Image: The Remains of St Fillans Priory, by Andrew Bowden – https://www.flickr.com/photos/bods/3724892950/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94461645 Modern traditional musicians are … Read more
This spring, various social media posts told me that the Caithness Music Festival was celebrating its 70th anniversary (1956-2026). The … Read more
Folk who know, know that Caithness accents are just not like other Highland accents, nor even like Orkney ones. There’s … Read more
Image: Ben Klibreck from Strath Vagastie Road, Photo by Anthony Jeffrey, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2671872 This post is a meditation … Read more
Fiona Mackenzie brings to her biography of Margaret Fay Shaw two significant gifts. Firstly, she spent almost 9 years as … Read more
Soundyngs has posted quite a bit in recent months about the infrastructures for maintaining and disseminating traditional music in Scotland, … Read more
Soundyngs has the greatest of respect for people who make things that make music, since its own cottage industry experiments … Read more
Scotland has a small but highly creative group of independent recording labels, which do important work in curating and shaping … Read more
At the start of its own (digital) life, Soundyngs wondered what constituted ‘Scottish’ music, and decided that if it was … Read more
Image: The Westminster Tournament Roll of John Blanke, a trumpeter in the service of the court of Henry VIII, in … Read more
Soundyngs doesn’t speak Gaelic. There it is; and sorry, the failing memory and current work pressures means that it won’t … Read more
Music, place, and people are woven together in this collection from the far north-west of Scotland. Subtitled ‘òrain, sgeulachdan, puirt’ … Read more