This review covers books which have been out for a few years now, but which are part of a larger, ongoing, research project, and which offer a chance to think about how music sits within research into Scottish cultural and history.
The European Ethnological Research Centre which coordinates this series sits within the School of Celtic & Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh and carries out research into Scottish “everyday life and society”. Since 2011, their work has been gathered up under two themes – the spoken word and the written word – which doesn’t fully embrace the musical sounds we might be interested in. Earlier published work from this group shows how music is situated within these enquiries. This review finds a) that music is clearly flagged in this series as a discrete topic in Scottish life but b) this also carriess a potential risk, as separating fields of activity can create a silo effect. I haven’t reviewed how this impacts other topics, but I can say based on what I’ve read that the editorial discussions might want to think about how one field reaches out into other. In the case of music, studies on other topics don’t necessarily address music as a tool, a lens, a process, a facet, that is integrated with rather than separate from that field of practice. Silos can be useful highlighting tools, but in further research we might want to make their walls transparent, or possibly, think more in terms of a weave than a container. Tartan, not tins, if you like.
Ongoing, the Centre is publishing 14 thematic volumes on aspects of Scottish ‘everyday life’ (see here https://llc.ed.ac.uk/celtic-scottish-studies/research/eerc/life-and-society for the full list). These are conceptually encyclopedic, but invite researchers to do more that crosses the category listings.
Volume 10 in the series, Oral Literature and Performance Culture (2007), is most relevant to Soundyngs’ interests, with chapters on different categories of music – trad, folk and classical, although not popular – a recurrent gap in a lot of research, I’m finding. A running theme is interrogation of the idea of “tradition” across different genres, demonstrating that “tradition” is a dynamic process that significantly intersects with literary and print culture, rather than a fixed repertoire derived from some rarified notion about a purely oral indigenous practice.
There are no less than 5 editors for this book, and 32 separate essays by many other writers, which produces diverse views on the oral-print relationship, and indeed, to what constitutes ‘Scottish music’. Consideration is given to diasporic Scots as well as Scots at home, and to sites of performance from ceilidh houses and travellers’ campsites to university departments and the concert hall.
The book has large internal divisions into three parts. Part one applies the lens of narrative and “story telling” musical forms and performance contexts, informed by a sense that narrative shapes histories which shape ideas of tradition. Part two provides histories of instruments and specific repertoires, including discussion of transmission methods of oral culture into cheap print media such as chapbooks and broadsides. Part three is a bit of a miscellany, including art music, dance and drama.
In its coverage, this book is reasonably comprehensive (except for that gap in popular music) as a stocktaking of Scottish music research at the opening of the 21st century.
I’ve also sampled 2 further volumes because – logically enough – music and oral culture crop up across many different areas of everyday life, as contemporary ethnographic writing on music’s reach (e.g. Tia de Nora, Music in Everyday Life, 2011) has shown. Researchers interested specifically in music, therefore, might want to dip into more than just volume 10; you might expect to find find musical references scattered elsewhere.
Volume 11 discusses education, with an emphasis on institutions and systems rather than granular cultural aspects of the curriculum. At first glance, the index was not encouraging; there was nothing specifically under ‘music’, although one might argue that awareness of geography, culture and even languages (Scots and Gaelic) are primed and even constructed by creative activities such as classroom singing. The gap is more telling because there are 3 index citations to “sport” in Scottish society, and 4 to “Latin, importance of”.
This writer first became aware of Scottish music and its repertoire subdivisions through school songbooks. Living in the Highlands, I was introduced to the notion that Scotland might have different languages and cultural areas (Burns is only part of the story). The volume might (but doesn’t) have included more discussion both of music as a pedagogic tool and of training in music and other areas of creative practice in teaching profession, although to be fair, chapter 13 by Willis B Marker does mention one-year courses taken by those teaching ‘special subjects’ such as music and PE in the earlier 20th century (p.277). Marker’s chapter also discusses the ‘feminisation’ of the teaching profession, which might have gone on to explain why many teachers from this period had some piano skills for classroom singing (learning piano was an aspirational skill for many middle class girls in Scotland). Overall, however, the focus is more on conventional “academic” areas of the syllabus. The inference is that music and creative education was and is less valued within the institutions that shape Scottish education than these “core” subjects. Space is made towards the end of the volume for “informal education” (which includes community and after-school provision): music might have been more fully covered there, but it didn’t really feature.
The most useful chapter in this volume on education is chapter 17, on curriculum and assessment, by David Hartley and Angela Roger. This includes illustrative material on subject areas if not pedagogic musical tools. Featured images of syllabus summaries show that “pianoforte and theory”, “singing in class and private”, and “dancing and physical culture” were listed within the advertised curriculum of Scottish schools such as Craigmillar Park College in the decades after the 1872 Education Act (p.364). This Act created a national school system without a national curriculum; the actual subject list was left to the discretion and resources of individual schools. Although core literacy and numeracy might be assumed to be universal, other areas were discretionary. This particular case study shows that Craigmillar in Edinburgh was reasonably well-resourced. Other schools in more rural areas or poorer areas of cities might not have been as lucky.
The development of national assessment systems encouraged schools to review their provision. Later in the same chapter, discussion of curricular areas shows that music was listed in 1924 national assessments within a grouping that included art, domestic sciences, and applied science. Groups 1 (English), 2 (mathematics and pure sciences), and 3 (languages classical and modern) have a more coherent feel to them than the final miscellany that is group 4. Music is also positioned in this final bundle as a non-academic subject, and possibly therefore less appealing to aspirant students. In the later 20th century one can read about attempts to create balance in the syllabus between the “creative arts” (p.373) and other curricular areas, including more interest in providing alternative pathways for students with different skills and aptitudes. This volume appeared before the introduction of the so-called “curriculum for excellence” in 2010-11, the results of which have been for all subjects, not just music, rather mixed.
All-in-all, volume 11 gives a perhaps all-too-accurate impression of music being rather less than fully celebrated in Scottish education since 1874. This is sad, because in the pre-Reformation period song schools, and when these were reestablished as parish schools by the 1579 Act of Timeous Remeid, learning to sing was recognised as an essential part of early stages education. Singing supports literacy and aids memory of complex texts. Reasonably, one can only write about what is there – but still, there must have been rather more musical activity than this volume allows itself to cover (maybe the editors felt that volume 10 had said what needed to be said).
Turning from these rather austere institutional histories of education to volume 12, Religion, this has a promising choice of introductory author in Gordon Graham, a moral philosopher who understands more than most how important sacred art can be to worship. Graham provides a clear and concise historical overview of Scottish faith practices which mentions an emphasis on singing metrical psalms and paraphrases (p.9) as Scotland’s particular contribution to the wider Christian world. This volume is not simply about Christianity, however; later chapters also survey the diversity of faith practices to be found, particularly in modern Scotland.
This time, the index is richly provided with musical citations, from BBC religious broadcasts (pp.302 and 647), to repertoires in the Catholic, Episcopalian and Presbyterian branches of Christianity, to revivals such as the missions by Moody and Sankey (p.498), with 4 references to religious music in schools and music teaching. Jewish music also gets a mention. Cross references take us to organs, choirs, hymns, psalm, rock music, song schools and folk and Gaelic music. This is a useful list; writers on religion understand (perhaps through practical experience in ways that educationalists don’t) why music is a useful means of getting across a message and building communities.
Chapter 30, by Douglas Galbraith, on “Music, Church and People” (pp.629-651) elaborates further on the importance of psalmody to the Church of Scotland, although the coverage of this chapter ranges more widely and indeed is as good a general introduction to religious music in Scotland as anything I’ve read. Psalms, Galbraith tells us, were important to the Celtic conversion of Scotland (St Columba was said to be audible from a mile off as he chanted, p.630), the Reformation of Scotland, and to the continuing maintenance of faith communities. Psalms even get into Scottish politics (especially psalm 100, p.629). Readers will learn here about the revival of choirs in Aberdeenshire in the 18th century, and the use of ‘practice verses’ in choir practices which continued into recent times, singing secular words to psalm tunes in order that the music could be learned without insult to the sacred text (p,640). Conversely, sacred texts might also be sung in domestic and informal contexts, for moral improvement and simply, socialising.
This chapter has a lively coverage of the Scottish debates around organs and other instruments (pp.641-2) and the cross-over careers of Presbyterian precentors as opera and concert singers (p.642). The enthusiasm of Victorian singers who gathered in huge numbers to sing psalms and hymns is also a notable aspect of social life in that period. In the modern era, Galbraith highlights the work of contemporary hymn writers such as John Bell and Graham Maule in the Iona Community in producing new, biblically literate, songs, and the incorporation of songs from other global communities and different confessions in recent hymnals (p.647). To my delight, Galbraith also assesses the contribution of rock bands to contemporary worship (p.648-49). “At the close of the [20th] century”, he says, “church music in Scotland was in as good a state of health as it ever has been”. Since then, the same has not been true of formal church attendance in Scotland.
What is particularly attractive in these volumes – indeed, what is core to ethnographic method – is the richness of individual case studies used to illustrate the historical narrative. There are gaps – but there is also much to admire in the chronological ordering and systematic structuring of this material. Libraries should make sure they have complete sets. Including volume 10.
Further Reading
- Scottish Life and Society: A Compendium of Scottish Ethnography
- Volume 10: Oral Literature and Performance Culture John Beech, Owen Hand, Fiona MacDonald, Mark A Mulhern and Jeremy Weston (Edinburgh: John Donald for Birlinn, 2007)
- Volume 11: Education Heather Holmes (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000)
- Volume 12: Religion Colin MacLean and Kenneth Veitch (Edinburgh: John Donald for Birlinn, 2006)
- Tia de Nora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press, 2011)