Karen McAulay Our Ancient National Airs.pdf

The Scottish Journal of Performance, 2013

2013

According to the conventionally held view, the strathspey or 'strathspey reel' was an eighteenth century innovation instigated by fiddlers of the Speyside region, such as the Browns of Kincardine and the Cummings of Grantown. However, the basic rhythmic characteristics inherent to the strathspey - a series of long and short notes, organised within two or four strong beats per bar - are found in Gaelic songs thought to be much older. Using a range of data from early fiddle collections and transcriptions of twentieth century audio recordings, this paper explores the musical and semantic connections between the strathspey and Gaelic song, suggesting an alternative developmental path for Scotland's national music.

This is my PhD dissertation. The third chapter might be interesting since it shows that the natural scale was the primary scale used in European antiquity (the so-called Folk Music Scale). It combined with the early diatonic scale (stacking thirds on the diatonic scale that those instruments couldn’t play) to create our modern scale. The Highland bagpipe is an ossified hybrid between the two. The fourth chapter might be of interest to composers because it explains the rhythm of languages (especially English) and also the pitch-patterning of the spoken word which is used as the basis of melody. The link brings you to the University of Otago library which is open and non-private. So you have to force your web browser to continue to the site. ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study was to investigate through archival and musicological analysis the audio recordings of Fenian lays made in the middle of the last century. These recordings were made from informants who learned the material orally; they contain cultural elements that assist in comprehending the musical mechanics of Fenian lays at a time when their performance practices were being extirpated by foreign musical influences. These elements include Indo-European (IE) thematic material, poetics, language register, pitch structuring, rhythm, and vocal techniques. Audio recordings of Fenian lays from Ireland, Scotland, and Nova Scotia, Canada were analysed in terms of their linguistic-musical material. Results show that the rhythm of the lays did not display a repetitive musical metre but the more complex structure of speech. However, rhythmic patterns did alter with volume. Also, resonance tuning was apparent. Many characteristics associated with volume in lay recordings exist in declaimed speech as well; both may be seen to act as a bridge between speech and metered song. Lay poetry appeared to be syllabic, which is unusual for a stress-timed language; this reflects an Indo-European genesis that is supported by the presence of oral formulaic language. Both stress and accent shifted pitch by poetic line to match spoken characteristics. A high language register was present, which does not indicate composition by the intelligentsia for use at court, but rather a fear-induced protective linguistic device apparent in all social classes. Moreover, the addition of delineated pitch to spoken declamation may be seen as an attempt to further increase the communicative register. The pitch structure was seen to be anachronistic, matching the linear scales played by pastoral instruments, particularly that of wooden shepherd trumpets used since at least the beginning in the Early Neolithic Age.

Western Folklore, 1986

Field research undertaken since the 1950s into the singing traditions of Scottish travelling people (also known as tinkers, and sometimes associated with gypsies) has confirmed the complexity of oral/literary relations while affirming the omnipresence of creativity in ballad singing. I argue for a 'freeze/thaw' theory of ballad transmission that emphasizes the creative role of the individual singer in absorbing and remaking the materials of a prior tradition. The article is accompanied by a response by folksong scholar Eleanor R. Long. A revised version of the article was reworked as chapter 6 ('Context and Loss') of my 1999 book 'Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature'.

A later version of this paper was published in Michael Brown, Catriona Kennedy, John Kirk, and Andrew Noble (eds.), United Islands? Multi-Lingual Radical Poetry and Song in Britain and Ireland, 1770–1820 (2013)]

Ethnomusicology, 2011

2014

Preface xv singers sometimes experience in recalling words in the absence of a tune (and there is some evidence from neuroscience for the synergy of the two things in human memory)-there is still an absence of a critical vocabulary that would convincingly facilitate the discussion of an integrated whole. Ballad words belong ultimately to the domain of language, and ballad melodies to the domain of music, yet it remains unclear to what extent those two domains really can be thought of as precisely equivalent-as both belonging, as it were, to a single grand domain of Saussurean langue. Versions of some of these chapters have been aired as published articles or as presentations, but all have been rewritten for this volume in order to integrate them into the book, to bring them up to date, and, as far as possible, to avoid unnecessary repetition. Versions of chapters one, five, six, and seven, respectively, appeared in the journals Lied und populäre Kultur/ Song and Popular Culture, Twentieth-Century Music, Variants, and Folklore, and I am very grateful to their editors and copyright holders for permission to reuse the material (full bibliographic details are cited at the beginning of the respective chapters). A version of chapter four was to have been published in Estudos de Literatura Oral but has not appeared at the time of writing. I am especially grateful for the insights and enthusiasms of members of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, the Folklore Society, the Kommission für Volksdichtung, the Traditional Song Forum, and the Editorial Board of Folk Music Journal, who have all indirectly contributed to this volume. Likewise the readers for Open Book Publishers, who made some valuable suggestions which I have incorporated. This is the place, too, to thank Alessandra Tosi and Bianca Gualandi at Open Book Publishers for their professionalism and enthusiasm. Special thanks go to the J. M. Carpenter project team-Julia Bishop, Elaine Bradtke, Eddie Cass, Tom McKean, and Bob Walser; Malcolm Taylor and everyone at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library; my co-editor on Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America, Steve Roud; and Brian Peters, for the late nights and ballad discussions. It is a privilege and pleasure to work in a field where people still uphold the human values of friendship and cooperation. All of them have done their best to keep me from straying too far from the scholarly straight and narrow. All errors that remain are, of course, my own stupid fault.

The Phenomenon of Singing, 2013

When I submitted the abstract of this paper, I did not realize that the late Frank Harrison used almost exactly the same title in an 6 Riada memorial lecture at University College Cork, Ireland some years ago (Harrison, 1988). I can only say by way of excuse that it was not conscious theft on my part, but an example of inadvertant intertextuality. In this paper I propose to give a survey of the traditional song scene in Ireland, its main events and also to attempt an exploration of some of the issues which concern singers and indeed the wider community of musicians in Ireland at the moment. Folk song has long been a subject of interest to scholars and has meant many things to varying groups since the time of its coinage by Herder in the eighteenth century (Bohlman 1988, 32-33). Bruno Nettl (1983, 304) has noted that: the term "folk song" has strong emotional connotations in Western society as already illustrated by Julian von Pulikowski ... who showed, in a large study of the term, how the concept was batted about by politicians of the left and right, by social reformers, nationalists, educators, antiquarians, musicians theoretical and practical, even in the nineteenth century.

2010

In contrast to their English predecessors, who had compiled their collections largely from printed texts and manuscripts, the Scottish ballad collectors of the early nineteenth derived their material principally from oral tradition. The introductory material and commentary in their published collections makes it clear that value of the ballads for them lay above all in their antiquity. From this perspective, oral tradition was initially approached with ambivalence: on the one hand, it had ensured the durability of ballads which would otherwise be lost, while on the other, it involved a process of change which had eroded the integrity of the supposed original texts leaving only transient variants. By the 1820s, a more positive view of oral tradition was being expressed, but still within a basically devolutionary paradigm. The twentieth century appreciation of oral tradition as a creative and evolutionary process was still in the future. The folkloric text, circulating in oral tradition through space and time, is characterized both by durability and by transience. On the one hand, there is the durability of genre and type; on the other, the transience of the individual variant, the unique performance experienced through the evanescent medium of sound, which, as Walter Ong observes, "exists only when it is going out of existence" (32). This paper will look at some of the ways in which early nineteenth-century Scottish collectors and editors of one traditional genre, the popular narrative songs that were by this time coming to be identified in literary circles as "ballads" (Gerould 250-2)-in particular Walter Scott, Robert Jamieson and William Motherwell-approached the durable and transient aspects of the texts that so fascinated them. To what time does an orally transmitted text belong? That of its original creation, or that in which the particular version under discussion was recorded in performance? In an article first published in 1935, John Spiers claimed the Scottish ballads for the eighteenth century on the grounds that "a poem and the language it is in are one and the same", and the language of the ballads, as we know them from published collections, is largely that of the eighteenth century (236). And in the 1990s, the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature decided after some discussion to move their sample selection of "Popular Ballads" from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, the period in which the printed texts took shape, rather than that of the conjectured origins of the genre (Brown, Placed 116-18). To the eighteenth century itself, however, or at least to those eighteenth-century Britons whose encounter with ballads was primarily through expensive printed anthologies rather than through oral tradition or popular printed broadsides, things looked different: what was interesting then about ballads was that they were old. From A Collection of Old Ballads (1723-25), whose editor sought to "enter upon the Praises of Ballads, and shew their Antiquity" (qtd. in Kersey 41), through Thomas Percy"s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), where the ballads were attributed to "our ancient English bards and minstrels, an order of men, who were once greatly respected by our ancestors, and contributed to soften the roughness of a martial and unlettered people by their songs and by their music" (Percy I: xiii)-thus, it has been argued, offering a legitimating genealogy for English literature, and at the same time affirming a role for the author as a natural part of an imagined feudal world in contrast to the insecurities of the eighteenth-century literary marketplace (Stewart 113-4)-, to Ancient Songs: From the Time of King

Classic English and Scottish Ballads from the Frances James Child Collection , 2017