'Scotland's Music' is an all-embracing account of the history of music and musicians in Scotland, from the Stone Age to the present day. It emcompasses traditional, classical and popular music and places them in their historical contexts, adding vital information to the history of Scotland itself.

Scottish traditional music has been through a successful revival in the mid-twentieth century and has now entered a professionalised and public space. Devolution in the UK and the surge of political debate surrounding the independence referendum in Scotland in 2014 led to a greater scrutiny of regional and national identities within the UK, set within the wider context of cultural globalisation. This volume brings together a range of authors that sets out to explore the increasingly plural and complex notions of Scotland, as performed in and through traditional music. Traditional music has played an increasingly prominent role in the public life of Scotland, mirrored in other Anglo-American traditions. This collection principally explores this movement from historically text-bound musical authenticity towards more transient sonic identities that are blurring established musical genres and the meaning of what constitutes ‘traditional’ music today. The volume therefore provides a cohesive set of perspectives on how traditional music performs Scottishness at this crucial moment in the public life of an increasingly (dis)United Kingdom.

This book traces the unique attraction Scotland has had for the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century composers. It is not about Scottish composers, but rather about the music that for two centuries was written and performed outside Scotland by musicians of other countries who had Scotland in mind. Hitherto far more has been known about this attraction in Germany and France than in Britain, but Roger Fiske here puts this right and shows how nearly all the major composers from Purcell to Brahms were affected - most notably Schubert, Mendelssohn and Bruch, but also Haydn, Beethoven, Chopin and Schumann. In particular, Dr Fiske describes the travels of Mendelssohn and Chopin in more detail than has been attempted before. There are two major influences to be found in this enthusiasm for Scotland. The first is Scotch song, a generic term commonly used in eighteenth-century England for a type of popular song. The second is Scottish literature, especially Macpherson's Ossian and the writings of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns: Scotland influenced continental literature as well as inspiring some fine music.

From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, a steady stream of Scots migrated to Ulster and eventually onward across the Atlantic to resettle in the United States. Many of these Scots-Irish immigrants made their way into the mountains of the southern Appalachian region. They brought with them a wealth of traditional ballads and tunes from the British Isles and Ireland, a carrying stream that merged with sounds and songs of English, German, Welsh, African American, French, and Cherokee origin. Their enduring legacy of music flows today from Appalachia back to Ireland and Scotland and around the globe. Ritchie and Orr guide readers on a musical voyage across oceans, linking people and songs through centuries of adaptation and change.

Gaelic Scotland is one of the world's great treasure-houses of song. This work is an anthology of music and lyrics from the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Islands. It provides an introduction to Gaelic tradition, musical transcriptions, and English translations. It portrays the social and historical background of the songs.

Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published in ten parts from 1882 to 1898, contained the texts and variants of 305 extant themes written down between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unsurpassed in its presentation of texts, this exhaustive collection devoted little attention to the ballad music, a want that was filled by Bertrand Harris Bronson in his four volume Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. The present book is an abridged, one-volume edition of that work, setting forth music and text for proven examples of oral tradition, with a new comprehensive introduction. Its convenient format makes readily available to students and scholars the materials for a study of the Child ballads as they have been preserved in the British-American singing tradition. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A comprehensive annotated collection of 365 tunes with a historical introduction. Much more than a definitive collection of tunes, James Hunter's introduction traces the history of the fiddle and music through the centuries.