the melody third (overtones 5, 10, 20 etc) in the harmonic structure of the Jew’s harp, playing a melody without a third is a remarkable choice. Yet Angus Lawrie makes it sound like the most natural thing in the world.
There are many versions of ‘Sleepy Maggie’ in both Scotland and Ireland, where it is also known as ‘Jenny’s Chickens.’ In the Irish fiddle version, the tonic is usually B and here too the third of the melody is usually missing. Given that this step on the scale determines whether a melody is major or minor – depending on whether the third of the melody is high or low – it is interesting to note that accompanied versions of ‘Sleepy Maggie’ are very often interpreted as minor even though the defining step is missing from the melody.
Here is a selection of versions:
Massed pipes and drums, Sleepy Maggie (from 3:30)
The French-Canadian group La Bottine Souriante with a pretty wild arrangement, renamed Le reel des soucoupes volantes – ‘The reel of the flying saucers’
