Welcum — Fàilte — Croeso — Welcome!
ScotMus.com aims to become an experimental online reconstruction of the entire history of all styles and traditions of Scottish music, from the oldest surviving evidence up to the early modern era. The heart of the project is the online publication of new free-to-access multimedia editions of the key sources of Scottish music, along with its cultural heritage — all presented in a scholarly but chatty style.
My primary work is on the music section — an ever-expanding series of musical scores, transcribed as originally written by their own authors, with minimal editorial interference on my part. But you can also just listen to handy audio illustrations of their contents, helpfully edited to try and make practical musical sense of the sometimes difficult scores. Because this project's not just for musicians and musicologists — it's for normal people, too. In fact, the music section's built like a virtual juke-box (no coins required: just press 'n' play).
But you'll also find an ever-expanding selection of historic writings and new essays on Scottish music gathered together in the texts section. Here, you can browse through thoughts by and about the people who made, listened to, and mused over the sounds in the first place.
Please note that new material appears here regularly, often in surprisingly large instalments — it's an eternal work-in-progress, so stay tuned...
yours aye,
dr. steve sweeney-turner,
freelance musicologist, scotland
Benjamin Franklin (1765)
Sophia Scott-Lockhart (c.1827)
Robert Sempill (c.1645)
— ScotMus.com Exclusive (Aug/Sept 2010):
Nordberg's "King Arthur" at Craigcrook Castle: If the collision of the Ancient and the Modern happens to be your thing (and as a ScotMus reader, it probably is), then check this one out. I was recently offered a couple of complimentary tickets to the show, but can't attend, so decided to offer them to you on a first-come-first-served basis.
Press Release Excerpts: Following Edinburgh-based company Siege Perilous' critically acclaimed production of Lucy Nordberg's new play "King Arthur" during Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2009, Richard Demarco will host a larger scale open air performance in the atmospheric grounds of Craigcrook Castle, the home of the Demarco Collection and Archive, as part of the events celebrating Richard's 80th birthday during 2010.
"King Arthur" charts the latter years of the enlightened king as he struggles to impose democracy upon an unwilling people. This strongly authored, character driven piece uses myth to investigate current national and international concerns: the post-enlightenment problem of reconciling faith with reason, and tradition with modernity. A renaissance style drama written partly in blank verse, it raises many questions, not least about the use of the this form in modern works and the effect on actors and audience.
For further information from the press release, please click here (PDF).
Further Information From:
Contact the author, Lucy Nordberg to claim your tickets, citing ScotMus.com as your source. Thanks to Tony N. for this one. :-)
Gie's a Joab: OK, folks, I finally admit it — I will never, ever, ever make any kind of "living" from being a Scottish musicologist. It was worth a go, though. So the next question is how to make a living at all. To this end, I've re-started my non-academic freelance writing career after an almost 20-year gap, but am also setting up a new sort-of-musical project (announcements to follow) that should have more general appeal (and also generate a bit more of the elusive ol' Filthy Lucre). The upshot of this is that I'm finally getting to grips with a big pile of web-technologies that'll make running large-scale websites a lot easier. Hence, the new version of ScotMus.com promised below will on the one hand be a lot bigger and better, but also be delayed further. Sorry 'bout that, but needs must. ;-)
New Version: ScotMus.com is undergoing major re-development. The current version of the website will continue to function as before, but the up-coming new version will be much better. However, don't expect huge piles of new material for a wee while — there's a brane-boggling amount of techno-tweaking for me to do first! Stay tuned...! :-)