Robert Burns Thought Scottish Songs should be Performed Like This

A few years ago, we posted a blog entry about William Tytler.  Never heard of him?  Well, he lived a long, long time ago. 
Nonetheless, we think Robert Burns may have been influenced by William Tytler's "prescription" for good Scottish song performances.  He could have read Tytler's dissertation - it was published in several different books.  Or he could have read Joseph Ritson's book, Scotish Songs, where Ritson quoted from Tytler's dissertation.

So, let's find out more about what Tytler said.

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William Tytler (image from ElectricScotland)

On 12th September, 1792, William Tytler died at the grand old age of 81.  Scottish musical history owes much to Tytler.

Tytler (1711-92) was an Edinburgh lawyer and historian. A founder member of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1780, his A Dissertation on the Scottish Musick was an influential commentary on the history of Scottish music for antiquarians and collectors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

It was first published in Hugo Arnot’s The History of Edinburgh, attributed to ‘a learned and ingenious friend’, in 1779 (and again in 1788).  It also appeared under Tytler's name in 1783 and 1790, and was later read at a meeting, and subsequently published in 1792, in the first Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

Tytler wanted to track down the origins of the earliest melodies, ‘and to trace the history of our music down to modern times.’ His comments were influential upon the song collection compilers who followed him - Johnson, Burns and Ritson. Tytler’s pronouncement about the correct kind of accompaniment for Scottish song became almost a ‘gold standard’ for contemporary antiquarian publishers of song collections.

• Royal Conservatoire of Scotland - for books on Scottish music history in the Whittaker Library, click here.
• Check COPAC (UK national and university libraries) to find your nearest copy of a Tytler source.
• We have a photocopy of Tytler's dissertation in our own library - here.  (We downloaded it from Archive.org)

Know your Scottish musical history! On this day, 12th October 1711

William Tytler, Scottish music historian, was born in Edinburgh on 12th October 1711. 

Followers of the WhittakerLive blog will already know about Tytler, of course.  'Whittaker' blogged about him when it was the anniversary of his death on 12th September.  (He died in 1792.)  Remind yourself who he was here.

Also on this date, but many years later, the Scottish song-collector Alexander Campbell was beginning to head home after 3 months of hard toil gathering Hebridean traditional songs.  On 12th October 1815, Sandy arrived in Broadford Bay on 'a heavenly morning' to see fishing boats on a perfectly calm sea.  He admired the morning view before making his way by ferry to Glenelg, where he was going to interview Lieut. Donald MacCrimmon, 'the celebrated performer on the Great Highland Bagpipe'.  He spent the day with MacCrimmon and his family, enjoyed hearing his playing and discussing piping, and then had a night in the pub with Alexander Bruce, the Piper of Glenelg, continuing to increase his knowledge of the manner by which pipers were trained.

• Why not look up "MacCrimmon" in the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Library catalogue? - look here.