ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Scottish traditional music in particular constructs and mythologises the place of the Scottish Borders. In ethnomusicology a great deal of work has gone into understanding the soundscapes around us, both in terms of the musical sound and humans' interaction with their environments. There are three principal historical places in the Scottish Borders that emerge in song and literature, including the rough and unlawful debatable lands of the medieval Border Reivers; the romantic place of the rolling hills of the Borders; and the daunting supernatural landscape of Border Ballads where otherworldly beings help to dictate community morality. Archie Fisher is a internationally renowned singer and guitarist who has been a professional musician for fifty years. Hearing the meaning of a song is of course as much an act of creation as performance or composition, because it is the act of hearing that we construct semiotic meaning and make sense of the musical text and its cultural intertextuality.
