Understanding Scotland Musically

Scottish traditional music has been through a successful revival in the mid-twentieth century and has now entered a professionalised and public space. Devolution in the UK and the surge of political debate surrounding the independence referendum in Scotland in 2014 led to a greater scrutiny of regional and national identities within the UK, set within the wider context of cultural globalisation. This volume brings together a range of authors that sets out to explore the increasingly plural and complex notions of Scotland, as performed in and through traditional music. Traditional music has played an increasingly prominent role in the public life of Scotland, mirrored in other Anglo-American traditions. This collection principally explores this movement from historically text-bound musical authenticity towards more transient sonic identities that are blurring established musical genres and the meaning of what constitutes ‘traditional’ music today. The volume therefore provides a cohesive set of perspectives on how traditional music performs Scottishness at this crucial moment in the public life of an increasingly (dis)United Kingdom.

Focus: Scottish Traditional Music engages methods from ethnomusicology, popular music studies, cultural studies, and media studies to explain how complex Scottish identities and culture are constructed in the traditional music and culture of Scotland. This book examines Scottish music through their social and performative contexts, outlining vocal traditions such as lullabies, mining songs, Scottish ballads, herding songs, and protest songs as well as instrumental traditions such as fiddle music, country dances, and informal evening pub sessions. Case studies explore the key ideas in understanding Scotland musically by exploring ethnicity, Britishness, belonging, politics, transmission and performance, positioning the cultural identity of Scotland within the United Kingdom. Visit the author's companion website at http://www.scottishtraditionalmusic.org/ for additional resources.

Focus: Scottish Traditional Music engages methods from ethnomusicology, popular music studies, cultural studies, and media studies to explain how complex Scottish identities and culture are constructed in the traditional music and culture of Scotland. This book examines Scottish music through their social and performative contexts, outlining vocal traditions such as lullabies, mining songs, Scottish ballads, herding songs, and protest songs as well as instrumental traditions such as fiddle music, country dances, and informal evening pub sessions. Case studies explore the key ideas in understanding Scotland musically by exploring ethnicity, Britishness, belonging, politics, transmission and performance, positioning the cultural identity of Scotland within the United Kingdom. Visit the author's companion website at http://www.scottishtraditionalmusic.org/ for additional resources.

'Scotland's Music' is an all-embracing account of the history of music and musicians in Scotland, from the Stone Age to the present day. It emcompasses traditional, classical and popular music and places them in their historical contexts, adding vital information to the history of Scotland itself.

From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, a steady stream of Scots migrated to Ulster and eventually onward across the Atlantic to resettle in the United States. Many of these Scots-Irish immigrants made their way into the mountains of the southern Appalachian region. They brought with them a wealth of traditional ballads and tunes from the British Isles and Ireland, a carrying stream that merged with sounds and songs of English, German, Welsh, African American, French, and Cherokee origin. Their enduring legacy of music flows today from Appalachia back to Ireland and Scotland and around the globe. Ritchie and Orr guide readers on a musical voyage across oceans, linking people and songs through centuries of adaptation and change.

This book examines the community-based learning and teaching of ‘traditional’ music in contemporary Scotland, with implications for transnational theoretical issues. The book draws on a broad range of scholarship and a local case study of a large organisation. A historical perspective provides an overview of new educational formats emerging from the mid-twentieth century folk music revival in Scotland. Practices through which participants encounter and perpetuate the idiom of traditional music include social music-making, learning by ear and participatory and presentational elements of musical performances. Individuals are shown as combining these aspects with their own learning strategies to participate in the contemporary community of practice of traditional music. The work also discusses how experiences of learning contribute to identity formation, including the role and practice of ‘tutors’ of traditional music. The author proposes conceptualising the teaching and learning of traditional music in community-based organisations as a ‘pedagogy of participation’.

Voicing Scotland takes the reader on a discovery tour through Scotland's traditional music and song culture, past and present. West unravels the strings that link many of our contemporary musicians, singers and poets with those of the past, offering up to our ears these voices which deserve to be more loudly heard. What do they say to us in the 21st Century? What is the role of tradition in the contemporary world? Can there be a folk culture in the digital age? What next for the traditional arts? REVIEWS Can folk stay true to tradition and still be genuinely contemporary? Can its pride in place counter globalisation- without collapsing into narrow nationalism? The answer for, Gary West, is a resounding Yes. SCOTSMAN Voicing Scotland...is an engrossing assessment of where Scottish Traditional Music standsl, at a time of resonant political developments in the nation's history but also of globalisation and the threat of cultural homogenisation in todays 'liquid society'. SCOTSMAN