Sunday 25 March 2012

atter.  I think this was my first proper weekend off this year, and I really needed it after organising two gigs in the past week.

The second one was the memorial concert for Kenneth Elliott, where we were on last, after a fascinating lecture from Anne Smith (who I frustratingly only had time for the briefest of chats with) and the Chapel Choir directed by Katy Cooper, with keyboard interludes from John Kitchen (I got to hear my harpsichord from a distance probably for the first time ever) and David Hamilton.  All of us were singing or playing music that had been edited by Kenneth, and it wasn’t until we put it all together that we realised what a wealth of material he’s left behind, and how much he’s contributed to our understanding and experience of Scottish music.

a tiny fraction of Kenneth Elliott's work on my study floor

In rehearsal, Alison pointed out that, quite by chance, this is probably the first time that our entire band has been made up of Scots. The issue isn’t that Scottish people necessarily play or sing Scottish music any better than anyone else (we don’t), but that our nation’s relationship with its musical history is so screwed up that it’s taken 20 years for us to get to a place where we haven’t required outside help to perform it at all.  Mhairi was on blistering form too. It’s good to have a shared repertoire of old Scottish material that’s almost become part of our personal folk traditions: we can say ‘let’s do Joy to the Person of my Love, some of Odo di mesto intorno, and Lyk as the Dum Solsequium’ or whatever, and we don’t know exactly how they’ll turn out, but we all know them well enough to be able to adapt and respond to one another and listen to what happens. I don’t expect McGibbon’s sonata in imitation of Corelli ever to be as popular as Auld Lang Syne, but it is interesting how some of these pieces have sunk into the collective memory of even just a few musicians. In a more culturally confident country this would not be so unusual.

Don’t forget the skins finale tomorrow – I still haven’t seen the pictures that go with Rae’s song, so I’ll be glued to the telly to see how it all comes together.