EIF: A Folk Song Sharing
This was my thought at the end of the second concert of the Festival’s welcome traditional music stream. The idea was a good one, to have three singers to sing traditional songs and to explain their background and context, in other words to explain the “folk song process”. Introduced by Mary Ann Kennedy who is well known as a BBC presenter particularly around the Gaelic culture she comes from. The singers were Arthur Cormack representing Gaelic song, Josie Duncan a young performer who sang two Gaelic songs and one Scots song, and Nancy Nicolson who represented Scots songs and stories. The result was that half the songs and the encore were in Gaelic, a language spoken by a very small percentage of the Scottish population, and the impression given to a Festival visitor was that the Gaelic culture and language dominates the Scottish traditional music scene. It doesn’t. This was brought home to me in discussion at the opera that night with a Festival visitor who had been to the concert in the afternoon and enjoyed it but was surprised by how many Gaelic songs were sung. Of course you can argue that over the whole range of concerts this will balance, giving appropriate time to Gaelic song, but this particular concert did seem a little unbalanced.
The concert itself was enjoyable, beginning under a weak sun warming the big tent in the Old Quad, although incidentally this made it quite difficult to see the performers on stage. Arthur Cormack has a very sweet tenor voice and he sang three Gaelic songs with some background context to the songs. He also attempted to encourage the 150 strong audience to join in the chorus which produced a muted response, partly because few understood Gaelic, but also, I suspect, because some audience members worried about COVID transmission from mass singing. This concert was of course before the final relaxations of COVID rules on August 9th.
Nancy Nicolson was for me the star of the afternoon. She told the story of how she got taken into the folk process as a young teacher training student in Edinburgh and ended up as one of the key singer songwriters and educators in Scotland. She chose three traditional songs and told the stories to explain them, the first ‘Sandy Bells Man’ told the story of a wronged woman from the pub at the centre of traditional music in Edinburgh (hopefully soon getting back to its old self)..She then sang a song about the life of a whaler from Leith which was one of the centres of the whaling industry, She then sang Burns’ great song “Ca the Yowes” and did get a good response from the audience in the chorus. She concluded with her own very funny song about the builders working on the Festival Theatre exhibiting their “cleavage”! Nancy is a lovely singer with a warm personality, and she got a great response from the audience. The third singer was Josie Duncan, a young singer who is past winner of the Young Traditional Singer competition. She sang two Gaelic songs and one traditional song about working in the mill. She also played the guitar and stood up to sing into the microphone this seemed to create a problem in the clarity of her sound and made it difficult to hear her clearly. She has a nice voice but didn’t do it justice today. The concert concluded with another Gaelic song led by Arthur Cormack with some audience participation.
I enjoyed the concert as did the 150 strong audience, it wasn’t a sold out concert and I did hear that tickets were available on the day at reduced prices, not surprising as folk music fans are not used to paying £26 for a one hour concert. Also I was left with the question: was there too much Gaelic in the concert? For me yes, it didn’t accurately reflect Scottish folk culture, but then we do have a number of other very good concerts coming!
