4. Contemporary Performance and Reception

Since the turn of the nineteenth century, Scots Tunes and the performance practices associated with them have continued to be valued by different groups for different reasons. Johnson explains how, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, a new antiquarian movement arose in Scotland, as an indirect result of the further stratification (and anglicisation) of Scottish society.1 Upper-class Scots, wishing to reconnect with an oral tradition that they saw as an essential part of their national identity, became preoccupied with the collection and dissemination of Scots Tunes. This trend was marked by an obsession with the provenance and perceived “authenticity” of this repertoire, and a belief that such tunes must have originated from an illiterate peasant class, at some point in the far distant past. This movement thus marks the point at which many of our received assumptions about Scottish traditional music crystallised.

The folk revival of the twentieth century brought yet another set of associations which have influenced popular understandings of Scottish Traditional music. As Johnson describes elsewhere:

Since the Second World War, however, fiddling has made a triumphant comeback, with a brand-new ideology attached to it. On top of the peasant myth, we now have the working-class myth: fiddling has become part of “folk music,” an expression of working-class protest against a capitalist system.2

While Johnson is referring here specifically to the Scottish fiddling tradition, his arguments can be extrapolated to Scottish traditional music as a whole. To this association with working-class identity, we can perhaps add a certain element of gender identity. Representations of working-class identity in the mid-twentieth century were often highly masculinised – this, combined with the location of traditional sessions in pubs (exclusively masculine spaces for much of the twentieth century) may also have had an impact on the way we view Scottish Traditional music today. This may go some way to explaining why research into women’s involvement in Scottish traditional flute playing had not been attempted until as recently as 2016,3 and why women continue to be under-represented in both the Irish and Scottish traditional music scenes.4

In the last few decades, interest in this repertoire has grown exponentially. Successive generations of performers and audiences have continued to engage with this repertoire in varying ways. It is perhaps time, therefore, to reassess popular narratives surrounding Scots Tunes, and to investigate the ways in which this repertoire continues to be valorised today. To that end, I have compiled a survey of recordings of Scots Tunes from Italian eighteenth-century collections, released within the last three decades. By analysing the ways in which they are presented to the public (through liner notes, cover art etc.) and the ways in which they have been received, I hope to establish a clearer picture of current perceptions of this repertoire.

4.1: Scope

Several surveys of this kind already exist in the secondary literature. Swinden’s is perhaps the most similar in terms of scope, as it focuses specifically on Scottish flute music from the eighteenth century, with particular emphasis on recordings which make use of Scottish Traditional performance practices.5 However, Swinden’s primary aim was didactic – to create a list of resources from which historical flute players could draw, in order to achieve what Swinden called a “blended” performance style.

The scope of this survey is somewhat different, in that it only includes recordings of works discussed in this thesis, that is, Italian collections of Scots Tunes. Almost all the ensembles included in this survey fall neatly within the category of “Early Music” or “historically-informed” groups, perhaps with the exception of Concerto Caldeonia and Les Musiciens de Saint Julien, both of whom regularly perform “traditional” music of one kind or another. The recordings surveyed here cover a range of almost exactly 30 years, with the oldest available recording being first released in 1992. This is an attempt to collate an exhaustive list of all the recordings of Italian collections of Scots Tunes produced within this time period. The complete list is presented above right, in chronological order.

4.2: Analysis: General Trends

Perhaps the most obvious trend worth mentioning relates to the number and frequency of albums released over time. There appears to be a significant increase in the number of recordings produced of this repertoire within recent years, with spikes in 2012 and 2017. Determining whether this trend is statistically significant or not would require an analysis of broader trends within the classical music recording industry, including sales figures and streaming data. The limited scope of this survey (being restricted only to Italian collections of Scots Tunes) likewise makes it difficult to determine whether this trend is significant. Turning to the recordings themselves, it quickly becomes apparent that some Italian collections of Scots tunes are recorded more frequently than others. By far the most overrepresented collection in this survey is Geminiani’s A Treatise of Good Taste, which appears on at least 15 of the 23 albums surveyed. The next most frequent is Barsanti’s A Collection of Old Scots Tunes, which appears to have become more popular over time. One recording includes several arrangements by Urbani, but this appears to be an outlier. While works of Corri’s have been recorded in recent years,6 none of these recordings have included any of his Scots Tunes settings. Even though Emily Baines has produced an album based on her research, Corri does not make an appearance, and is thus excluded from this survey.

The artists represented in this survey include a wide range of new and established ensembles, duos, and soloists from a diverse array of backgrounds. While the majority are anglophone, there is also significant French representation. Due to the fact that each of these collections is flexibly scored, almost every recording surveyed takes a unique approach to instrumentation. The transverse flute features in only five of the surveyed recordings, while the recorder is slightly better represented, appearing in eight. Seven recordings opt to use strings only. The choice of continuo instruments is particularly striking – there is roughly an even split between recordings that use harpsichord and recordings that don’t, with five opting to omit the chordal accompaniment entirely. This aversion to the harpsichord is curious, considering that both Geminiani and Barsanti mention the instrument by name in their publications.

The absence of harpsichord in these recordings might be explained by the connotations of the instrument itself. In popular imagination, the sound of the harpsichord is synonymous with images of gilded furniture, ornate dress, and all the opulence and splendour of the high baroque. For many, the strength of this association precludes the instrument from being used in anything that might be categorised as “folk” music, perhaps due to the equally powerful associations the genre has with pastoralism and working-class identity. Shane Lestideau notes the strong reactions that the harpsichord can often provoke in audiences less accustomed to the instrument.7 I have often run the experiment of playing Colin Scobie’s recording of one of Barsanti’s Scots Tunes8 for fellow musicians without any explanation, and have observed their reactions when the harpsichord enters at about 00’28”. Usually, this sudden shift in instrumentation is met with looks of shock and bewilderment, and sometimes even laughter. So strong and pervasive are the connotations of the harpsichord, that even musicians who are well-accustomed to its jangling sounds find it difficult to reconcile with their perceptions of folk music.

Scobie’s performance is not an isolated case. In many of the recordings listed above, musicians begin a track by performing the tune without accompaniment, often decorated with many graces inspired by Scottish Traditional performance practice. By situating such an interpretation just before the “main event” as it were, it feels as though the performer is making a statement about the historicity of Scottish Traditional techniques. It is as if to say: “this is what Barsanti heard, and this is what he did with that material.” How the performer then continues is an even more powerful statement. Do they maintain their original approach, with all the fleeting articulatory ornamentation so characteristic of Scottish Traditional music? Or do they take a more literal approach, and allow the music to be “disciplined” by notation?9 Compare, for instance, Scobie’s equally inflected rendition of Barsanti’s Lochaber (both before and after the entry of the harpsichord) to Brian Berryman’s more varied approach.10

There are also plenty of examples in this survey of musicians completely reharmonising Scots Tunes, assumedly to make them sound somehow “more Scottish.” Indeed, even in tracks listed as being “by Geminiani” or “by Barsanti,” the actual harmonisations that are played sometimes have very little to do with either composer. In Kristine West’s performance of The Birks of Invermay, for instance, a violinist accompanies the second reprise with a pulsing figure on an open fifth, in alternation with the same figure a tone lower. This harmonisation technique has appeared in Scots Tunes sources since at least the mid-eighteenth century, and is often interpreted as an imitation of the mixolydian scale and drone of the highland bagpipes.11 Here again, we see the invented tradition described by Trevor-Roper and promoted by Johnson, continuing to have an impact on the way in which we understand Scots Tunes.

4.3: Analysis: Ornamentation

The ornamentation practices evident in the recordings surveyed here run the full gamut of aesthetic approaches – from strictly literal readings conceived within a positivistic framework, to highly personal, subjective approaches that take only the faintest inspiration from the notated musical text. There seems to be a fairly linear trend in the development of these approaches. While the earliest recordings appear to be some of the most literal readings imaginable, more recent recordings have taken less and less inspiration from the text, abandoning a sense of Werktreue12 in favour of an approach that embraces Scottish Traditional performance practices.

The earliest recording surveyed here, Italian Musicians in London, recorded by Michael Henry et al., features perhaps the most literal interpretation of Barsanti’s graces. Trills are executed at a moderate speed, beginning always on the upper note; appoggiaturas are player relatively long; unusual notational symbols are executed in the manner of their nearest modern equivalent; and there is no sense that the ornamentation functions in anything other than a harmonic way. The overall effect is like that of a perfectly well-executed (if rather strait-laced) interpretation of a Händel sonata for solo oboe. The performers’ interpretation relies on dominant understandings of musical notation, which are strictly adhered to in performance. This kind of approach would seem to embody the kind of “test fetishism” critiqued by Taruskin in his seminal tome Text and Act.13

At the time of recording, the sound of eighteenth-century instruments playing newly rediscovered Scottish music would probably have been considered sufficiently novel so as to not merit any further research. Barsanti and Geminiani are both presented here as “Italian musicians in London,” (despite the fact that Barsanti’s arrangements date from his time in Edinburgh) meaning that the question of incorporating Scottish Traditional performance practices simply doesn’t arise. Indeed, the only available review of this album seems oblivious to any such concerns, and praises the performers for their “refined and affecting” playing.14 Just as Geminiani’s treatise reduced this repertoire to a “peg on which to hang his ideas about ornamentation,”15 so too does this performance reduce Barsanti’s Collection to a peg on which to hang the performers’ considerable technical skill.

Early recordings by the Palladian Ensemble seem to follow in much the same vein as Henry et al. Their album An Excess of Pleasure features several Airs from Geminiani’s A Treatise of Good Taste, all of which are performed with strict observance of Geminiani’s meticulously-notated graces. On the reprises of these tunes, however, the performers opt for a slightly more liberal approach by adding several graces and divisions, most of which are unremarkable, despite their refined execution. The embellishments in Auld Bob Morris are worth noting however – on the reprise, the recorder player shortens the execution of several downward mordents, crushing them together to the point that they almost resemble a tap or strike. On the very last phrase, the recorder ascends high above the ensemble, articulating the climactic note with an extremely brief grace note that seems to acknowledge bagpipe practice with a subtle wink and a nod. This is the earliest example in this survey of musicians hinting at Scottish Traditional performance practices.

There is an understandable reluctance to engage with such practices in the performance of Geminiani’s Scots Tunes settings. Given how prescriptive Geminiani’s markings are, and how little room there is for reinterpretation with regard to ornaments, it’s unsurprising that Early Music practitioners would be hesitant to apply Scottish Traditional performance practices. Nonetheless, several recent recordings take a particularly adventurous approach to the performance of Geminiani’s settings, particularly in the case of Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament.16 Recordings by Genevieve Lacey and the French group L’Escadron Volant de la Reine both do away with Geminiani’s harmonisation and ornaments, either in whole or in part, and both make extensive use of articulatory ornamentation practices. Lacey’s treatment is particularly evocative of highland bagpipe practices, featuring extremely wide cuttings and drone accompaniment. The recording by L’Escadron likewise features a droning bass, but maintains Geminiani’s original bassline as an inner part, creating a three-voice texture. Both the bass and treble feature articulatory ornamentation, but there is obviously still some reliance of Geminiani’s notated ornaments. In the case of L’Escadron, it seems the musicians have resolved the conflict between these two performance traditions by adding to, rather than by removing, Geminiani’s graces.

Returning to the issue of “essentialising notation” discussed earlier, it might be said that Scottish Traditional musicians who perform Geminiani’s transcriptions in this way are engaging in an act of “reappropriation” or “reclamation.”17 As Bohlman explains, in the act of essentialising Scots Tunes through notation, Geminiani (or perhaps Thomson) has succeeded in “universalising” and thereby “controlling” this repertoire.18 Performance, by contrast, acts as a space for the contestation of this control, and offers the possibility of recontextualization and reclamation, thereby opposing the essentialising force of notation.  

4.4: Analysis: Reviews and Liner Notes

When surveying the reviews and liner notes of modern recordings, one finds a reprisal of many of the same discourses used to define the value of Scots Tunes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Appeals to notions of antiquity, Scottish nationalism, and pastoral simplicity abound, often underpinned by an unspoken enthusiasm for the “exotic.” Nineteenth-century conceptions of Scotland as an idealised arcadia are alive and well in the reception of these recordings, with one review of the Palladian Ensemble describing the players with reference to pastoral tropes:

Not the least enjoyable feature is the convincingly folkish accent with which the Scottish tunes are performed; Pamela Thorby's soulful bends and grace notes are like an echo of the glens, while Rachel Podger's violin playing is as lithe as a fly-fisher's rod.19

This view of Scottish music is likewise mirrored in the art that adorns the front covers of many of these recordings. Sweeping vistas and idyllic pastoral landscapes are common recurring features in the liner notes of these recordings, with those of The Rare Fruits Council, Les Basses Réunies, and Les Musiciens de Saint Julien being notable examples. It’s interesting to note that this trend in cover art is a more recent development. Earlier recordings tend to feature historical drawings of buildings, streets, and still life rather than landscapes, and this change may be symptomatic of the change in performance practices discussed earlier. As musicians’ performances began to engage more with Scottish traditional music, so too did the marketing – reproducing and reinforcing the Rousseauian ideals which had come to be associated with Scottish traditional music in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Several reviews use the phrase “crossover” to describe these recordings. Raymond Tuttle, for one, bemoans the fact that “it seems like almost every other “classical” release…is a crossover project, and many of them are dire, if not worse” in his review of Dan Laurin and Parnassus Avenue’s Airs and Graces: Scottish Tunes and London Sonatas.20 Likewise, one BBC Radio 4 listener described Concerto Caledonia’s work in a similar way, explaining they “normally find crossover, mixed-genre recitals completely off-putting…Concerto Caledonia are a glorious exception to this.”21 While its certainly true that these collections might represent something of a “crossover” historically, between Italianate harmonic practice and the modal melodies of Scots Tunes, the phrase is usually used here to refer to the categories of “folk” and “classical” music, which are fundamentally anachronistic, and which come loaded with assumptions about performance practice.

Indeed, almost every one of these albums has received at least one review which references “folk music.” This label is used in a variety of different contexts, revealing the myriad associations that “folk music” has come to acquire. Several reviews refer to the accessibility of folk music, as a “light” genre in comparison with baroque music, recommending these recordings “for listeners who either like their baroque music on the light side or their folk music treated with respectful, artful imagination."22 Others reinforce the idea that “art” and “folk” musics have always been tied to mutually-exclusive class identities, claiming that Scots Tunes collections are: "not like the regular baroque of those days, that's for sure...the majority of these tunes would not look out of place in today's British or Irish pub."23

One review of the Musiciens de Saint Julien praises the sense of “naturalness” that emanates from their performance. The perception of these performance practices as “natural” has an obvious lineage stretching back to Johnson and Rousseau, and also reinforces the association between Traditional performance practices and a sense of genuine, “natural” expression, free of artificial construction. Similarly, there is a perceived lack of artifice in Concerto Caledonia’s album The Red, Red Rose: "Concerto Caledonia obviously take their music seriously, but not so themselves - there's passion and perfection here, but no pomposity."24 This lack of “pomposity” again points to the idea that Scottish Traditional performance practices embody a kind of authenticity; a believability not always ascribed to the work of Early Music practitioners. Bruno Cocset, in his liner notes to a recording of Geminiani with Les Basses Réunies, makes a similar claim, albeit in far more purple prose:

If, thanks to the Italians, this revisited folk music succeeded in becoming more respectable to the ears of the British aristocracy, it is nonetheless the Celtic spirit that will blow through our salon and will often knock the walls down to give us a glimpse of a field of standing stones, the wind, the sea, kegs of beer and whisky. Melancholy, too, is a presence indissociable from this music. It is never feigned or ‘acted’. If its delicacy and discretion often give the impression that it aspires to serenity, it can sometimes plunge into an almost abyssal despair.25

Leaving aside for a moment the Pentecostal imagery and the conflation of Scottish and Irish culture into a single “Celtic spirit,” one notices again much of the same Romantic imagery regularly associated with Scottish Traditional music, and a binary opposition established between this music and the art music of the “British aristocracy.” The former is imagined as an untameable natural force, and is ascribed a kind of genuine authenticity which is not associated with the latter: “Melancholy….[in] this music…is never feigned or ‘acted.’” This lack of artifice; this sense of not being “feigned or acted,” is a distinctive feature of the way Scottish Traditional performance practices are perceived, and a large part of the reason why they are valued by Cocset and his colleagues.

4.5: Authenticity and “Authenticity” (within and without scare-quotes)26

It seems, therefore, that part of the appeal of this repertoire (for Early Music practitioners and audiences alike) lies in the fact that these performance practices lay claim to a kind of authenticity – a claim that has seldom been made without qualification by Early Music practitioners since Taruskin and the “authenticity wars” of the 1980s and 90s.27 In the years following the publication of Taruskin’s critiques, it was no longer fashionable, nor indeed permissible, for Early Music practitioners to advertise their work using labels like “authentic” and “original,” despite the fact that many performers still justified their approaches with reference to these ideals, albeit veiled in euphemism. This sense of moral and existential panic among Early Music practitioners can still be felt today in plenary discussions on the meaning of the word “authenticity” at Early Music conferences, and in endless arguments surrounding what exactly the “I” stands for in HIP.

Perhaps the appeal of these recordings lies in the fact that they provide a kind of resolution – a way out of the moral panic in which the Early Music movement finds itself – by laying claim to a very different kind of authenticity. Whereas Early Music pioneers were criticised because of their recourse to authenticity claims based on historical recreation, the kind of authenticity ascribed to folk music traditions is one which bypasses the need for such claims. By appropriating performance practices from these traditions, Early Music practitioners are likewise able to claim an authenticity that is far more easily defensible. As Philip Bohlman notes:

Folk songs thus become evocative symbols of the past, and they legitimize the traditionality of a contemporary context by virtue of their symbolic value. It is not important (or possible) that a specific historical moment and place be represented; nor is there any awareness that musical styles, genres, and repertories are juxtaposed in ways uncharacteristic of any past. Rather, folk music, because of its new timelessness, carries the weight of continuity and tradition.28

This “new timelessness” is an attractive epithet for Early Music practitioners, and is perhaps part of the reason why this genre is growing in popularity within the Early Music community.

Jonathan Shull observes a similar trend regarding the appropriation of Arabic and Andalusian traditional music practices in the performance of medieval music. He explains how, over the last few decades, strict authenticity claims have been abandoned by leading figures in the study of medieval music, and replaced by a more pragmatic approach, which necessarily looks towards living traditions of performance practice for inspiration.29 In the words of Thomas Binkley: “I don’t really want to hear the most authentic performance of this piece that ever existed, but I would like to hear the best one.”30

Defining the “the best one” is, of course, a vexed task. What this approach very easily ignores is the question of exactly who gets to decide what “the best one” is, and who stands to benefit (financially or otherwise) from that decision. It can be tempting for performers to simply gravitate towards techniques that seem to particularly different or “shocking” in a society that places value on perceived novelty, that fetishizes the “exotic,” and that commodifies otherness. The impact this process has on informants is not always positive, and the potential for exploitation and serious reputational damage is ever-present. But for Shull at least, these difficulties are necessitated by the absence of documentary evidence in the field of medieval music.31 Without treatises, documentary evidence, and sometimes even without musical notation at all, specialists in medieval music are forced to look further afield, leading many of them to appropriate practices from non-western cultures.

There are several important differences, however, between this kind of appropriation, and that employed in the historical performance of Scots Tunes. For medieval music specialists appropriating Arabic and Andalusian traditions, the music object they are studying is usually separated from the subject by an almost unbridgeable chasm of time and space, not to mention cultural and linguistic difference. For historically informed performers of Scots Tunes, however, this separation is far less extreme. Many of the musicians on the recordings surveyed are equally at home in the context of traditional sessions, and are themselves regarded as leading figures within the Scottish Traditional music scene. Nonetheless, as the popularity of this approach grows, so too does the risk of exploiting and exoticizing Scottish Traditional music through performance, particularly by performers who are less experienced in this field.

For this reason, the need for self-reflexivity within the Early Music movement has never been greater. It is essential that we continue to interrogate the motivations behind our performance practice decisions, the reasons why we privilege certain repertoires over others, and the categories we impose on the music we perform. Like Shull, I recognise that the critical observations I have offered here about Early Music practice are coloured by the fact that I am speaking as an “insider.” I therefore echo both Shull and Shelemay in advocating for broader ethnographic study of the Early Music movement, and indeed of Western classical music more generally, which is often assumed to exist outside the parameters of ethnomusicological research.32

Final Conclusions and Future Research

This thesis began by summarising some of the ornamentation techniques employed by Scottish Traditional musicians, and investigating their possible influence on Italian Scots Tunes sources. In the ensuing chapter, four such collections were examined, with reference to their historical and philosophical context, and the ornamentation practices they exhibit. In doing so, this thesis has attempted to lay bare the relationships between notational practice and aesthetic judgements that are manifested in performances of Scots Tunes. The final chapter has then sought to demonstrate how these aesthetic values have persisted into the present day, shaping our perceptions of Scottish Traditional music.

This repertoire has increased in popularity over the past three decades, holding particular appeal for Early Music practitioners, many of whom regularly engage with Scottish Traditional performance practices. I contend that this rise in popularity may have come about partially as a response to the authenticity debates of the 1980s and 1990s. Discourses of authenticity continue to shape the way in which the Early Music community engages with this repertoire, which is why it is important that Early Music practitioners remain self-reflexive, questioning the motivations behind their approach to this music.

This study has only touched on many adjacent issues of performance practice and cultural history that require more research. Bagpipe practices have been briefly mentioned, but there remains much work to be done in exploring the relationship between the pipes and the flute in eighteenth-century Scotland. Fiddle practices have been almost completely ignored for the sake of scope, but these too would provide valuable insight for flautists. Likewise, this study has deliberately avoided discussions of the harmonisation of Scots Tunes. Combing a study focussing on ornamentation, like this one, with a thorough harmonic analysis of Scots Tunes settings would be extremely valuable to all those who appreciate and perform this repertoire.

* = year first released

Fig. 4.4: A selection of cover art from recent recordings of Scottish music by Early Music ensembles33