ABSTRACT

The pre-Higher Education landscape in traditional music in Scotland has evolved – pedagogically, commercially and professionally – since the BA (Scottish Music) was first established at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in 1996. This shift toward the mainstream has occasioned a confidence; a more external-facing eclecticism and fusion in contemporary Scottish traditional music, involving innovation and acculturation with jazz and orchestral western music as well as the traditional music of other nations and cultures. This gradual ‘mainstreaming’ of the traditional music of Scotland over the past generation has in turn led to young and aspirational exponents’ notions of authenticity increasingly coalescing around the sonic – around performance practice itself – and less so on the ethnology of traditional music on which the Conservatoire’s BA (Scottish Music) was arguably based at its inception. This article explores these and other issues related to the porosity and hybridity which appear to be establishing themselves as hallmarks of Scottish traditional music at the outset of the twenty-first century, and how these issues have transformed traditional music in Scotland’s national conservatoire: firmly performance-oriented, contemporary, external-facing and eclectic, with a focus on the individual as creative artist; but rooted nonetheless in the musical cosmology of Scotland.