Scholar who added to Scots culture through piping

Frans Buisman, a Dutch scholar who spent 30 years researching and writing about Scottish piping, has died as a result of a road accident.

Frans Buisman's life was brought to an abrupt end by a skidding car while cycling on a mountain road in Austria, but his passing should not go unmarked in Scotland, for he has added to the nation's culture through his voluntary and tenacious study of Scottish piping, particularly ''Piobaireachd'', over the past 30 years.

Through a continuous output of writing that began in 1984, and culminating last year in

the publication by the universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen

of The MacArthur-MacGregor manuscript of Piobaireachd (1820), Frans Buisman created a major legacy - to the world of Scots piping in particular, but also to the people of Scotland

- hauling a major portion of Gaelic culture out of mystery, myth, and disdain into higher understanding and respect.

His exhaustive analysis of the early pibroch sources will serve as the foundation for historically informed performances

of pibroch for generations to come. Frans had more recently extended his research to the early music of the Welsh and Gaelic harps, and had twice delivered papers at the Centre for Advanced Welsh Music Studies in Bangor. His pip-

ing research appeared in the British Journal for Ethnomusicology, the Proceedings of the Piobaireachd Society Conference, and 17 articles in the

Piping Times (full details at www.pibroch.net/buisman).

Frans worked at Amsterdam University Library, where he catalogued ''exotica'' - any book the other cataloguers had trouble with, learning new languages when required. He

originally studied Indian and Persian languages and culture, and later learned Scottish Gaelic, Chinese, and Japanese. His library colleagues described him as irreplaceable.

Scots and Irish music was popular in Holland in the late 1960s and this brought Frans to Scotland where his academic training and curiosity led him to adopt what was then a severely under-studied art form. When I first met Frans in Sandy Bell's bar in Edinburgh, in the early 1970s, he was already speak-

ing English with a tinge of a Scots accent. He was a quiet person who spoke with a slight stammer. This may have given people the impression that

his vocabulary was on the light side, but he was very erudite

and no more so than when proving a point.

Published last November by the universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen, Frans's scholarship on The MacArthur-MacGregor manuscript of Piobaireachd (1820) fills 115 pages. It justly merits its place as volume one in a new series of quality editions entitled The Music of Scotland.

Outside the crematorium

in Hoorn, near Amsterdam, friends and family were greeted by the sound of the pipes, with Frans's own edition of Cumha MhicAoidh, or The chief of Mackay's Lament played by

his close friend and colleague Barnaby Brown.

During the ceremony, Allan MacDonald played MacIntosh's Lament and the ground of The Big Spree, a tune Frans himself played before turning his attentions exclusively to research. Allan, who is preparing a book on the relationship between Gaelic song and

the pibroch ''ground'', was in constant communication with Frans about his work. Also present was the Gaelic singer, Margaret Stewart, whose CD with Allan MacDonald, Fhuair

mi pog, received a substantial review by Frans in Stichting A G van Hamel voor Keltische Studies, a journal in which he shared his immense knowledge of pibroch with Dutch readers.

While talking with family and friends from both sides of the North Sea, it became obvious that Frans had many interests and talents, but didn't divulge his varied pursuits to everyone. For all but one of his eight brothers and sisters, it was quite a surprise to learn that he had published a book, and an important one at that.

In May 2002 he came to Scotland for the last time. He was in grand spirits. We were

so pleased for him. All the years of study and perseverance,

all the early disappointments while establishing a reputation, trying to find a publisher and,

at last, a book in print. He was very pleased with the result and, were it not for a tragic road accident, he would certainly have produced another.

Frans Buisman, musicologist; born December 1, 1942, died September 15, 2002.

DOUGIE ANDERSON