Music in the Great Tapestry of Scotland
Image: Scottish Pop Music – author’s own photo History is a literary genre, but history telling can take other material … Read more
Jane Pettegree
A Multiplicity of Charlies: the winding path connecting Airlie to Loch Lomond
Image: Airlie Castle By Simon Cotterill – https://www.flickr.com/photos/137828720@N06/51368183908/, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=179738954 If you have patience to read to the end of … Read more
Revisiting the Gesto Collection: Karen Marshalsay and St Fillans Monastery
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
Competitive Music Festivals in Scotland
This spring, various social media posts told me that the Caithness Music Festival was celebrating its 70th anniversary (1956-2026). The … Read more
Wick Voices: A New Online Audio Archive
Folk who know, know that Caithness accents are just not like other Highland accents, nor even like Orkney ones. There’s … Read more
The Waters of Kylesku
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
Review: The Cadence of A Song, The Life of Margaret Fay Shaw
Fiona Mackenzie brings to her biography of Margaret Fay Shaw two significant gifts. Firstly, she spent almost 9 years as … Read more
J Scott Skinner and Taigh na Teud: Weaving together print and orality
Soundyngs has posted quite a bit in recent months about the infrastructures for maintaining and disseminating traditional music in Scotland, … Read more
Scottish Historical Musical Instruments Collections
Soundyngs has the greatest of respect for people who make things that make music, since its own cottage industry experiments … Read more
Greentrax Recordings: the sounds of Scottish music history
Scotland has a small but highly creative group of independent recording labels, which do important work in curating and shaping … Read more
Review: Brian Bannatyne-Scott A Singer’s Life
At the start of its own (digital) life, Soundyngs wondered what constituted ‘Scottish’ music, and decided that if it was … Read more
The More Taubroner: A Black Musician at the Court of James IV
Image: The Westminster Tournament Roll of John Blanke, a trumpeter in the service of the court of Henry VIII, in … Read more