ScotMus.com : Steve Sweeney-Turner

Mercilessly-Blethery Version: OK, that was a fair wee ideological blast, for which I heartily apologise, but kindly allow me a moment to explain myself in more detail. Yes, I am an English-born Scottish Nationalist (and make absolutely nae apologies for the fact). But this is no contradiction, and I am far from alone in this — modern Scotland is full of passionate immigrants (not least our more recent Asian family-additions) — and actually always has been, coz there's just something damn, damn good about this place that we all fall in love with instantly, regardless of where we're from (one indicative point being that, in the 90s, the SNP developed a sub-chapter of members called "Asians for Independence", who were mostly Urdu Paks and whose work I admired greatly, as one of their comrade-immigrants-in-arms — oh, and according to certain legends, the SNP was actually founded by a Yorkshireman, as am I, which is rather pleasing, aside from being somewhat ironic, although probably largely apocryphal!). But I see my political identification as something that goes beyond mere party-lines — I've often said, for example, that I will absolutely always vote SNP until we get independence — after which, they're probably the last politician-eejits I'd ever vote for (not least coz the political smorgasbord would change radically once we are independent, so a wider range of far stranger and way-more hilarious political fruit would then be on offer). So, yes, I am a committed Nationalist, but very much with The Long Game very much in my strategic sights. But, looking back over the shoulder, the cultural history of Scottish Nationalism is not without its historical oddities — and embarrassments. It has, for example, sometimes been rather nastily anti-"English", not least back in the 70s when I was the very-identifiably-Middle-Class-"English" kid in my Midlothian Nat-voting Working-Class constituency's school playground. Oh, aye, that wesnae much fun at all. From that truly miserable and emotionally-damaging formative experience, it's actually remarkable that I turned into a Civilised Scottish Nationalist (with deeply-held Socialist tendencies that far exceed the Party norm) at all (rather than, for example, a Jack-flag-waving Thatcherite BNP boot-boy, which in many ways would have been the more likely result). So, with some obvious irony, kindly allow me to observe that perhaps my most authentically-Scottish emotion is that I feel deep, bitter and personally-devastating emotional resentment towards the country I love above all others on this strange little planet. But I do love it, despite its many insane foibles. This evil, twisted emotion, if nothing else, makes me 10,000%-Scottish in ways that far exceed mere DNA criteria.

I guess it's obvious from the website that I am indeed said (odd) Nationalist type of guy. At this point in history, no-one other than the maddest of Nationalists would actually have bothered putting something like this together in the first place. But, as previously indicated, I am a Nationalist with a long-term view. I'd actually like it all to be a lot calmer in the future (and, pleasingly, Scotland does indeed seem to have a future again). I'd like future generations not to have to make the impossibly-complex cultural decisions that my generation has been forced to make (whether we are "DNA-natives" or otherwise). So you might, at this stage, reasonably ask me "what kind of Nationalism are you really trying to promote?" Ah, that would be a very wise question indeed. Ireland (which I have DNA links to, obviously, behind my Northern-English frame), has always been a model for me here — both as things that Scotland must, at all costs, absolutely avoid, but also as things that we can learn from and be inspired by. Economic ("Celtic Tiger") success is only the most obvious — and, as we now know — transitory thing we can learn from. I do not entirely subscribe to the stock Party line that we will be "better-off" when we're Independent. The history of Capitalism teaches one thing above all else — success is a passing thing (by definition). So let's be honest about the fact that it is indeed "our oil" out there, but that it is almost spent. So, no, my Irish example is not about the economy. What I think we can learn from Ireland is how to re-write our colonial minds. Obviously, Ireland was an actual colony, whereas we never were — if anything, we were the evil colonisers, in cahoots with "The English". In fact, we even colonised ourselves, and did so way better than any invader could have. But, like the Irish, we have been raised with many damaging Nationalist Myths that bear no true relation to our real history, and often actually further the cause of Unionism rather than Nationalism. So, here's an Irish example of how to strike though the school-book nonsense we were all raised with, and start working towards a workably-New Nationalism (where, for example, an f-word becomes our greatest savvy) — (apropos, "OK, I want to talk about Scotland") —

Sinead on Jules's Show

So go figure yourself where I'm really going with this. But... I take The Great Sinead (and I really don't care what the English papers say) to be saying that, psychologically, the real effect of British colonialism in the long-run to Irish society was not actually half as damaging to Ireland as the initial Irish Nationalist reponse to it. Saying that "The Famine" was an illusion (in the sense of how we've been taught about it) is a Massive Nationalist Heresy, of course, and got her a fair auld bit o bad press at the time. But I, for one, completely approve of her analysis, and want to apply the same principle of uncomfortable truth to my own native culture(s) — and on that pluralistic note, kindly note the single crucial word Sinead repeats over and again at the end of her song — cos "knowledge and understanding" are very fine things, but so rarely enough in practice. :-)

BTW, if you're a Sinead fan, my advice is let the YaChoob link run its course — at least at the time of writing, the next item is the great cliched Prince Classic, followed by other even-more-bald exotica. Weil worth yer wait!

Anyhow, blahdie-blah. What follows is the long auto-biog babble with all the self-preening you'd hoped not to expect —

Originally, I was going to be a physicist, following in my Dad's scientific footsteps rather than my Mum's more artistic inclinations. However, while doing my best to avoid high-school, I got into a Heady combination of early-80's post-Punk, 70's Rock and 60's Psychedelia, and was soon murdering Syd Barrett, Jimi Hendrix, Dave Brock and Jimmy Page on an untunably-second-hand Gibson Les Paul copy and hankering after a Rickenbacker bass (à la Jean-Jacques Burnel) that I never got 'round to strangling-up the cash for. Consequently, I enrolled in the school's O-Grade music class (free guitar lessons) and joined a pretentious band of pseudo-hippies who seemed vaguely willing to indulge my half-Punk leanings. I also started seriously getting into the more experimental end of things from the Velvet Underground, Nico/Cale, Doors-freakouts and Gong (I still find cheese amusing) through Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Laurie Anderson and The Creatures, etc. On playing some of my own noisy experiments to my high-school music teacher, I was duly exposed to Stockhausen's early sonic assaults (starting with Mikrophonie I & II, soon progressing to the pan-galactic oto-blaster of Telemusik), at which point science and art no longer seemed such strange bed-fellows after all. So it's been down-hill ever since (I even went through an adolescent Wagnerian phase, although Nietzsche soon cured me of that), and said high-school teacher has much to answer for. But another thing whose significance only emerged later on was an original copy of Hamish MacCunn's Songs and Ballads of Scotland that one of my Mum's friends gave me to learn a bit of piano with. Which, being a teenager, I nonetheless didn't. Even so, there was something intriguing about it that kept nippin the back o ma heid for the next couple of years...

So I went on to study music formally and pretty Modernistically at Nottingham University, where I got a B.A. (Hons) 1st, majoring in composition, with musicology in close pursuit. It was at Nottingham that I wrote my first blethers on Scottish music, including the "Scotch Song" tradition and Niel Gow's dance tunes, having found an apparently-unread library copy of David Johnson's ground-breaking mouthful, Music and Society in Lowland Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (as things turned out, David has a lot to answer for, too). After Nottingham, I had a year being a skint itinerant music-teacher in Glasgow and Renfrewshire (where I discovered Robert Tannahill and the Radical tradition and started listening to The Pogues a lot), and then compounded my initial and quite serious error of judgement by getting myself a second and entirely-musicological qualification from Edinburgh University, a Ph.D. in a weird combination of: (1) C18th & C19th Scottish music aesthetics and cultural politics; (2) late-C20th Parisian deconstruction, postmodernism & post-structuralism; and (3) the whackier end of musical Modernism. Specific folks dealt with included Alexander Malcolm, Robert Burns and Thomas Carlyle on the one hand, with Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous & Gilles Deleuze on the other, and John Cage on the other other. During all the chaotic scribbling, John Purser's vast radio epic, Scotland's Music went on the air, and I was instantly hooked on its wealth of glittering revelations. It's thanks to John, as much as David (who'd become a close friend and moral, if not practical partner-in-crime by this time), that my Ph.D. went entirely off the tartan rails. One upshot was that I organised a mini-conference on Scottish music at Edinburgh University, with John as the keynote speaker (it was the first of many similarly-motivated conferences to come). I also tried to set up a Scottish Modernist music magazine, although, to quote Hume, it "fell stillborn from the press". More successfully, I worked as a freelance music journalist, becoming a sort of proxy (and prolix) "Scottish Music Correspondant" for The Musical Times, amongst various other London and Edinburgh rags, from Tempo to Cencrastus and beyond. A series of interviews I did with John Cage on his visits to Scotland and England around 1990 first established my name within the "classical" cliques (several are now reprinted online by the Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft — use the Search box to find them, they are in English). I also experimented with setting up a small publishing house devoted to Scottish music ("Books for Burning"), but that ended in a financial and legal quagmire when my first big order was 150 copies of J.F. Campbell's Canntaireachd for a bagpipe shop down The Mile that (naming nae names) failed to pay up on time and consequently blew any chance of me becoming an evil corporate media mogul. That's probably a good thing from the rest of humanity's point of view.

So, I ultimately opted for an academic "career", naively assuming that it offered something called "job security" (ahem) compared to freelancing, and ended up lecturing mostly in music (but also occasionally in literature, cultural studies, and even art theory) at places like Salford University, the Open University, Portsmouth University, Leeds University, and finally back up over The Border at the University of the Highlands and Islands (Perth College). Early on in this period, I was one of the first inter-disciplinary poseurs in Britain to call myself a "Critical Musicologist", although found most of my work as an equally-modish "Popular Musicologist". Aside from the conventional po-mo pop-muso's bag of tricks (not least the Gender Studies end of things), sidelines included work on the links between technology and culture in Trip-Hop and Techno, as well as some vexed studies of Englishness in Britpop, and a lot of lurking around the obscure musical margins of Critical Theory and Celtic Studies. A big thing was a pile of conference-papers and book-chapters on the aesthetics and politics of Burns and Tannahill songs. I also increasingly worked within online environments, creating websites for my course modules (which in those early days of the web seemed to scare as many students as they helped), and also established a couple of the first ever online Humanities journals — firstly, as the founding Editor of Critical Musicology (which died the moment I moved on from its hosting institution), but more enduringly as the founding Editor of Celtic Cultural Studies. I was also instrumental in the early years of Popular Musicology Online as its first Internet Editor. But one thing remained throughout, and that was my work on Scottish music and the cultural histories in which it lives. In fact, I became a bit notorious for managing to sneak it in by the back-door at every possible opportunity, regardless of which class I was teaching, which conference I was speaking at, which media mic was in my face, or which book I was contributing to. But then, flying the flag's easy enough when it's the Saltire. ;-)

These days, there pretty-much just aren't any lecturing posts advertised in musicology 'round here. So, I've tried my hand at a few other things. One was following my digital interests by "re-training" with a postgraduate diploma in I.T. at Glasgow University, but that turned out to be run by people who didn't think the World Wide Web was "Real I.T." (one can only assume that they've subsequently had to revise that remarkably Medieval opinion, and widen their horizons beyond archaic offline Java programming as a result). And, to add insult to injury, West Lothian's "Silicon Glen" crashed as soon as I put my foot through that door (in the very first week of the course). Hence, a few occasional bit-jobs in I.T. were about all that came of that (one as an Instructional Designer on Aberdeen College's distance-learning website — and believe me, you have no idea what commuting is till you have to do West Lothian to Aberdeenshire several times a week). So various other avenues were necessarily pursued. The most enjoyable was temporarily being a Site Custodian for one of Historic Scotland's greatest but most obscure prehistoric monuments, about which I wrote an unfinished and not-entirely-scholarly website, Cairnpapple Hill. There were also some further fairly successful experiments in small-scale publishing (which I'm currently planning to expand within the context of the ScotMus.com project). So, finally, I decided to gather up all the random parts of my so-called "career" and do something vaguely useful with them all piled together into one big lump. And that, of course, is how we got where we are right now — ScotMus.com. Will it lead to fame and fortune (finally), or not? Only time will tell, but in the meantime, all offers of even vaguely-gainful employment will be seriously considered — full C.V. and/or Publications Portfolio available on request... :-)

Postscript — My Anglo-Scots Heroes of Scottish Music: I'll only mention my two biggest ones for now (the first is more on the Scots side of the equation, the second on the English side), but there are a lot more, and I'll add tributes to them, too, in time.

It goes without saying that we'd certainly never have got where we are without Allan Ramsay — "despite" his cross-Border parentage (that many commentators do their unworthy best to avoid discussing in any detail at all, as if attempting to avoid some kind of unwelcome ethnic embarrassment). It was he who defined the Scots Song genre for all time in the early C18th, a generation well before those of Burns and Hogg, both of which very conciously followed in his wake. Today, we might grumble (with very good reason) about Ramsay's saccharine sub-Augustan lyrics to tarted-up Rococo re-workings of traditional tunes, but so far as Burns was concerned, he was top of the C18th charts (along with Fair Edina's ain Fergusson, of course). Without Ramsay, Burns wouldn't be the Burns we now know and love. But it's also equally true that, without the significantly-formative literary influence of his Northern English Mum, Ramsay wouldn't be the Ramsay we now know and scratch our heads about. It's worth reading Ramsay from this perspective — things soon start to become a lot clearer than if we just defer to critical convention and narrow our vision to the allegedly-"Folk" aspects of his highly-sub-Augustan Scots (which in fact only leads to an endless spiral of contradictions). He might be a famous Jacobite (in an era when it was still a real political ideology, not just an aesthetic pose), but we also have to accept that the Jacobite agenda of his day was still an absolutely neo-Jacobean agenda, concerning the future of the whole of the UK, and not just Scotland. The UK, after all, was first presided over by one of the most infamous members of the Sons of Jacobus, James VI & I. And a century on, in Ramsay's era, the real-politik is that Jacobites were often Unionists — after all, they invented the UK in the first place (damn their eyes!). And in Ramsay, we routinely find exhortations to the heroic Britons, right, left and centre (although a lot of those moments mysteriously vanish in a fair few modern editions). But this isn't why Ramsay's one of my bi-ethnic heroes. Not at all — I'm a Nationalist, so his archaic sub-UKanian proto-"nationalism" is a cause for deep critical reflection on my part. But I ain't gonnae blame that on the fact that he had a Derbyshire Mum — our poetising wig-maker and publisher was his own, and fairly self-made, Jacobite man-about-Edina-toun. What I do attribute to her is Ramsay's interest and education in literature in the first place, and particularly some of his crucial cross-Border influences — and, less strongly, his own pan-British approach to poetry and song. Personally, I don't like Ramsay's work, but I do pay tribute to its epoch-making force, and its complex, Anglo-Scots influences. Nae Ramsay, different Burns — simple, unavoidable formula, for anyone who values Burns.

Second on my list of Anglo-Scots heroes is, without doubt, Stephen Clarke — another Northern English immigrant. Most folks these days probably won't know who he is, or even if they know the name, they probably won't know much about him (and if they do, might wish they didn't). But, again, Burns certainly did know, and value him — highly. Not only did this Northumbrian-Anglican-turned-Lothian-Episcopalian church-organist give us the first (and vast) batch of musical settings of Burns' songs, which also represents the major portion of Burns 1st editions as a whole (The Scots Musical Museum), but they also seem to have been pretty good mates, not least when Burns was riotously-haunting the Edinburgh club scene. And our famous Scots song-writer was more than happy with his Anglo-Scots collaborator's arrangements. In fact, Burns once said that Clarke's knowledge and understanding of traditional Lowland tunes was second to none. So why isn't Clarke more widely-recognised these days? The answer seems fairly simple, aside from the obvious ethnic "embarrassment" involved in acknowledging a major English contribution to a large portion of Burns' best, most famous and most definitive work — the fact is that Clarke (primarily) arranged Burns' throrough-bass parts. And that, as the publisher's preface to the Museum's 1st edition Vol.1 clearly states, is for harpsichord, first and foremost — Burns wasn't, in fact, writing what later generations understood as "Folksong" at all (any more than Ramsay was). So, as these things seem to go these days, Clarke's crucial contribution is often seen as "aesthetically-fake" — and there's no doubt in my mind that this has been linked in some quarters, albeit tacitly, with his ethnic origin. But maybe it's time we took Burns' own word for it, aye? Because, although Burns did indeed supply Clarke with at least some of his song-tunes himself, in notated form, even then, it was Clarke who crafted them for publication (with his own characteristic Rococo flair). And, more than that, Burns often only supplied the tune-title, leaving the actual musical choices entirely to Clarke (which in itself is a clear indication of Burns's absolute trust in Clarke's judgement and co-authoring skills) — along with the details of the word-setting itself, perhaps the most crucial aspect of song-writing overall. So even if you cut out Clarke's thorough-bass parts and decorative frills 'n' trills, as most later editors modishly have done, you're still unavoidably dealing with Clarke's basic melodic sets. And these bear the official stamp of approval from Burns himself. We can't avoid the facts. As a genre, Burns Song is musically-crafted by Clarke on at least one structurally-significant level (and often several) — throughout. Without Clarke, Burns Song "literally" wouldn't be what we know it as. And even the most narrow-minded among us can do naught but acknowledge that that is no minor contribution to the complex and cosmopolitan cultural commonwealth that is this most curious of things we call Scots Song. If you're a Burns fan, you're a Clarke fan, too — whether you knew it or not.

Much more to follow... ;-)