Bass culture in Scottish musical traditions

Scottish traditional music is one of the most popular and widely-known aspects of British culture around the world, where it is used to express cultural identity, ancestry and political allegiance.

A common assumption about the folk music of Britain and Ireland is that it is based entirely on melodies, that is, tunes and songs. These are generally considered to be the core of the tradition, which can be presented with accompaniments which are optional, less important, and less historically grounded.

However, study of the notated sources presents a different picture of past practices. Rather than a variety of accompaniments being generated from a more-or-less fixed melody as happens today, hundreds of different melodies were derived from a few standard bass patterns. Even now, most of the music played at the World Pipe Band Championships is based on only four grounds. These grounds originally served as the basis for improvisation and composition, and as an aid to memory and the classification of pieces.

From the 18th century to the early 20th there was a strong tradition in Scotland of 'bass fiddling' on the cello, which also built on these patterns. Its existence has previously been hidden because the cellists were also referred to as fiddlers: they were 'bass fiddlers', alongside the 'small fiddlers' who played the violin. The similarities between patterns which underlie fiddle music and those in pibroch have not yet been explored.

Scotland's musical traditions have been highly literate as well as oral, and there is a large surviving body of written and printed evidence for these practices. But while performers of traditional music now as a matter of course consult 20th-century field recordings, it is much rarer for them to engage with the earlier records that predate the history of recorded sound.

This project will investigate sources from the 17th to the 19th centuries, including pibroch in written canntaireachd notation, and newly-discovered fiddle manuscripts, to determine how and to what extent grounds were the primary means of generating repertoires and characterised their performance. Classification of these sources by function, and analysis of their musical content to unravel layers of fixed structures and possible techniques of improvisation, will help to demonstrate how pipe and fiddle melodies were generated, and what bass fiddlers played.

Beyond this scholarly work, a team of specialist musicians from the worlds of traditional and early music will develop historically-informed performance styles and practices, finding vocabularies of fiddle accompaniment and of improvisation that find their inspiration in the historical evidence. In performances, recordings, formal workshops and informal sessions, the musical results will be shared with today's professional and amateur musicians, encouraging them to develop their skills in new ways consistent with the history of their traditions, and to contribute feedback and interaction with the research as it progresses, resulting in richer musical choices for players and audiences.

One of the barriers to understanding the wealth of history behind traditional music is the difficulty that the non-specialist musician or busy touring professional has in accessing original historical material. The project will therefore provide a substantial web resource of musical sources and their interpretation, with a focus on making the unfamiliar and challenging aspects of the inheritance accessible to all. The contrast between past and present realities only underlines the music's vigour and adaptability, through changing climates in society and culture.

The aim is to enable creators of music in all traditions to develop a deeper understanding of the structures that underpin Scottish fiddle and pipe music, and to empower the traditional music industry to develop its distinctive character through a deeper, more widespread appreciation of the diversity of its roots.

Key beneficiaries of the research will be professional musicians working in Scottish traditional music and related areas. Scotland itself has a thriving community of folk musicians, but there is also a substantial Scottish traditional music industry across North America, and the British army has left a legacy of connected piping communities on every continent. From the interaction with historical material which relates directly to their specialism, musicians will gain creative stimulus, and be encouraged to develop their practice further. In particular, those who work within the non-melodic aspects of the music (and in many modern performances of fiddle music these are in the majority) will have access to a renewed sense of ownership and engagement with the traditions whose music they carry into the present.

Direct peer-to-peer knowledge exchange with professional and emerging professional musicians in Scotland is built into the timetable of the research programme, via Distil workshops and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland; musicians further afield will benefit from access to the web-based archival resource, which is to be published in year 3. The Scottish Government ministerial working group on the traditional arts identified the availability of archival resources as a need in its January 2010 report (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/300460/0093769.pdf, 35), and the printed material in this resource will complement the AHRC-funded Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage at Napier University.

At a professional level, many Scottish traditional musicians regularly collaborate with those in related musical areas, whether with other traditions particularly in Europe and South America, or in cross-genre projects with jazz and electronic dance music. As a result, the historically-derived principles will have an impact outside their strictly historical musical parameters. Most also teach regularly at summer schools, festivals and fèisean, in conservatoires and colleges, and in local council-run initiatives, and this oral dissemination will continue well after the project itself is complete. Engagement with amateur musicians will deepen meaningful participation in Scottish traditional music, encouraging community cohesion between those musicians concerned with the melodic layer and those who play 'accompanying' instruments, and will enable pipers to develop a more personal means of expression in pibroch.

Record companies, distributors and retailers of online and physical product will directly benefit from the production and sale of the two recordings to be completed in year 3 of the project.

The audience for Scottish traditional music is large and varied, and this project will contribute to a wider understanding of the music's range and character, will challenge some of its cultural clichés, and will also enable an enriched musical context for Scottish country dancing. This broad audience will be engaged through broadcasts, performances, recordings and online content, and the project will actively seek publicity for these outputs in the music press, broadcast media, in specialist web newsgroups, and through the universities' press offices.