Wynds, vennels and dual carriageways : the changing nature of Scottish music
- Submitting institution
-
Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 2844348
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
-
-
- Book title
- Understanding Scotland musically : folk, tradition and policy
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9781138205222
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- February
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The book in which this chapter is published, was an outcome from an AHRC-sponsored conference, entitled (like the book), ‘Understanding Scotland Musically’, seeking to ask how we might understand Scotland’s musical landscape in terms of – quoting from the preface – ‘policy and practice; porosity, genres, hybridity; home and host; and the past in the present’. This chapter falls into the final of these categories and was developed from a paper first given at the conference.
My paper, like that by David McGuinness, arose from work that we undertook for the AHRC-funded Bass Culture project. My own was further influenced by my earlier doctoral research on Scottish song collections of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century; and by my experience of instructing undergraduates in the evaluation of historical collections. The questions which drove me were:
What makes Scottish music ‘Scottish’ to the listener or performer?
How did compilers see their own collections at the time of writing?
How can we describe Scottish music today, given that everything has changed vis a vis the repertoire, and the context in which we enjoy and talk about it (even the terminology has changed, from ‘national’ to ‘folk’ to ‘traditional’)?
Why is there the resistance to conceding that traditional songs did not just ‘grow’ like weeds, without some element of authorial creativity?
The chapter was highlighted by James MacMillan in his review of the volume for the Scottish Review (11 April 2018) and is mentioned favourably by a review in Northern Scotland Vol.10#2, 217-220 in which the reviewer writes: ‘As Karen E. McAulay notes in her essay, we can be misled by trying to interpret past musical movements and aesthetics by means of present-day values and judgements. She offers further choice words: "It does not pay to pin things down too precisely."'
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -