David Johnson's classic study describes Scotland in the eighteenth century, a period when music, both folk and classical, flourished. Thomas Erskine, the Earl of Kelly, is the most remarkable composer of the time, but this book shows how the vibrant musical flowering left no section of society untouched. Musical societies and assemblies were active in all the main towns; the gatherings of genteel society revolved around performances of music and dancing; and among folk instrumentalists the fiddle was overtaking the bagpipe as the mainstay of popular entertainment. At this time both the folk and the classical traditions were at a peak and developing rapidly. One of the achievements of this book is to show the complexity of the relationship between these two main strands of Scottish culture. Much of the repertoire of present-day traditional fiddle music, sometimes romantically depicted as the creation of generations of illiterate farm workers, originated in the eighteenth century through the interplay of classical and folk musicians (many of whom could read music). As remarkable as this hundred-year burst of creative activity is its sudden collapse.Almost two centuries passed before, in our own time, Scottish music has again begun to flourish. In a provocative new introduction to this edition, David Johnson casts a critical eye over the current musical scene in Scotland. He shows how the eighteenth century experience sheds light on the present day, and on what is likely to happen next. If the recent Scottish musical renaissance is to continue, it will have to learn the lessons, so masterfully unfolded here, of an earlier golden period of Scottish music.

Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. From the field of natural philosophy, involving the science of sounds and acoustics, to the realm of imagination, involving resounding music and art, the branches of modern culture that were involved in the intellectual tradition of the science of music proved to be variously appealing to men of letters. Among these, a particularly rich field of investigation was the British philosophy of the mind and of human understanding, developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which looked at music and found in its realm a way of understanding human experience. Focussing on the world of sensation - trying to describe how the human mind could develop ideas and emotions by its means - philosophers and physicians often took their cases from art's products, be it music (sounds), painting (colours) or poetry (words as signs of sound conveying a meaning), thus looking at art from a particular point of view: that of the perceiving mind. The relationship between music and the philosophies of mind is presented here as a significant part of the construction of a Science of Man: a huge and impressive 'project' involving both the study of man's nature, to which - in David Hume's words - 'all sciences have a relation', and the creation of an ideal of what Man should be. Maria Semi sheds light on how these reflections moved towards a Science of Music: a complex and articulated vision of the discipline that was later to be known as 'musicology'; or Musikwissenschaft.

Modern freemasonry was invented in London about 1717, but was only one of a surge of British associations in the early modern era which had originated before the English Revolution. By 1800, thousands of clubs and societies had swept the country. Recruiting widely from the urban affluent classes, mainly amongst men, they traditionally involved heavy drinking, feasting, singing, and gambling. They ranged from political, religious and scientific societies, artistic and literary clubs, to sporting societies, bee keeping, and birdfancying clubs, and a myriad of other associations.

Reveals how the musical benefit allowed musicians, composers, and audiences to engage in new professional, financial, and artistic contexts.

The volume covers many of the most significant themes in pre-industrial Scottish society.