A Tribute to Hamish Henderson, ‘Father of the Folk Revival’

On Friday 2 February in the Whittaker Library at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, at 4.30 pm. Dr Margaret Bennett and students present a musical tribute:-

Flyer for event

Emily Lyle: an Impressive Career

We have an eight-volume collection of Scottish folk songs that our Traditional Music students will know well – the Greig-Duncan Collection. Gavin Greig was an Aberdeenshire school-master at Whitehill, New Deer. Together with his minister friend, Rev. James Bruce Duncan, they amassed a huge collection of folk songs collected in the North East of Scotland, but the collection was only published comparatively recently – between 1981 and 2002. If that seems like a long time to publish eight volumes of songs, then you need to know that the Greig-Duncan collection consists of some 3,500 texts and 3,300 tunes. Gavin Greig was a man with a mission to demonstrate that the Scottish songs in book collections (‘book songs’) were often far removed from the ‘folk songs’ in circulation amongst people in a particular locality.

Two editorial names were associated with the preparation of these massive tomes for publication: Patrick Shuldham-Shaw (1917-1977) died before the first volume was even published, but Dr Emily Lyle has been General Editor for the entire collection, with the help of Peter A. Hall for Volume 3, Adam McNaughtan for Volume 5 and Katherine Campbell – formerly on the RCS teaching staff here – for Volume 8. This was a project of truly epic proportions!

Dr Lyle is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Celtic and Scottish Studies Department. As well as her work on Scottish folk song, she has also researched oral culture, folk customs and ancient mythology.

• Robert Burns and the discovery and re-creation of Scottish song – edited with Katherine Campbell (Musica Scotica Trust, 2020)
• An article about Robert Burns, in Musica Scotica : 800 years of Scottish music. Proceedings from the 2005 and 2006 conferences (2008)
• Fairies and folk : approaches to the Scottish ballad tradition (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2007)
• The song repertoire of Amelia and Jane Harris– with Kaye McAlpine and Anne Dhu McLucas (Scottish Text Society, 2002)
• Scottish ballads (Canongate, 1994)
• not to mention contributions to the journal, Scottish studies : the journal of the School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh

This is a phenomenal output, and Dr Lyle’s careful, detailed work is on reading lists for our own Traditional Music students. Sometimes it’s easy to focus on composers and performers, platforms and performances, but we should never forget that quiet, dedicated scholarship enables the more obviously ‘creative’ folk to build their own work on solid foundations.

Oor Ain Folk at Celtic Connections 19 Jan – 5 Feb 2023

Thirtieth Anniversary

[Pixabay image of violin and bow]

Here in the Whittaker Library, a few of our team have been in the library as long as Celtic Connections has been running in Glasgow! It’s impossible to compute just how many of our alumni have performed in venues around the city over the years, at this popular fortnight of traditional music events. And what better time of year, to brighten our lives in the gloom of midwinter in the west of Scotland?

https://www.celticconnections.com/

The festival website tells you all you need to know. Perhaps the most crucial, of course, is the at-a-glance pdf programme! If you’re connected with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Traditional Music courses, then you’re likely to recognise a number of names. We spotted Chris Stout – a graduate from the days when we were the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD), and the Scottish Music course was newly-started by Drs Jo Miller and Peggy Duesenberry, with Brian McNeill of the Battlefield Band also connected with the course in its early days. Chris now has a musical partnership with Catriona McKay, who has been an external examiner and visiting harp-teacher at RCS. Chris Stout and Catriona McKay appear on Friday 27 January with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the City Halls.

More recent alumni include Isla Ratcliff, who took her MMus at RCS after getting a first in Music at the University of Oxford. Isla’s concert is on Thursday 26th January at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall’s Strathclyde Suite.

You’ll also find Fergus McCreadie, jazz pianist, performing at the Mackintosh Church on Friday 25th January, and in the City Halls Recital Room the following day. Graduating in 2018, he was featured on the RCS website as Graduate of the Month in February 2019, with an update on his progress the following year (‘Graduate Focus‘).

Looking in the library catalogue, you’ll find several CDs and a couple of newsclippings relating to Celtic Connections over the years, but there are also plenty of CD recordings of various alumni from the Traditional Music course – you just need to look them up by name! But it’s also worth bearing in mind that Celtic Connections is of interest in itself, as an example of a large and successful traditional music festival. If you’re researching music festivals, their organisation or history, you could do worse than visit Catalogue Plus (at the same link) to find everything in our catalogue, plus all the digital articles and audiovisual media that we subscribe to.

If you find that one of our alumni has made an interesting recording that we don’t yet have in stock, then do let us know. We can only get streamed sound as part of our big music streaming subscriptions, but if they’ve made a CD, we can certainly try to buy a copy.

Enjoy the music!