EIF: The Living Archive
Old College Quad
There used to be a well-worn joke, much used by folk club troubadours, to the effect that playing to a sparsely populated room was like playing at the Ideal Home Exhibition. I was reminded of this when walking into the Festival’s temporary auditorium at Edinburgh University’s Old Quad. Seats singly and in pairs were well distanced from each other and any kind of ‘hygge’ seemed like a distant prospect, especially as the rain started to batter down on the plastic roof of the giant gazebo.
The evening was a celebration of the University’s School of Scottish Studies’ 70th anniversary, and there were plenty of warm remembrances of some of the School’s key figures such as John Macinnes, Morag MacLeod and Hamish Henderson, all of whom had done so much to place before students and the public not only the collected material but an understanding of its meaning and value. A recurring theme was the bringing of inert archival material back to life in its contemporary re-creation and its use as inspiration for new work. ‘Not just about preservation but taking what you have been given and making something new,’ as host Mary Ann Kennedy put it.
Mary MacMaster’s electro-harp got things off to a spirited start with the resounding bass of the instrument to the fore in a reading of a Gaelic air that also included a fluid improvisation around the melody. Switching to the wire-strung harp she brought the sound of a courtly Gaelic past that the 18th century bard, Síleas na Ceapaich herself might have recognised. MacMaster was joined on a waulking song by dancer Sophie Stephenson who literally sparkled in a routine of percussive taps and shuffles, complemented by a rainy tattoo on the roof.
Stephenson herself performed a dance piece dedicated to the itinerant dancing masters, the ‘dancies’ who plied their trade around rural Scotland up until the middle of the last century. At the heart of the piece was the stately solo dance, The Flowers of Edinburgh, movingly set off by a ghostly collage of Scots and Gaelic voices discussing the topic of dancing. Particularly effective was a passage where speech rhythms were echoed by Stephenson’s footwork.
Kirsty Law boldly pushed at the boundaries of the archive’s possibilities with fragments of old songs embedded in her own lyric and musical settings. There were riches there to be enjoyed, particularly her setting of Hamish Henderson’s translation of a poem by the Roman writer, Catullus, but a combination of fuzzy diction and an overtone-rich electric guitar sometimes obscured understanding.
Closing the evening, Mike Vass, the School’s Artist in Residence, combined his own compositions with traditional material. His instruments of choice are tenor guitar and fiddle, both of which he plays with great fluidity and excellent phrasing, and which he skilfully looped and multi-tracked in real time. The elegiac ‘Leaving St Kilda’, based not on sounds from the archive but on photographs was a particular highlight. Its sombre tone emblemised what was on the whole a rather low-key evening.