Songs of the Hebrides album cover with water colour suggesting waves and heather colours

Review: Marjory Kennedy Fraser’s Songs of the Hebrides: a virtual concert-lecture

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Soundyngs editor writes: recently I visited Joan Busby, and a cup of tea turned into a wonderful private 2 hour lecture-recital with notes, Joan singing and me scrambling my way through the accompaniments, that gave me an immersive appreciation of how Marjory Kennedy Fraser’s arrangements of Gaelic song intersected with her remarkable life.  Joan talked about Kennedy Fraser’s 4-year voyage around Australia, New Zealand and North America made in her teens with her singer father, David Kennedy; her training in bel canto singing in Italy and France; and her life as a musician in Edinburgh, all culminating in her years of work collecting and arranging Gaelic songs in the Hebrides from 1905.

This post is sharing with Soundyings readers the bones of that visit, with Joan’s script generously provided and attached, and links to Joan’s recordings of the songs. Joan’s singing of these songs reinforces the case for taking Kennedy Fraser seriously both as a musician an as a curator of repertoire. I hope that this post, linked to Joan’s script and album tracks, will to share that appreciation. Joan is a renowned mezzo, for many years a teacher of voice at Edinburgh Napier University, and founder of the Oxenfoord International Summer School, and of the Handel at Hopetoun Festival. I can’t share her cup of tea and cake, with you, but I can share her insights and singing.

Kennedy Fraser has not been treated kindly by folk musicians from the 20th century ‘revival’ period, who criticised her arrangements of Gaelic songs (for this history, and timely reappraisal, see Blankenhorn, 2018). Her arrangements were prepared with the assistance of the Reverent Kenneth Macleod, a native Gaelic speaker born in Eigg with ancestors from Skye, Harris and the Western Highlands, who undertook English translations to go with Kennedy Fraser’s composed accompaniments.  The songs thus re-composed both linguistically, instrumentally and in performance style were intended primarily for non-Gaelic-speaking audiences, evoking for them the idea of ancient Gaelic harpist and singer. In concert tours of this material, Kennedy Fraser would sing this material in an ‘art music’ bel canto style; her daughter Patuffa could play the clàrsach. Fortunately for wider performance purposes, the piano also serves.

Research by both Blankenhorn and Ahlander has established Kennedy Fraser’s serious efforts to master Gaelic, and her cultivation of contemporary writers such as Alexander Carmichael who were also actively collecting this material.  While it is undoubtedly true that her accompaniments and Macleod’s English translations reflect a late romantic ‘Celtic twilight’ late 19th century aesthetic that is very different from the unadorned field notes made by her near-contemporary in Skye, Francis Tolmie, if you look carefully at the header material in the multiple volumes of Kennedy Fraser’s Songs of the Hebrides (1909, 1917 and 1921, with a final volume in 1929) you can see she did make efforts to record the names of the people from whom she learned the tunes and lyrics of this remarkable repertoire.

Kennedy Fraser also made recordings of songs heard in the Islands using wax cylinders, which, together with her compositions and notes, she bequeathed to the University of Edinburgh in 1930, the year of her death.  People such as Vaughan Williams in English similarly set folk songs to piano accompaniments in their own contemporary national style; over in western Europe, composers such as the Hungarian Zoltán Kodály deployed similar means to collect but also transform folk song reflecting ‘art’ song techniques. Part of the reception challenge here is that unlike Kennedy Fraser, the English and Hungarian collectors did not also translate from a minority language to a dominant one with the additional baggage of political and cultural hegemonic imbalance.

Virginia Blankenhorn’s research is very useful here in helping us understand why the early twentieth century appreciation of the “Celtic twilight” style was a hinge around which later Gaels came to criticise Kennedy Fraser’s approach as being overly ‘anglified’ and “middle-class”, a kind of cultural appropriation, to use contemporary terms. Blankenhorn is admirably even-handed in helping us to understand that the ‘art song’ context in which Kennedy Fraser was working has its own merits and terms of engagement, and that Kennedy Fraser could not in all fairness have anticipated the political pressures of the “folk” revivalists working after she did.

An early note of warning was sounded by Hugh MacDiarmid, who wrote in April 1926 that Kennedy Fraser’s songs were “dated”, belonging to a late 19th century aesthetic, and showing signs of the “artificiality and decadence” of that period (Blankenhorn, p.10).  Others of the Scottish literary renaissance piled in: Kennedy Fraser’s work fell on the wrong side of modernist national politics. Later that year, MacDiarmid went on to praise the art songs of Frances George Scott in a famous 1926 essay about new, modern, Scottish music, particularly commending Scott for setting Scots poetry and the spirit of Scottish musical melodies using modern, international art song style (Hugh MacDiarmid, 1925). MacDiarmid’s enthurisasm, not least, might have been spurred for encountering his own poetry in modern song.  In time, grass-roots folkoric collecting by people like John Lorne Campbell overtook Kennedy Fraser’s field methods. By the time the folk-revivalists of the 1950s and 60s were revisiting this material, Kennedy Fraser was all-too-easy to attack: the wrong class, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong century. Even Kennedy Fraser’s old-fashioned and fast-deteriorating wax cylinders were ripe for criticism (see Blankenhorn, p.14, quoting Lorne Campbell).

What Joan Busy did for me was to help me to understand the particular biographic situation out of which Kennedy Fraser’s creative work emerged.  Joan’s notes connect with Kennedy Fraser’s autobiographical accounts of her travels, with her father, around Australia and New Zealand, singing to Scots who had settled far from home. Recent work in Australia on particular on the ways in which music spoke to memories of home in emigrant communities intersect with the accounts in A Life of Song of concerts in the outback, and continuing interest in her legacy in Australia today (e.g. Coombs, 2007). This nostalgia might not be the Hebridean Gaelic “insider” reality, but it does nevertheless speak to the real historical identity music of people in the Scottish diaspora.  The work – the travels, the professionalism shown – is not simply ‘money grubbing’ (as one mid-century critic complained), but rather, impressive and even courageous.

Even if subsequent singers and collectors went back to the sources and re-constructed the performance styles back to the bothy and away from the concert platform, Kennedy Fraser’s work brought the material to new generations and prompted wider attention and discussion. Yes, this is Gaelic-music repackaged for outsiders.  But nevertheless, it is an imaginative cross-cultural, and cross-generational, work of outreach, and on its own terms, still provides opportunities for fine singing experiences. Many of these songs formed the core of the ‘Hebridean song’ repertoire I remember learning in school in the Highlands in the 1970s, and the work also travelled widely to emigrant Scottish communities around the world.

But ultimately, what Kennedy Fraser’s songs need is a fine singer (rather finer than the 1970s classroom afforded).  Here, I’m without hesitation grateful to Joan Busby – credited in the header of this post – for sharing her art with me, and bring her recording to your attention (see in Further Reading and Listening).

Further Reading and Listening

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