Scottish folk music

“ The martial music of Ireland is a matter of tradition; on the first step of the invader the genius of chivalric song and melody departed from Erin. Scotland retains her independence, and those strains which are known in northern Europe as the most inspiriting and delightful, are recognised as the native minstrelsy of Caledonia. The origin of Scottish song and melody is as difficult of settlement as is the era or the genuineness of Ossian. There probably were songs and music in Scotland in ages long prior to the period of written history. ”

“ These terms certainly indicate the leading features of Scottish music. There is something not only of wild sweetness, but touches of pathos even in its merriest measures. Though termed a new kind of music, however, it was not new. The king took up the key-note [Pg xxii] of the human heart—the primitive scale, or what has been defined the scale of nature, and produced some of those wild and plaintive strains which we now call Scottish melodies. His poetry was descriptive of, and adapted to the feelings, customs, and manners of his countrymen ”

“ There have been crofters, shepherds, farm laborers, tailors, weavers, and shoemakers, servant lassies and old wives, who have given expression to their feelings in verse and song, with more or less skill and success, and testified to the strength of the national genius which has made Scotland so peculiarly the land of song, and filled the lower bed of bracken and furze in which the higher and rarer flowers of Scottish minstrelsy have stood preeminent. ”

“ The Scotch songs, of all true folk-songs the world over, have for many decades been the most familiar. No nation, except perhaps Russia, has been more vigorously creative in its folk-music than Scotland. Many excellent judges regard the Scotch folk-music as the finest in the world. ”

“ Our song-writers, for a long time after, are unknown minstrels, who had no character to lose by making or singing profane songs,—they were of the people, and sang for them. So matters continued, until, at the commencement of the eighteenth century, Scottish songs began to be the rage both in England and Scotland, and an eager desire arose to gather up old snatches and preserve them. Henceforth Scotch poetry held up its head, and a few remarkable poets won their way into the hearts of large masses of the people. ”

“ The genius of folk-song and ballad poetry had always been remarkably developed in Scotland, in comparison, at least, with England, and, in spite of many characteristics among the Lowlanders, worldly thrift, bitter and barren bigotry, and a sort of dourness and hardheadedness, not calculated to encourage sentiment and emotion; and the student of racial distinctions may be inclined to attribute it to the influence of Celtic blood and tradition, creating a vein of sensitiveness, tenderness, and susceptibility to the magic of song and music in the strong and hard fabric of the Saxon character. ”

“ The vexed and dull controversy as to the origin of Scottish folk-songs was due to ignorance of the comparative method, and of the ballad literature of Europe in general. The result of the discussion was to leave a vague impression that the Scottish ballads were perhaps as old as the time of Dunbar, and were the production of a class of professional minstrels. These minstrels are a stumbling-block in the way of the student of the growth of ballads. ”

“ Civilization is of the south and the Lowlands; but Scottish music and poetry, in their nascent, original, most forceful forms, are of the north and west. This is true, also, because among the most potent causes of difference are the aspects of nature, so strikingly in contrast as one nears England or Norway.
Scottish song and verse were born among the mountains nearer the North Star, and the first bards were hunters and cragsmen. In the early poetry and music of no land, more than in that of Scotland, are primitive art and pre-ancient nature more in accord. ”

“ Surely it is along similar lines in Scotland itself that our difficult national characteristics may yet be turned to musical account and make the basis of a new technique, at once completely modern yet intimately related to the whole history of Scots psychology and conjoining in the closest fashion the artists we are about to become, if the Scottish Renaissance realizes its objectives, with the Auld Makars and the ballad makers whose achievements we have yet to parallel and continue. ”

“ Scarcely any effort is being made even yet to create a national school of composers in Scotland, although the creation of such national schools in every other country in Europe—at their third and fourth stage of development now in most of them—has constituted during the past half century or so one of the greatest revolutions in music. So far as Scottish music is concerned it remains at best practically where it was in the sixteenth century. Music in Scotland is another matter. ”

“ Lost ground is being rapidly recovered; efforts are being made once more to create [15] distinctively Scottish literature comparable in artistic quality and tendencious force to the contemporary output of other European countries, and to regain the independent cultural position of Scotland in Europe; efforts are being made to create a Scottish national drama and Scottish national music—both of which Scotland alone of European countries entirely lacks, mainly because of Calvinistic repression—and all these efforts are achieving a measure of success. ”

“ Even in Scotland, we have comparatively few national songs in the eastern part, where we have had most influx of strangers. A real old Scottish song is a cairngorm—a gem of our own mountains; or rather, it is a precious relic of old times, that bears the national character stamped upon it—like a cameo, that shows what the national visage was in former days, before the breed was crossed.”
While Scott was thus discoursing, we were passing up a narrow glen, with the dogs beating about, to right and left, when suddenly a blackcock burst upon the wing. ”

“ But, on the whole, mirth and light-heartedness are very far from being characteristics of the Scottish ballads. Of ballad themes in general, it has been said that they concern themselves mainly with the tragedy and the pathos of the life of feudal and early times; while, on the other hand, the folk-song reflects the sunnier hours of the days of old. This is peculiarly true of the Scottish ballads. The best of them are dipped in gloom of the grave. They breathe the very soul of 'the old, unhappy far-off times.' Even over the true lovers, Fate stands from the first with a drawn sword ”

“ There are beautiful, simple, touching airs, to which the common songs of the country are sung, and there are airs of a similar class, but distinct, which are used with the religious hymns of Buchanan, Matheson, Grant, and other writers of hymns, of whom there are many. The dance music of the Highlands is also distinct from that of any other country, and broadly marked by its own peculiar features. There is the strathspey confined to Scotland, a moderately rapid movement well known to every Scotchman; there is the jig in 6/8th time, common to Scotland with Ireland ”

“ The long drawn cadences are hard to render honestly; in their excess of feeling they are apt to sound insincere. They lack the clear-cut statement which makes the Scotch songs so unfailingly true to the highest demands of art. Yet the folk-song of Ireland is a product of which any nation might be proud. And, on the whole, the folk-music of the British Isles is their worthiest contribution to musical literature. In former ages these islands were not inferior to any country in Europe in musical vigor. ”

“ Nothing can be more sweet, more touching, more tender, than the native growth of Scottish song—nothing more full of fun and spirit than the brilliant dance music which, like the song, seems to have sprung spontaneous from the soil. And no country has {465}ever more loved both songs and strathspeys, or clung to them with greater devotion. It would be perhaps impossible for the most learned to decide between the rival claims of Scotland and Ireland in respect to the airs which seem native to both ”

“ Judging from a comparison of extant remains, and other means of information now available, it may be doubted whether any country has equalled Scotland in the number of its lyrics. By the term lyrics, I mean specifically poetical compositions, meant and suitable to be sung, with the musical measures to which they have been wedded. I include under the term, both the compositions themselves, and their music. The Scottish ballads are numerous, the Scottish songs all but numberless, and the Scottish tunes an inexhaustible fountain of melody. ”

“ Making all allowance for borrowings and influences drawn from without, may we not still say that the Scottish ballad owes nearly all that is best in it—the sweetness not less than the strength of this draught of old poetry and passion—to the land and to the folk that gave it birth? A land thrust further into the gloom and cold of stormy seas than the Southern Kingdom; a land whose spare gifts are but the more esteemed by its children because they are given so grudgingly, whose high and bleak and stern features make the valleys they shelter the more lovely and loved from the contrast ”

“ That spirit has lived through the many changes that have taken place since Rob Roy’s day, and it lives in a modified form now. Nothing will make a Scottish audience, especially a Scottish audience far from home, cheer as the pipes will, and no sound is so welcome at an open-air gathering, or to the wandered Scotchman, as the wild notes of the national instrument. In the preface to one collection of Highland music we are told of a well-known Edinburgh man, discreetly referred to as “W—— B——, Esq.,” who was at the time the most exquisite violinist in Scotland. ”

“ One thing they do see and feel, painfully enough at times, namely, that the old Scottish pastoral life is passing away, before the combined influence of manufactures and the large-farm system; to be replaced, doubtless, hereafter, by something better, but in the meanwhile dragging down with it in its decay but too much that can ill be spared of that old society which inspired Ramsay and Burns. Hence the later Scottish song-writers seldom really sing; their proses want the unconscious lilt and flash of their old models; they will hardly go (the true test of a song) without music. ”

“ To say that Scotsmen abroad are still fond of their national music is simply to say that they do not cease to be Scotsmen. If anything, the fondness becomes intensified. I once heard an enthusiast in South Africa observe: ‘My Ain Fireside—Ye Banks and Braes—The Land o’ the Leal—eh! a body could be fit to gang to heaven hearing thae sangs sung!’ At a mission-school connected with the Scotch Church in Cape Town I once listened to Weel may the Boatie row, sung as a duet by a Dutch girl and a Malay, a result attained by the enthusiasm of the Scottish schoolmaster. ”

“ Scottish music as it now exists has been derived largely from the Highlands. No man did more to acclimatise 76Celtic music in the Lowlands than Burns. By wedding Highland airs to his own incomparable poetry he gave them a new lease of life, albeit he helped to destroy them under their old names while preserving them under the new. ”

“ Sufficiently imaginative, he does not, like his minstrel predecessor the Ettrick Shepherd, soar into the regions [Pg 48] of the supernatural, or roam among the scenes of the viewless world. He sings of the mountain wilds and picturesque valleys of Caledonia, and of the simple joys and habits of rural or pastoral life. His style is essentially lyrical, and his songs are altogether true to nature. Several of his songs, such as "Scotland Yet," "The Wild Glen sae Green," "The Land of Gallant Hearts," and "The Crook and Plaid," will find admirers while Scottish lyric poetry is read or sung. ”

“ On each side were ranged, promiscuously, the Scottish and the French nobility, with their wives, daughters, and sisters. Music lent its influence to the scene, and the strains of a hundred instruments blended in a swell of melody.
Thrice a hundred tapers burned suspended from the roof, and on each side of the hall stood twenty men with branches of blazing pine. Now came the morris dance, with the antique dress and strange attitudes of the performers, which was succeeded by a dance of warriors in their coats of mail, and with their swords drawn. ”

“ The human heart loves the things of romance, and in the exercise of its native privilege, delights to feel. Scottish song has been written in harmony with nature, scenery, and circumstances; and fledged in its own melodies, which seem no less the outpouring of native sensibility, has borne itself onward from generation to generation. ”

“ It is beyond a question that what is called Scottish music has been derived from the Gaelic race. Its characteristics are purely Celtic. So far as the poetry of Burns is concerned, his songs were composed in many cases to airs borrowed from the Highlands, and nothing could fit in better than the poetry and the music. But Scottish Lowland music, so much and so deservedly admired, is a legacy from the Celtic muse throughout. There is nothing in it which it holds in common with any Saxon race in existence. ”

“ About the close of the seventeenth century, a taste for Scottish music became prevalent among the upper classes of society, and Scottish airs were introduced at all places of public amusement in London and elsewhere. ”

“ These are all “wedded” to music, which is the reason for noticing them here, and the music must be known in order to have the full relish of the poetry.
There are several collections of Highland music which are well worthy of being better known to the musical world than they are. The oldest is that by the Rev. Peter Macdonald of Kilmore, who was a famous musician in his day. More recently Captain Simon Fraser, of Inverness, published an admirable collection ”