Keening, Grief, Power and Love
Margery Bray was born into a family of traditional Scottish village musicians and poets. She has pioneered trauma resolution in children through the medium of play therapy and is now exploring keening and Highland bagpipe (pìobaireachd or pibroch) traditions as a form of musical medicine for grief and loss in society. Margery’s conviction – widely shared by tradition bearers across oral cultures – is that sound is not owned but carried. The singer or piper is not the originator of meaning, but its conduit. "Song is taken into the body, inhabited fully, and then released in the spirit with which it was granted. This understanding provides the ethical and spiritual ground for the argument that follows." Sound, connection and coherence Margery says: "Human beings are relational creatures. Connection is central to our capacity to function, to make meaning and to remain whole. When connection is compromised – through loss, rupture, displacement, or overwhelm – internal coherence is often lost. Fragmentation follows, and with it suffering, confusion, and difficulty remaining present in daily life. …sound and vibration are inherently reconnective forces. They do not rely on language or explanation, and they operate directly through the body. Sustained vibration, in particular, provides a woven bedrock that can support reintegration where connection has been strained or lost. What contemporary language names as ‘coherence’ was recognised in earlier Highland communities through ritual sound." Ancient grief wisdom practices She describes how Highland Scotland once possessed a deep communal wisdom of grief: embodied, relational and profoundly spiritual. Before the Reformation, lament was not an internalised or privatised emotion but a collective rite, embedded within community life and ritual practice. Women were central practitioners within this ecology. Through keening – improvised sequences of cries, prayers, incantatory vocables and melodic fragments – women were instrumental in the creation of an emotional and spiritual field in which the grief could move, intensify and resolve. Keening was not merely expressive – it was regulatory, providing both containment and sanctioned cathartic release. It allowed grief to be voiced without overwhelming the individual or fracturing the wider community. Underlying this practice was a Highland cosmology in which the human person is understood as porous to land and spirit. In lament, grief is voiced so that the community may remain coherent in the face of loss. This scriptural summons mirrors the role of keening women within pre-Reformation Scotland and challenges later Protestant discomfort with embodied sorrow and female ritual authority. Margery argues that the Scottish Reformation of 1560 introduced a radically altered spiritual and social order. Keening was condemned as disorderly, superstitious or spiritually dangerous. "What was dismantling was not merely a musical custom, but a feminine ministry of grief: embodied, relational, and spiritually authoritative. Though public keening was prohibited, fragments endured in remote communities and private ritual spaces. Grief, however, lost its communal container." Continuity and displacement: Gaelic song and pìobaireachd cumhaBut lamentation did not disappear from Highland culture. It was displaced into other musical forms, notably Gaelic song and the piping tradition of pìobaireachd (pibroch). Gaelic song retained many of keening’s melodic and affective contours: rising cries, falling resolutions and a tonal gravity shaped by loss, exile and longing for land and kin. "The pìobaireachd lament (cumha) preserved the architecture of grief in instrumental form. A cumha begins with a spacious ùrlar (ground melody), unfolds through intensifying variations – dithis, doublings, taorluath, crunluath – and returns to the ground. This arc mirrors the movement of grief itself: arrival, intensification, rupture, release, and return. Crucially, the form allows sorrow to rise without collapse, and to settle without denial. Bagpipe drones create a continuous sonic field that stabilises attention and supports presence. Sustained vibration provides a woven bedrock that allows experience to move without fragmentation. Melodic structures, when held with care and continuity, provide a safe architecture through which intensity, release and return may safely occur. When approached with tenderness rather than force, pìobaireachd becomes less a display and more a carrying stream, allowing experience to move while remaining held." Margery believes that each stage of a pìobaireachd lament corresponds to a natural human grief process. When played with presence and heart-resonance, the music gently guides the body and nervous system through sorrow and back into steadiness. Piping schools, masculine containment, feminine flow, and balance By the seventeenth century, pìobaireachd had become the most complex and demanding form of Highland instrumental music. Training in the piping schools was rigorous and extended – often lasting many years. "Although pìobaireachd was practised primarily by men, its expressive power depends upon what may be understood as feminine flow within masculine structure. Breath-led phrasing, elasticity of time and emotional permeability are essential to the music’s capacity to hold grief. These qualities echo the function of the conyach within keening, transposed into instrumental form." As pìobaireachd became professionalised and militarised, its relational and breath-based qualities were often constrained. At the same time, the feminine vocal lineage of keening diminished in the face of formal vocal training and performance aesthetics that prioritised control, projection, and polish over raw relational sound. "The result suggests a gradual erosion of balance. Where masculine containment dominates without feminine flow, pìobaireachd risks becoming rigid or abstracted. Similarly, where flow is present without containment, grief risks fragmentation. I am reminded here of the production of Harris Tweed, where the warp and the weft need to be in right relationship in order that a wearable garment can be produced. The tradition itself, therefore, points toward the necessity of balance, rather than dominance of one principle over the other." Readers of Barry Oshry might recognise ‘containment’ and ‘flow’ as synonyms for ‘power’ and ‘love’. Trauma, ritual, and ancestral insight Contemporary trauma research affirms what Highland tradition appears to have known intuitively. Trauma persists when instinctive discharge, vocal, physical, relational is interrupted. Breath, rhythm and communal witnessing are now recognised as essential to integration. Keening provided precisely these elements. Its suppression, followed by the narrowing of grief ritual in modern funerary practice, has left many without a container for sorrow. "Intergenerational trauma persists and emerges in our society as poverty, violence and family dysfunction, not only through what is remembered, but through what is unvoiced." Read the full article on which this Idioticon entry is based: Margery E. Bray: From the keening to the chanter: Feminine lineage in Scottish lament References: |
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