LAST week it was Munro and McLean. This week it’s McGibbon and Foulis. Sounds like purveyors of dairy products, but they were men of music. McGibbon lived from 1696 to 1756, and Foulis from 1710 to 1773 when we were all very Enlightened, hem-hem.

McGibbon made a big impression, not only in his own time, for he is remembered with nostalgia by the poet Robert Fergusson, writing in the 1770s.

MacGibbon’s gane:
Ah! waes my heart!
The man in music maist expert
Wha cou’d sweet melody impart,
And tune the reed
Wi’ sic a slee and pawky art;
But now he’s dead.

There’s just a wee bit of a puzzle here: he is remembered as a composer and violinist, but Fergusson remembering him as a reed-instrument player. Was he both?

McGibbon subscribed to McLean’s Twelve Solo’s or Sonata’s. Yup, like I said, they were already challenged by apostrophes nearly three hundred years ago, but I’m a fully paid-up academic so I have to spell it as it was.

McGibbon’s dad was probably Duncan McGibbon who was a “violer” in Glasgow, so it’s likely enough he trained his son William (one of seven children) as a violinist. And William was pretty good as a violinist. As good as McLean. How do we know? By the music they wrote. And what did he make of the Italian dominance? Well, he composed much of his music in the Italian style and he didn’t write whole sonatas based on Scottish tunes as Munro and McLean had done. But McGibbon did publish loads of arrangements and variations on Scots tunes alongside his more Italianate sonatas.

READ MORE: How Alexander Munro and Charles McLean outsmarted the Italians

William studied in London with William Corbett and may have travelled with Corbett to Rome but by 1726 he was employed by the Edinburgh Musical Society as a violinist and music copyist, in which employment he remained for the rest of his life.

He produced 12 trio sonatas for two flutes or violins and continuo, published in 1729 and 1734; and, in 1740 and 1748, 12 sonatas for flute or violin and continuo. You remember “continuo” from last week? No? It was the 18th-century musician’s life-raft, the player at the keyboard whose music had all the parts and with a tame cellist or bassoonist helping out the bass part. The complete sonatas are published in A-R editions, edited and with critical commentary by Dr Elizabeth Ford.

You think 18th-century Scottish composers are a thing of the past? No they’re not. Here we have in Ford a leading scholar who has had to go back to the USA and apply for a visa to allow her to return and continue her work on these self-same composers. Her work generates work for others. With music, history lives. Readers of The National may remember Elizabeth’s story. It is still unresolved.

McGibbon’s 1723 sonatas were dedicated to Susanna Kennedy. She was herself a flautist – and a great beauty. Some said playing the flute distorted the appearance and was not to be encouraged in ladies – but this same Susanna was wooed by the composer John Clerk of Penicuik with the following thoroughly seductive poem, concealed inside the flute he gave her, so she had to take it out and read it if she were to be able to play the instrument. Nice one, John Clerk! Too bad it didn’t work – maybe she didn’t like being called Sylvia, which was a standard name in love songs. Instead, she married a wealthy nobleman and became Countess of Eglintoun.

The National:

Here’s the poem:

Harmonious pipe, how I envye thy bliss,
When press’d to Sylphia’s lips with gentle kiss!
And when her tender fingers round thee move
In soft embrace, I listen and approve
Those melting notes, which soothe my soul to love
Embalm’d with odours from her breath that flow,
You yield your music when she’s pleased to blow;
And thus at once the charming lovely fair
Delights with sounds, with sweets perfumes the air.
Go, happy pipe, and ever mindful be To court the charming Sylphia for me;
Tell all I feel – you cannot tell too much –
Repeat my love at each soft melting touch;
Since I to her my liberty resign, Take thou the care to tune her heart to mine.

Although most of McGibbon’s Sonatas were composed with the flute in mind, he was an outstanding violinist, expecting a higher level of technique than was generally looked for in Britain. In his Sixth Sonata from 1729, the violin has a showy part with double-stops and rapid passage-work, surely designed for himself to display his skills. But, as we have seen in the works of McLean, he was not alone, and with both composers publishing technically demanding works, we may assume that others were expected to play them; so performances at the concerts of the Edinburgh Musical Society (formed in 1728) will have been of a high standard.

By the way, although the violins on which Scottish musicians were playing were usually Italian or modelled on Italian violins, there were soon to be very good Scottish violin makers.

One of the early ones was John Grice. David Rattray’s wonderful book on the subject of Violin Making in Scotland (Oxford 2006) has stunning photographs of their work.

MCGIBBON’S style is fluent rather than personally characteristic, but that is not to say that his music is without character. Rather, his voice is one of a composer sufficiently comfortable with the lingua franca of the time to give it varied and sometimes searching expression.

The trio Sonata No.1 in D major from the 1734 set is pastoral in character and features a lovely mixture of contrast and interplay between the two flutes over a relatively static bass. But in trio Sonata No. 3 in B minor, a typical baroque walking bass gives a note of solemnity, and the contrasts between loud and soft of the second movement Allegro add to its urgency.

The National:

Several of the trio sonatas could be as easily played by a small orchestra as by a chamber group and have been performed successfully in that garb. Haydn was just two years old when McGibbon composed the G major Sonata, but when Haydn started composing he too drew no clear boundaries between orchestral and chamber music. Composers used what came to hand, though the Earl of Kellie produced works unequivocally orchestral in character; but he is going to need an essay all to himself.

This sort of music was known to Bonnie Prince Charlie, for on the eve of Culloden in Kilravock House, where chamber music was much cultivated, he joined in the music-making, playing the cello and helping pass what must have been a tense evening.

A subscriber to McGibbon’s publicatons and performer beside him at the Music Society concerts was the physician David Foulis (1710-1773). He was a medical student of Alexander Munro, of whom we heard last week. Foulis’ family were wealthy and his father had purchased and restored Woodhall House, south-west of Edinburgh, but it didn’t do David much good.

Foulis’ only known works are Six Solos For The Violin ... Composed by a Gentleman, and a minuet and march. He inscribed the sonatas to Francis Charteris of Amisfield which is odd. The sonatas are refined, Charteris rather less so, being a member of the Wig Club which was focused more on the erotic than the spiritual. ‘Nuff said.

The solos are varied, lovely, and beautifully written for the instrument. Judging from the variety of style and form, their composition was spread over a number of years. Sonata I is in the baroque form that McGibbon was using. Its first movement has the dotted rhythms and pomp and circumstance of the French Overture.

The French are top notch at pomp and circumstance – the recording made by their army musicians of Bruce’s March to Bannockburn (Scots Wha Hae) leaves everyone else struggling out of the trenches while they march triumphant down the famous road of Fame.

Sonatas V and VI are cast in three movements, the first slow, the second fast and the last dance-like in character, while the remaining three sonatas follow the Neapolitan pattern (fast, slow, fast) which was to form the basis of the classical sonata. The Neapolitans, being much further south, are more frivolous than the French – but we Northerners learnt how to sort all that out.

Though a doctor by profession, Foulis must have been a very competent player, and his compositional skills suggest that had he applied himself to more ambitious things he would have been a composer to reckon with.

The variety in the over-all form of his sonatas is also reflected in the internal structures of the music. Simple binary form is used for the siciliano-style Largo of Sonata III. The Siciliano is a gentle pastoral affair which, considering the Sicilians are even further south than the Neapolitans, can best be explained as being inspired by a siesta.

Though he came from a wealthy family, David Foulis died in poverty, apparently rejected by them, either on account of a marriage they disapproved of or his having continued his medical studies in Leyden rather than return home to take up the family estates - which seem in any case to have followed an odd line of succession. His position in Scottish music is similar, the record of his activities scanty, his undeserved obscurity only recently corrected.

Foulis, Munro, McLean and McGibbon are all figures of importance, but the most prolific and significant of the Scottish composers, and one who consciously developed a native style within a classical framework was James Oswald.

He’s my favourite and we’ll meet him in a couple of weeks, but next week is given over to philosophy and we are going to polish David Hume’s big toe. Honest.