Runrig - Loch Lomond

[Leroy]

Can anyone help me with a phonetic pronouncation of the, '...ho, ho blah blah ho...' section of the Runrig song, 'Loch Lomond ? Also, what does it mean ?

[Eoghan]

BRB dying.

I'm assuming you're referring to the section that goes as follows;

Ho, ho mo leannan
Ho mo leannan bhoidheach

It translates as

Oh, my wee bairn, (Oh my little child)
Oh my wee bonny bairn (oh my little, beautiful child)

Leannan could also be used as sweetheart.

Here's a rough transcription;

hoe hoe moe lahn anne
hoe hoe moe lahn anne woy och

[eirinn14]

Actually a lot of the "ho/horo-horainn"s in Runrig and other Gaelic songs are what is known as vocables. They're a loose equivalent of our "la-la-la" but have their origins in pipe music, where each essentially meaningless sylablle corresponded to a note on the pipes and was a way to teach music where a large proportion of the population was illiterate. Some of the modern songs will have an actual word thrown in for example "leannan" meaning sweetheart, but generally these choruses don't have a meaning as such.

[ceid donn]

Actually, their roots are in Renaissance music inspired by Italian and French songs, just like the fa la la of English madrigals. A lot of Scottish folk music was very influenced by the music of what classical music historians call the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Music histories just tend to not mention it because 1) unlike English Renaissance folk music, like madrigals, most Scottish music of the time was not written down (with the except of a few collections of lute music and a few other things that's survived), but passed down orally and 2) cultural bias for centuries that deemed the culture of the Scots, and especially the Gaels as being primitive and uncultured. So, for example, a lot people over the centuries have assumed that the "ho ri ro" and such in Scottish music must have originated within supposedly rustic and isolated Scottish traditions (never mind that Scottish lute music from the Renaissance is more like French lute music than English lute music is to either!). But then these same folks happily give the English credit for being worldly and cultured enough to model their "fa la la" madrigals after the French and Italians. But since we know that the use of vocables in vocal music in both Scotland and England appear around the time--when Italian and French music was being spread throughout the British Isles during the Renaissance--we can safely assume their share that common source.

The use of vocables is believed to imitate instruments, allowing vocalists to sing unaccompanied while filling in a instrumental refrain, but it's just a theory. The tradition in Europe is so old, we can only guess. But it's so prevalent across Europe that one cannot assume it's based on imitating any one particular instrument, just on the kind of refrain/melody that would have been played by whatever instruments they had on hand--harp, lute, vihuela, viols, crumhorns, shawms or bagpipes.

Now, port-a-beul is a Scottish musical tradition that we can say with a lot of certainly was based on imitating instrumental music, namely Scottish fiddle and bagpipes, because this tradition is more recent and specific to Gaelic-speaking regions. We know the port-a-beul's development was largely influenced by the banning of traditional Gaelic instrumental music in the Highlands after the suppression of the Jacobite uprising, and the Gaels turn a lot of instrumental tunes into "mouth music," thus preserving the forms of music played on those instrument, like reels, jigs, strathspeys, puirt (short melodic tunes), òrain mòra (airs and laments) and pìobaireachd (pibroch). And naturally, they incorporated the use of vocables that had been a part of Scottish music since the Renaissance.

Sorry for the lecture, but as a musician and (in my earlier days) a Renaissance lutenist, this is a point of particular fascination about Scottish music for me.