In Soundyngs’ very first post in January 2022 we suggested that this site had a working definition of ‘Scottish Music’ as “music that has made a contribution in past times to cultural life within Scotland”.
The book reviewed here agrees that Scotland’s music is a key to her culture, but the editorial framing takes a rather different approach, arguing that all discussions of ‘Scotland’s music’ derive from and need to define what constitutes “traditional” music, as something distinct from “art music” or “popular music”. The logic of their argument is based on contemporary understanding of these terms: as the essays within the volume explore, the categories are more porous and prone to cross-over within local and individual practice than might be assumed from the editors’ opening statements in their Preface. In fact, the book extends considerably beyond this: what we have here is partly an interrogation of what “tradition” means to people in contemporary Scotland, a useful contribution to that ongoing debate. The editors have been generous in including some contributions from writers pushing for a wider definition, or whose sense of what constitutes “tradition” might not be completely aligned with their own. Essays span widely across different areas of practice.
The essays in the book arose from a conference in the University of Newcastle in October 2014. This was a highly charged period for Scottish politics and its associated arts and culture discussions. The conference took place within a month of the independence referendum narrowly rejecting a ‘yes’ vote. This book’s editorial articulation of a particularly ethnic idea of “tradition” is (Soundyngs suggests) needs to be understood, at least in part, as a response to the fierce debates of that period. It also reflects the continuing competition for cultural resources in a “small nation” context, and as part of a longer-term contemporary discomfort with what the editors express as “our globalising and deterritorialized times” (Preface p.xv).
The book groups its contributions in 4 sections: policy and practice; porosity, genres, hybridity; home and host; and, the past in the present. These are astute divisions, addressing the core ideological challenges at play in this debate: i.e. the debates about the kind of music deserving public funding (politics); the necessary sensitivity to over-simplistic category definitions (ontologies); the wash-back cycles of diasporic dialogues (local vs global); and the impact of ongoing historiographical revisions on our understanding of our musical past (narratives about past selves constructive of present identity).
In section 1, essays by McKerrell, Josephine Miller, David Francis and Fiona Mackenzie lay out the points of argument showing why traditional music is so important to the articulation of Scottish identity, deserving of public funding and constructive in public debates about citizen empowerment. Mairi McFadyen’s reflection on music and referendum politics, that closes this section (pp.60-77) is a well-positioned comment on the pro-independent position taken by many musicians across all genres in 2014, remarking that in that heated period, “the heavily pro-independence voice of the arts community at large and the traditional music sector in particular may have obscured the opinions of those within it who were less committed, or indeed, directly opposed” (p.61). Macfadyen positions herself as outward-looking and inclusive (p.62). As a cultural activist associated with the TradYES strand of the ‘National Collective’ movement, she argues in her essay for “civic” rather than “ethnic” nationalism (p.63) in line with the SNP’s own policy formulations. Her essay acknowledges that the “traditional music” category is dynamic and she hopes to see a more open definition moving forward of what this might include; she argues that music’s power to both construct and express the emergent relationship between local and wider identities had been powerfully focussed by the 2014 referendum. McFadyen also documents the emergence of a new “tradition” of political songs created around the referendum. Despite the voting outcome, the long-term implications of this moment potentially could, she suggests, open a new vein of political articulacy in Scottish music. The book appeared very much in the early days of the “performative response” (p.66) to the events of 2014: possibly, in 7 years after its publication, it would be timely for more research to revisit this question of the political content of Scottish music more widely.
Part two of the book considers ways in which the ‘traditions’ of music change in contact with wider cultural pressures. Joshua Dickson, head of the traditional music program at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, thinks about how conservatoire provision has changed to reflect the values of wider performance practice. Meghan McAvoy (“Slaying the Tartan Monster”) considers how “traditional” musicians have updated their practice in ways that have moved away from its roots as oral and communal: “throughout the latter half of the twentieth century Scottish folk music has become increasingly professionalized and commercialised” (p.97). McAvoy shows how processes of hybridisation (“folk-fusion”) that twist away from pre-defined commercial categories might be understood as sites of resistance to “commodification” of ideas about tradition. Here, her argument is rightly reflective of trends in popular music. Scotland is a fertile home for indie bands of all kinds of cross-over musics. Small-scale record labels proliferate, assisted by new digital streaming options; again, 7 years after this book appears, more research could look at this folk-pop crossover practice. In contrast with McFadyen, McAvoy suggests that this resistance is more “aesthetic” than overtly political (p.98): “folk is an increasingly upwardly mobile genre” (p.101). Folk music, for McAvoy, has moved closer to the values that might in earlier times been associated with art music (ironically, something that Hugh MacDiarmid advocated for in the earlier nationalism of the 1920s), identifying with modernism rather than with the past. Later in this section, David McGuiness’s essay “The Problem with ‘traditional’” (pp.122-138) looks back to the 18th and early 19th centuries, suggesting that in this period – when the “traditional” repertoire by figures such as Niel Gow was first being coded as “national” – there were substantial cross-fertilisations between indigenous and wider European music-making: “placing the authentication of tradition within a community will always suppress individuality to some extent” (p. 132). Finally in part 2, Phil Alexander shifts the lens from history to geography, thinking about “Scottish Latin” music played by the fusion band “Salsa Celtica” (pp.139-156), and providing a hinge to the consideration of globalisation in the next section. Together, the essays in part 2 push to expand what we understand by “traditional” music.
The two essays in part 3, “Home and Host”, discuss how Scottish music travelled globally with Scottish emigrants (M J Grant, pp.159-174)) and with Scottish dancing competitions (Patricia H Ballantyne, pp.175-188), to become a marker of “roots” identity. Globalisation – particular the legacy of past imperial expansion – makes it difficult to restrict ideas of “Scottish” identity to one geographical locality. Scottish music has and still does travel with diasporic Scots.
The final section of essays focus on historiography: revisions which have refreshed our understanding of what enshrined past “traditions” might encompass. Danni Glover (pp.191-200) takes a fresh look at the preservation of Scottish ballads, as 18th century English clergyman Thomas Percy and others translated oral to print culture, arguing that the processes at work here often articulated connections between southern Scotland and northern England that complicate a narrative of singular “Scottish” identity and instead fed into to the 19th century experience of Scottish-British political culture. Stuart Eydmann (pp.201-216), who is known to many for his expertise in the German-invented but Scottish-ubiquitous accordion, writes about his experience of resistances within the “trad music” community to rigorous academic research on these cosmopolitan instruments, while also considering how the undoubted experience of practitioners active through periods of cultural “revival” can inform academic work working in the aftermath of such “revivals”. The amateur interest in the histories of traditions impacts revival practice. Robbie Gibson (pp.217-229) looks specifically at historically-informed practice in fiddle playing, and highlights that crossover between “classical” music and “traditional” music is historically common, Scott Skinner being one obvious instance. Karen McAulay’s chapter (pp.230-239) visits the bibliographic evidence that she examines in greater depth in her monographs, suggesting from this that a “binary opposition between unwritten tradition and composed music is fraught with difficulty” (p.232); the Folk Revival attention to oral practice contributed a great deal, but orality itself has historically interacted with printed material in complex ways. Ideas about “authenticity”, McAulay argues, need to be examined carefully, since traditions emerge from the interaction of uncertain, often contested, sources (p.234-5). She recommends educators look at a broad variety of historical printed materials, considering the uses they might have had in past times. Acts of compilation and anthologising are in themselves boundary-making expressions of “Scottish” identity.
Having allowed many of the essays in the collection to expand and problematise what is meant by “tradition”, the editors allow themselves the final word. Gary West (pp.240-251) focusses his discussion through the lens of war, asking how conflict has helped to define ideas of nationhood. As a bagpiper, West has a keen understanding of how that particular tradition has, literally, gone to war, and understands its power in voicing exhortation and lament. His discussion shows how bagpipe repertoire is a record of the historical traumas experienced by Scottish people, particularly the memory of the Great War, after which a new kind of national politics grew up. He summarises, “it does seem to me that ‘Scotland’ has for long served as a form of relational agency for the construction of traditional music and song, and that this agency relies upon the deeply local and place-bound concepts of family, love, work and landscape for its inspiration and impetus” (p.251).
A final afterword by popular music sociologist Simon Frith (p.253-259) suggests that there needs to be more discussion on the role of the kinds of music that reflect Scottish interactions with global popular forms. Scotland’s professional musicians, and Scotland’s audiences, who are necessarily responsive to wider music culture, have always shown tremendous capacity to appropriate these forms to local use. Music is social, learned and functional; performance contexts matter even more than ideology, and in modern contexts, Scottish popular music includes a wide variety of performance contexts. “Traditional music is made with a particular kind of historical ideology” (p.257); Frith reminds us that “Scotland” is “a political construction”, and that debates about what is or isn’t “Scottish” music express political ideas about what should be in or outside the pale.
Conclusion
Simon McKerrell’s own research website (see link in further reading) reflectively takes on board this provisionality. Looking back on the period of the project reflected in this book and others, his current website reflects “In essence the key finding of this research was that musical participation on a regular basis through time was the most important factor in developing a sense of belonging in this musical community (in contrast to older notions of authenticity and ethnicity or place of canonical repertoire).” (McKerrell, website). He continues to be primarily interested in investigating the practice of Scottish Traditional Music (SMT).
In part, the debates here between art / trad / popular music are revisiting, and updating, the debates of the mid-20th century folk revival period between the relative worth of art / folk / popular music. Back then, the politics were as much left wing as nationalist, with the art / folk tension expressing the high / low opposition of class politics, and popular music not much in the debate, dismissed by academic followers of the Frankfurt School (Adorno especially) as reducing audiences to automatons of commercial market manipulation. Today, new approaches to composition, and a commitment to civic responsibility that reaches out more to audiences, has transformed the practice of those who consider themselves ‘art’ musicians; popular music, which does not necessarily include “traditional” music as might be understood by this book’s editors, indisputably speaks to the lived experience of Scots, including their politics. The book doesn’t discuss the central belt hip-hop Scots-Nationalist band Stanley Odd, for example, who were particularly active around the time of the Referendum debates. Scottish “traditional music” still connects strongly with local historical identities but is also capable of being reproduced in globalised, de-territorialised forms; the boundaries between authentic and ersatz music are often not clearly defined. This is a rich and thought-provoking book, but Frith’s Afterword encourages us to see it as part of an ongoing debate rather than the last word.
Further Reading
- Simon McKerrell and Gary West (eds.), Understanding Scotland Musically: Folk, Tradition and Policy (London: Routledge, 2018)
- Simon McKerrell, “Understanding Scotland Musically“, website accessed 10 January 2025.