MUS200 Lecture 8
Creating Traditional Music
• Traditional music is used to describe or quality a certain kind of music alongside adjectives like
“classical”, “art”, “folk”, “world”, and “popular”
• we don’t know the boundaries of these terms of about how they became commonly understand
• Aren’t precise, or helpful or useful, yet they have currency and impact the ways we approach,
listen to or understand certain music
• “Traditional” often implies a dichotomy
o music is either modern or traditional [past]
o past, urban and rural spaces
• Traditional music seems to be music stuck in time
o in the past, particular cultural moment, time before the symbols of modernity invaded
o traditional music is dying off
• part of a not too distant past
o often imagined to be better, simpler, lacking the complications of today
• often associated with community elders, rural locations
• traditional is interchangeable with folk music
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o Folk music—used since 19 century by scholars to refer to music transmitted through
oral tradition by nonprofessional musicians
• traditional/folk music were created as a genre in opposition to the supposed refinement of art
music during the 18 century and onward
• Folk music (music of the people) is actually the older scholarly terms here, and switch to
traditional is one that has associations with the development of national musics later
o emergence of European nationhood in the 18 century
o various forms of national music as high art music and low/folk/traditional music
• Recognition and interest in traditional music reflected the popularity of Enlightenment ideas
o Noble savages –romanticized indigenous people
Case Study #1: Scotland
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• Romanticism in 18 -19 century Britain took several forms
o search for noble savage
o turn to Scotland highland culture, songs, music and dress as reflecting this ancient
bardic/oral poetry
o trying to find ancient bardic/oral poetry –Ossian myths
o creation of tartan myth—associating certain tartan kilt patterns with highland clans
▪ wearing tartan became extremely popular in London, method of stereotyping
Scots
▪ developed by 18 century English industrialist
o discovering ancient Scottish music, publishing traditional song in books for the rich in
London
▪ the printing press • Several printed music collections emerged during this period which will constitute our first case
study
• Important to think about London as social, business, class culture
o Scotland, Ireland, Wales = the periphery
o books of music with selections from these periphery appealed to this vague
understanding
• in contrast to the noble savage version of Scottish culture emerging in London at the same time,
Scotland developing as a centre for the Enlightenment
• Scottish Enlightenment
o mid-18 century, 75% literacy rate
o philosophers: France Hutcheson, David Hume
• Significant advances in medicine, law, physics, chemistry and geology
• Engineering
o James Watt, steam engine
o inventors and engineers –industrial revolution
• Wasn’t a lot of access and ability to refute what was going on—London was not in the centre of
UK
Traditional Scottish Music
• Piobaireachd (piping)
o hereditary pipers to Highland chiefs
o dates to Middle Ages
o orally transmitted through vocables (use sounds to mimic piping) and songs
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o notated in late 18 C
• Fiddle music
• Thriving song traditions
o Gaelic—Scottish Highlands
o English—City
o Scots –Lowlands
• Composers drew on this traditional culture to cater for fascination with Scottish culture in
London
• Symbols associated with power that the English is its own power
• Using these different musical practices as things that could be brought into society culture
• Songs were both poems and song
• Scotch songs were popular from 1680s London
• preeminent composers of the era brought in to translate oral tradition into books of Scottish
songs
o European composers Josef Haydn and Beethoven were part of this process of
translated from folk to art song
• Acknowledging the dual nature of songs as both song and poetry, the books were written in 2
ways o lyrics and notated versions of the air (melody)—assumption that the performer has no
familiarity with the tradition
o books with only lyrics and title of the air
▪ Lyrics written down, and phrase that says “play to the air…”
▪ implies to traditional era of the song
o Why is it significant
▪ conversation and Scottish periphery
• Davis (2004)
o power and control are exerted through the process of translating songs from oral
tradition into printed notated version
o songs are removed from situated performing bodies and modified in specific ways to
not only cater to the interests of those in London, but also to modify/the sound/me
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