Finding Scottish Fiddle Music in the Whittaker Library

RECOMMENDED COLLECTIONS

All our collections are in our catalogue, and they all live together on the shelves at M1450.  (It's the number for dance tunes).  We have loads of Scottish music, and the following collections are some that our RCS tutors recommend.   Numbers of copies are correct at the time of writing (17 November 2016).  If you can’t find what you’re looking for, then please do ask! 

.

Don’t forget the Digital!

There are some key websites where you’ll find masses of material:-

• HMS.Scot
• National Library of Scotland Digital Gallery
• Highland Music Trust
• Archive.org
• (And don’t forget IMSLP – sometimes things turn up there too.) 

.

Real Paper Copies

1. Athole Collection 1 & 2 (we have 5 lending sets and one in special collections) 
2. Simon Fraser Collection (5 copies) (also online at IMSLP)
3. Fiddle Music of Scotland (Hunter) (3 copies and ordering a fourth)
4. Harp & Claymore (Skinner)  (3 copies)
5. Highland Collections (5 copies)
6. Patrick MacDonald Highland Vocal Airs  (2 copies + a photocopy. Ordering 2 more.)
7. Gow’s Repository (1 copy) (also online at HMS.Scot AND NLS Digital Gallery)
8. The Marshall Collections (William Marshall) (4 copies)
9. Mackintosh Collections (Robert  Mackintosh) (4 copies) (also online at Highland Music Trust)
10. Skye Collection / Gesto Collection   (1 copy, ordering 3 more).  (Also online at Archive.org)
11. Gesto Collection – We’re ordering 3 new copies.  (Also online at NLS Digital Gallery)
12. Standard Settings of Pipe Music / Scots Guards (We have 1 and 2, and we’re ordering 2 copies of book 3)

Hey, Look! Nathaniel Gow's Dance Band

******************************************************

Nathaniel Gow's Dance Band

by

Concerto Caledonia

Fiddle Music from 

 Scottish Printed Sources 1761-1823

 

Hey, look! We have a new CD - the latest Concerto Caledonia release, produced as an outcome from the recent AHRC-funded Bass Culture project - or, to use its offficial name, Historic Music of Scotland.  We've added it to stock immediately, needless to say!

Lots of Lovely Fiddle Music - Historical Music of Scotland (hms.scot)

hms.scot

The new Historical Music of Scotland website is live - click here.  There are 22 fully digitized historic fiddle tune books, and full details of another 200, including where to find them, who their compilers were, and what kind of collections they published.  So if you're looking for old fiddle tunes and plenty of insight into how they were harmonized for the cellist, this is the place to go.

There's an article about the website (and the research project that led to it) in the February copy of Box and Fiddle magazine.

We kept a blog before the website went live. It's here at Bass Culture in Scottish Musical Traditions and shows you some of the things we were looking out for.

 You can now buy i-Tunes recordings from the Concerto Caledonia website, with CDs due to be released very soon.

The website will be launched with a concert in London - it's in Café Oto in Dalston on the 11th of February.

The Boundless Energy of Niel Gow and Sons

Anyone involved in the Scottish music scene knows that Niel Gow and his sons - particularly Nathaniel - produced an enormous amount of fiddle music to dance to.

• Take a look at IMSLP and be amazed. 
• Find out what motivated those fiddling Gows!  Here's a new posting from the Bass Culture project about Niel and Nathaniel Gow's controlling influence.
• And another posting about Nathaniel's diversion into Scottish song repertoire: Nathaniel Gow's "small share of trouble". 
• When the Bass Culture website goes live this autumn, there will be much, much more digitized fiddle music for you to exclaim over at http://hms.scot  (At the moment it's just a holding page.)

Who was Mrs Garden of Troup?

Mrs Garden of Troup's Strathspey was so very popular, we thought we'd ask:- who was Mrs Garden of Troup?

Leave us a comment if you know!

William Lamb - article about the diffusion of the Scottish Strathspey

Grafting Culture: On the Development and Diffusion of the Strathspey in Scottish Music

You can read the pdf of William Lamb's article HERE.