Sunday 23 December 2012

Plenty of column inches have been filled in the last week or so (and some more today) over Alasdair Gray’s piece on “Settlers and Colonists”.  It’s difficult to find any words for folk coming in from outside Scotland that don’t sound horribly insular: ‘settlers’ can have ‘white’ in front of it, and both ‘incomers’ and ‘outsiders’ both assume the people new to Scotland are at a disadvantage. Nonetheless, Gray’s distinction is a useful one: it’s raised hackles because he’s identified it with English people (and one in particular), but if you leave the ‘English’ part out of the discourse it’s much easier to see what he’s saying. We should welcome people from anywhere who want to come and make their home here and do their work, that’s obvious. Where we should be wary is where we let people run our cultural institutions in a way that’s modelled on those elsewhere, rather than in a way relevant to Scotland’s own cultures. Sadly, the former practice has often prevailed with music in the second half of the 20th century.

As an example, there was a rather lazy piece in the Herald a few days ago suggesting that Scotland needs some sort of national baroque ensemble, because we can’t celebrate Corelli’s tercentary in the way that another country might. Do we need yet another musical institution (probably run by a ‘colonist’ rather than a ‘settler’) to make this possible?  Why not find our own way to celebrate Corelli’s tercentenary, reflecting the effect he had on Scottish culture? Almost every 18th-century violinist of any standing in Scotland, Niel Gow included, played his music (Gow had a favourite giga), but it's unlikely that it sounded the same in Scotland as it did in Rome. There were also a few decades of experimental Scottish-Italian musical cross-fertilisation, but the one Scot who studied with Corelli had to give up composing music to become a lawyer, which tells you more about Scotland’s relationship to classical music than having a baroque orchestra would. (Whether the ‘baroque orchestra’ ever existed as a historical entity is another matter, of course. Yes, I know Corelli had lots of musicians in Rome ...)

The answer to our problems of cultural health and diversity may be to have fewer big state-supported institutions, rather than adding to their number. Or at the very least, not simply to allow those institutions we have to be provincial versions of those in other parts of the world.