Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Folk music?
Case studies from Scotland
Scotland
Sovereign state
1707: political union with England
Kingdom of Great Britain
House of Stuart:
o James I (1603-25)
o Charles I (1625-49)
o Charles II (1649-85)
o James II (1685-89)
Jacobitism
Movement to restore Stuart kings to thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland
Bonnie Prince Charlie (Young Pretender)
Popular in Scottish Highlands
Uprisings 1715 & 1745
Culloden
o Decisive battle of 1746
o Jacobite forces fall to House of Hanover
Highland Clearances
Highlands and Islands subjected to widespread social and agricultural reforms
The traditional clan system largely dismantled
Evictions from land
Mass migrations:
o Scottish Lowlands
o North American colonies
The Kilt
Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Invention of Scotland (2008)
o essays exploring the myths of Scottish tradition
What Hugh Trevor-Roper refers to the kilt as: Sartorial myth?
o Invention of the short kilt mid 18C by an English industrialist
o Invented because the highlanders were coming to work in large amounts
of fabric so the kilt was created so it wouldnt get caught in the machines.
Tartan myth?
o Sobieski Stuarts: Vestiarium Scoticum (1842)
o Two people from Wales re-invented themselves as a polish branch of
Stuarts. They wrote that book and put up several patterns of tartan and
began to commercially sell them and they became associated with
families.
Scottish Enlightenment
Mid 18C, 75% literacy
Philosophers: Francis Hutcheson (utilitarianism), David Hume (empiricism)
Adam Smith: first great work of modern economics
Significant advances in medicine, law, physics, chemistry, agronomy and geology
Engineering
o James Watt, improved steam engine
o Inventors and engineers helped propel Industrial Revolution
Edinburgh The Athens of the North
o Here I stand at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh, and can, in a few
minutes, take 50 men of genius and learning by the hand.
Music Culture?
Piobaireachd (Pibroch)
o Hereditary pipers to Highland chiefs
o Dates to Middle Ages
o Orally transmitted through vocables and songs
o Notated in late 18C
Pipe music
Fiddle music
Thriving song traditions:
o Gaelic
o English
o Scots (Most people who spoke Scots also spoke English)
Scots (Lowland Scots): Germanic language
Songs
Song = song and poem
Scotch songs popular in London in 1680s
Notations:
o Cut songs off from their bodily economies
There is no longer an oral tradition Its cut off from its culture
o Enforced uniformity
o Converted them to anglicized chamber music
o Made them available to unfamiliar instruments (flute, oboe, harpsichord
later pianoforte)
Printed Collections
Homogenized geographical and cultural peripheries of Britain
The Centre = London; periphery mixed together Highland & Lowland as well as
Irish & Welsh songs
1787 Dunkeld
Neil Gow, in service to Duke of Atholl at Blair Castle
Loch Erroch Side
Folk or art?
Before 19C, music categorized by function
Piobaireachd? How the music is functioning
Haydn, Beethoven?
National song? How they would describe this type of music
Folksong?
Johann Herder: Volkslied 1773
Ossian
Herder: Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples
James Macpherson, 1762: translation from Gaelic of Fingal, by Ossian, blind 3C
bard ?????
Scottish literati believed Ossian to be the Celtic Homer; took Europe by storm
David Hume: initially believed, then didnt though 50 bare-arsed Highlanders
should swear it
Hugh Trevor-Roper: the Literary myth
o Ossian, by Grard,1801
o Ossians Dream, by Ingres, 1813
o Fanciful depictions of Ossian based on the translation of this transcription
Enlightenment
Ideas of the noble savage
o A person unspoiled by civilization.
o Unspoilt, natural, unencumbered by civilization
The search for the noble savage in our midst? Remnant of rural past preserved
within modern Western civilization
Herder: longed to visit a land where what he called the songs of a living folk
still thrived Scotland
Ossian myth spread like wildfire: Goethe, Schubert, Mendelssohn etc.
Scots were creating their own legacy and identity in order to reinforce the idea of
being a living folk
o Musical Museum; Original Scottish Airs
o Relying on oral, not written tradition
19C craze for all things Scottish; Sir Walter Scott, Waverley novels
Haydn & Beethoven contributed to the Scottish imaginary
Sparked the European search for other folk
o Sparks the entire 19th century nationalist movement.
Ossian helped make Scotland the link between the primitive and the civilized
Ideas about Scottish music force a conceptual polarization between folk and art
Romantic art music?
German musicians and writers established an aesthetic hierarchy whose summit was artmusical masterpieces that were supposedly universal and timeless precisely because they
synthesized and absorbed the folk collective into the mind of the individual composing
genius.
(Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of Folk Music and Art Music, 2007: 11)
European composers didnt preserve Scottish airs, they changed them irrevocably
as they converted folk into art
o Tonal harmony & polarities of tonic and dominant negated the modal
character of many airs
o Refined textures & genteel, Germanic musical gestures detracted from the
rugged, untamed image of the Scots and their culture
Just mind you pay your rent to the factor when it's due
And mind your bloody manners when you pay!
For there's no gods and there's precious few heroes
And tell me will we never hear the end
Of puir bluidy Charlie at Culloden yet again?
Though he ran like a rabbit down the glen
Leavin better folk than him to be butchered
Or are you sittin in your Council house, dreamin o your clan?
Waiting for the Jacobites to come and free the land?
Try going down the broo with your claymore in your hand
And count all the Princes in the queue
For there's no gods and there's precious few heroes
So don't talk to me of Scotland the Brave
For if we don't fight soon there'll be nothing left to save
Or would you rather stand and watch them dig your grave
While you wait for the Tartan Messiah?
He'll lead us to the Promised Land with laughter in his eye
We'll all live on the oil and the whisky by and by
Free heavy beer! Pie suppers in the sky!
Will we never have the sense to learn?
That there's no gods and there's precious few heroes
But there's plenty on the dole in the land o the leal
And I'm damned sure that there's plenty live in fear
Of the day we stand together with our shoulders at the wheel
Aye there's no Gods
Leal = loyal
Laird = master, overlord
Factor = landlord
Broo = unemployment office
Claymore = large sword