The Scottish Fiddle Tradition

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The documented history is strong for the 18th and 19th centuries, through printed collections, portraits and recordings. Recent research has revised the early date of the violin's arrival. The weak points are claims of uniqueness: the strathspey and its snap are distinctive, but similar rhythms exist elsewhere. Composers' tune counts are also slippery, since many tunes were adapted from older ones.

An Italian instrument

established According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the violin family appeared in essentially its modern form in northern Italy, in Brescia and Cremona, around 1550. Andrea Amati of Cremona is credited with helping to establish the four-string violin and the standard shapes of the violin, viola and cello. Scotland had medieval bowed instruments called fiddles long before, but the violin itself arrived from Italy.

When the violin reached Scotland

established It was long assumed that the violin reached Scotland only around 1670. Dr Aaron McGregor's research at the University of Glasgow, in his thesis on violinists and violin music in Scotland from 1550 to 1750, shows a violin tradition at the Scottish royal court in the 16th century, more than a century earlier. Between about 1670 and 1750 Scottish fiddle music began to be written down in manuscript tune-books. McGregor argues that without this period there would have been no late-18th-century golden age.

The strathspey and the Scotch snap

shared The strathspey is a dance tune in four time, slower and more stately than the reel, with sharply dotted rhythms. It is widely described as the most distinctively Scottish tune form. Its signature is the Scotch snap: a short, accented note followed by a longer one, the reverse of the usual dotted rhythm. The snap is genuinely central to Scottish fiddling, but it is not uniquely Scottish. The same figure appears in Italian Baroque music, where it is called the Lombard rhythm, and in Hungarian music.

shared The dance historian George S. Emmerson, in A Social History of Scottish Dance (1972), describes the strathspey as a way of playing common-time reels slower and with a "snap or jerk" in the rhythm, which he regards as peculiar to Scotland and old in Gaelic vocal dance music. He does not claim it began in Strathspey itself, but notes that most 18th-century composers in the idiom lived in the north-east, and that the dance style took the district's name when it reached Lowland society. His view of the rhythm as uniquely Scottish should be read alongside the Lombard parallel above.

established The word is younger than often claimed. The Oxford English Dictionary once cited "Stravetspy" in Zachary Boyd's manuscript poem of about 1653, but Emmerson, checking the manuscript in Glasgow University Library, read the word as "strive to essay", a conclusion the dance researcher J. F. Flett reached independently. The first secure use is in the Menzies manuscript of 1749, which calls "The Montgomerie's Rant" "a strathspey reele". The first printed use Emmerson found is "A New Strathspey Reel" in James Oswald's Caledonian Pocket Companion (1751), and the first title page is Daniel Dow's Thirty-Seven New Reels and Strathspeys (1776). A run of collections followed, among them Angus Cumming's A Collection of Strathspey or Old Highland Reels (1780), William Marshall's A Collection of Strathspey Reels (1781) and Joshua Campbell's A Collection of New Reels and Highland Strathspeys (1788). After that, Emmerson writes, the word is seldom absent from a Scottish dance-music collection.

established In the ballroom the strathspey was usually paired with the reel. The Aberdeen dancing master Francis Peacock wrote in 1805 that many Highlanders preferred strathspey music for the reel but that the quicker reel was usually chosen for its liveliness, and by the early 19th century the Foursome Reel was normally danced first to a strathspey and then to a reel. Collections such as the Gows' Complete Repository (1799) printed tunes in this strathspey-and-reel pairing. Calling country dances set to strathspey tunes "Strathspeys" dates only from the 1920s.

The golden age

established The late 18th century was the golden age of Scottish fiddle composition. Its best-known figure is Niel Gow, born in Strathbraan, Perthshire, in 1727. After winning a fiddle competition at 18, judged by the blind musician John McCraw, he gained the patronage of the Duke of Atholl and played at the balls of the local nobility. Sir Henry Raeburn painted him in 1787. A later collector credited Gow with 87 dance tunes, though at least a quarter derive from older tunes. His son Nathaniel Gow, born in 1763, became a leading performer, publisher and composer with nearly two hundred tunes to his credit. William Marshall of Fochabers, a steward to the Duke of Gordon, was another celebrated composer of strathspeys.

established Gow's fame rested on playing for dancers. Susan Sibbald's memoirs, quoted by Emmerson, describe him leading the band at Border balls in the first years of the 19th century, coming to the front of the orchestra fiddle in hand, stamping and calling "high" as the music changed between strathspey and reel. In 1806 Sir John Sinclair of the Highland Society wrote that "Neil Gow knows who they are and the tunes that ought to be played" when the society wanted Dunkeld men brought to Edinburgh to show old Highland dances. Captain Gronow's often-quoted memory that "Neil Gow" led the Edinburgh band at Almack's in London in 1814 cannot be right, since Niel died in 1807; Emmerson takes it to mean his son Nathaniel, who travelled to London to support his brother John Gow (1764–1826), a music seller there who played at Caledonian balls.

The fiddle inherits the harp

established A rising instrument. In the Highlands the fiddle gained ground in the later 17th century just as the professional harper was fading. Keith Sanger and Alison Kinnaird, in Tree of Strings (1992), the standard archival history of the harp in Scotland, trace the overlap in household papers. In September 1662 the Campbells of Breadalbane entertained a piper "with Glenlyon's fiddler and his man", and in October of the same year "the Harper and his man" for two days. At Dunvegan, MacLeod paid a Lowland "violer", James Glass, and bought him a plaid in 1683–84, while the blind harper Roderick Morison (Ruairidh Dall) was still in his service. A student from Strathspey, writing to his professor at King's College, Aberdeen, in 1693, described bands of women who sang the poets' songs from house to house and "had ordinarlie a violer with them who played on his fidle as they sang". Sanger and Kinnaird read this as the fiddle taking over a job once done by the harp in the old bardic world.

shared Harp against fiddle. The rivalry entered verse and song. Grant of Shewglie (c. 1675–1746), who played fiddle, pipes and harp, composed a Gaelic poem, now lost, in which the three instruments quarrel. Simon Fraser's collection of 1816 gives its air as "Màiri Nighean Dheòrsa" and summarises the verses: the fiddle, his favourite, wins because it rules the wedding, the dance and the ball. A harp tune called "Fuath nam Fìdhlearan" (The Fiddler's Contempt) was ascribed by Daniel Dow to "Rorie Dall" and is often linked with Morison, who is said to have disliked fiddlers. Sanger and Kinnaird doubt that Morison composed instrumental music, and note William Matheson's suggestion that the tune mocks the fiddlers' Scotch snap.

established Harp tunes saved by fiddlers. Much of the little harp music that survives was printed in fiddle and dance collections. Sanger and Kinnaird stress that many of these were made in Perthshire, the strongest centre of harping in Scotland, or by musicians with Perthshire roots, such as Daniel Dow and John Bowie. Bowie's collection includes eight harp tunes, among them "Port Gordon", "Port Atholl", "Port Lennox" and "McLoud's Salute", which he said had come from a Highland gentleman whose ancestors learned them from "the famous Rory Daul". Dow printed "Lude's Supper", "Cumha Peathar Ruairi" and others attributed to "Rorie Dall". James Oswald's Caledonian Pocket Companion holds several harp tunes, though his "Rory Dall's Port" is a set of variations that are probably Oswald's own. Patrick MacDonald's Collection of Highland Vocal Airs (1784), made with his brother Joseph, has 186 vocal airs and 32 dance tunes, and claims to include the last remnants of the harp music of the Highlands.

shared Niel Gow and the harpers. Sanger and Kinnaird suggest that the line of inheritance in Atholl may have been direct. Niel Gow's mother's maiden name was apparently MacEwen, and a family of MacEwen harpers had served in that district for some three centuries. Nobody knows where Gow got much of his training. They also point out that some of Gow's compositions, such as his "Lamentation for James Moray of Abercairney", are close in style to older harp ports such as "The Duke of Lennox Port" and "Port Preist". The family link is a suggestion based on one surname; the stylistic likeness is their musical judgement.

established Musicians in between. Many 18th-century players moved between instruments. William McMurchy of Kintyre (born about 1700) was piper, fiddler and harper. When the Highland Society of London tried in 1784–86 to have a young Highlander, Christopher MacRae of Kintail, trained as a harper, the scheme failed, and its accounts show that "Gow the musician" was paid £16 3s 6d in June 1786 for teaching MacRae the violin and for music books. The Welsh harper William ap Pritchard, who wandered Galloway and Ayrshire until his death in 1816, laid aside his harp at fairs and played the fiddle for dancing, and was credited with tunes such as "Culzean Castle". His story, told by the exciseman Joseph Train, helped inspire Wandering Willie in Scott's Redgauntlet.

The fiddle and the dance

established For most of its history the Scottish fiddle was dance music, and the fiddler was hired for the dance. Emmerson records that when the Edinburgh Assembly was refounded in 1746 its orchestra was four fiddles, a bassoon and two oboes, the fiddlers being John Reoch, James Cameron, John Wilson and Robert Hutton. Each was paid on a sliding scale from six shillings to ten shillings a night by the size of the company, and the directors ruled that musicians who appeared "in drink" would be dismissed. In the countryside the fiddler played in barns, at weddings and at fairs; in Ayrshire, according to William Aiton's report of 1811, when fights broke out over the dance floor the fiddler retreated onto a bench and then became the arbiter who struck up the next reel. By the 19th century enterprising fiddlers hired halls during fairs and charged a penny a dance, the "penny reels" that Emmerson sees as the forerunner of the public dance hall. In the kissing dance Babbity Bowster a Lowland fiddler made a squeak by bowing above the bridge to signal the kiss.

established Fiddlers also carried the stigma of the dance. In the 1560s John Knox complained that at Mary Queen of Scots' court it was more profitable "to have been brought up with fiddlers and dancers" than among the godly. At the other end of the social scale, the London dancing master Thomas Wilson complained in the Regency years that ballroom musicians were treated as mere fiddlers for hire, rarely spoken to except haughtily and often left unpaid.

The Strathspey King

established James Scott Skinner, born in Banchory in 1843, son of a dancing master, became the most famous Scottish fiddler of his age. As a boy he toured with a travelling youth orchestra and performed before Queen Victoria in 1858; later he taught dancing at Balmoral. He toured the United States in 1893, made his first cylinder recordings in 1899, and was still touring in 1925 at the age of 74. By his death in 1927 he had published about 600 compositions and made about 80 recordings. He is known as "the Strathspey King".

A living and travelling tradition

shared Scottish fiddling has strong regional styles, from Shetland to the North-East, the Highlands and the Borders. It also travelled with emigrants, most famously to Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, where a vigorous Scottish-derived style survives. Claims that Cape Breton preserves 18th-century Scottish fiddling unchanged are a romantic simplification; the tradition has developed in its own way.

Cape Breton and the return to Scotland

established The anthropologist Jonathan Dembling, in his chapter of Transatlantic Scots (2005), based on fieldwork in Scotland in 2003, describes how the two branches drifted apart. In Cape Breton, Gaelic settlers kept the fiddle, strathspeys, reels and step-dancing, but added near-universal piano accompaniment, square sets from New England and a taste for jigs. In the Highlands, evangelical religion cast music and dance as sinful in the nineteenth century, accordion-led country dancing spread from the south, and step-dancing almost vanished. By 1971 the Cape Breton style itself seemed doomed, until a CBC documentary, The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler, provoked a revival: the Cape Breton Fiddlers' Association was formed, older fiddlers came forward and young people took lessons.

established In the 1980s two Scots, the fiddler Alasdair Fraser and the piper Hamish Moore, fell for the playing of Cape Breton fiddlers such as Buddy MacMaster. Fraser invited MacMaster and the step-dancer Harvey Beaton to teach at his summer school at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on Skye. Moore set up Ceòlas, a summer school in South Uist with many Cape Breton tutors, now run by a board of Uist people.

shared Dembling found the Scottish scene split. Enthusiasts called the Cape Breton style rough, driving and "dirty", and one fiddler spoke of the need to "put the dirt back" into Scottish music; critics used the same words as complaints. Scots tended to adopt the parts of the tradition that predate emigration: Scottish tunes over Cape Breton compositions, strathspeys and reels over jigs, step-dancing but not square sets, and almost none of the piano style. Supporters stress the link with Gaelic song, summed up in the phrase "you play it as you would sing it". Some Hebridean fiddlers heard no Gaelic in it at all; one called it "Scottish music with a French accent". Players from Shetland and the North-East objected that their own regional styles were being treated as debased. Islanders also complained that Ceòlas left out the accordion, which plays Gaelic waltzes at local dances.

shared Dembling's own conclusion is cautious. Most of the leading Scottish champions of Cape Breton music do not speak Gaelic, and the Cape Bretoners who teach in Scotland show little interest in the identity debate. He argues that if Lowland Scots use Canadian Gaels to tell Scottish Gaels what is authentically Gaelic, they risk repeating an old pattern of Lowland appropriation of Highland culture.

• The violin came to Scotland from Italy, where it took its modern form around 1550.
• Violinists played at the Scottish royal court in the 16th century, a century earlier than once thought.
• About 3,500 tunes survive in Scotland's earliest 27 fiddle manuscripts.
• Niel Gow won the competition that launched his career at the age of 18.
• At least a quarter of the tunes credited to Niel Gow derive from older tunes.
• James Scott Skinner performed for Queen Victoria as a teenager.
• Skinner made his first recordings in 1899.
• The Scotch snap is known in Italian Baroque music as the Lombard rhythm.
• A 1971 Canadian documentary predicting the end of Cape Breton fiddling helped start its revival.
• Older Cape Breton fiddlers would not play a new tune until they could sing its Gaelic words.
• The word "strathspey" is first securely recorded in 1749; an earlier "Stravetspy" from about 1653 turned out to be a misreading of "strive to essay".
• Edinburgh's assembly directors in 1746 threatened to dismiss any musician who turned up drunk.
• Niel Gow used to stamp and shout "high" at the change from strathspey to reel.
• At 19th-century fairs fiddlers charged a penny a dance, the origin of the "penny reel".
• Several old harp tunes, such as "Port Atholl" and "Port Gordon", survive mainly because fiddlers and fiddle-book compilers kept them.
• A lost Gaelic poem by Grant of Shewglie staged a quarrel between his fiddle, pipes and harp; the fiddle won.

• Do not say Scotland invented the fiddle or violin.
• Do not repeat the old claim that the violin reached Scotland only around 1670.
• Do not say the Scotch snap is unique to Scotland.
• Do not take composers' tune counts at face value; many tunes were adapted from older ones.
• Do not describe Cape Breton fiddling as an unchanged survival of 18th-century Scotland.
• Do not present the Cape Breton style as the one authentic Scottish style; Scotland's regional styles have their own continuous histories.
• Do not cite "Stravetspy" (c.1653) as the earliest use of "strathspey"; it is a misreading, and the first secure record is 1749.
• Do not say Niel Gow led the band at Almack's in 1814; he died in 1807.
• Do not state that Niel Gow descended from the MacEwen harpers; it is a suggestion based on his mother's surname.
• Do not present tunes credited to "Rory Dall" in fiddle collections as proven compositions of either blind harper of that name.