MUSIC, Ignorance and Faith 2017

Adam Holmes performed at Celtic Connections with Rura

The Arts lift us out of the ordinary, offer us permanence, shift time, give us beauty, hope and dreams..“When the arts are neglected and obscured, people suffer from dullness or ignorance.” Alan Raich

I now have my old record collection on display – and there appears a shift back to the quality of the physical purchase. In our world of fast moving shifting sands people are now searching out some classic permanence. 

Significantly my son said, ‘I want to own my music.’

At Milngavie folk club I enjoyed quality performances from Dougie Maclean, Cara Dillon , Blue Rose Code. Thanks Jason for running such a top folk club!

I enjoyed a great concert with the legend Celtic soul man Van Morrison.

At Celtic 2017 – I exhibited some of my Celtic photos of my ten years covering this major event, at the Old Fruitmarket venue and I thought of the many fun gigs I’ve enjoyed there. This year Rab Noakes played a quality concert with a mostly female band. Also concerts by many top Women musicians. Men continue to dominate music, but there are some highly talented and wonderful women musicians – both young and old – to be discovered. Julie Fowlis, Siobhan Wilson, Eddi Reader, Joni Mitchell, Cara Dillon, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Alice Marra, Laura Marling and many many more... 

The Scottish pipes were altered a while back, so that they can now be played along side an orchestra or band and this has made a big difference to ceilidh music.

Laura Marling backed by the RSNO

Beautiful Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis

the indomitable Eddi Reader

Iona Fyfe

Other artists I rate highly – Lorde, Father John Misty, Christine and the Queens, Radiohead,

Mary Chapin Carpenter and friends

**CUTs to the ARTS – Both Brexit and the deregulations by the UK government of Lottery Funds threaten the future success of the Arts.

The arts are of vital importance for our well being, how we view the world and ourselves and place in the world. The Arts give shape and understanding.

Van Morrison

Preservation

It’s important we preserve our significant heritage and in so doing ensure a flourishing, creative and rich artistic future. I’ve been reading of Burn’s travels over Caledonia – from the highlands to the Borders, when he kept his finely tuned ear alert for some of the world’s most memorable oral ballads, and to preserve them for all time. He added verses and altered tunes. What a legacy!

SCOTTISH WRITERS – Apart from Burns, I have been reading of the many other great Scottish writers – William Dunbar, Edwin Morgan, Iain Crichton Smith, Edwina Muir, James Hogg, Elizabeth Melville, Hugh MacDiarmid, 

As we entered into the Looking glass of Neverland in 2017…

I am sad for the lost forgetting, the hollow dreams, the ignorant minds…

Are we at crossroads, certainly not new beginnings. We are in a downward spiral, without balance and must now hope for options on the next turn. This is not about standing on the shoulders of the greats – its about being lost in some dark tunnels.

Blue Rose Code

For 2018 I hope we may find new balances, real informed debate in physical spaces, free press and build bridges across old, entrenched divides. 

Then I found a piece I’d written on inspiring people.

And I have to wonder - why can’t different cultures co-exits In harmony, side by side – are we not stronger for our very diversities?

There were many terrorist attacks UK – we need to build bridges and reach out. ….and we in Scotia long for self-determination…

‘One World’

All the arts depend on collaborating – the more diverse and broader the better. Bono of U2 wrote his ‘One World’ when the Berlin wall came down. Sadly today walls are going back up…..

 

Rab Noakes and his band

Rura

Women Writers EIBF 2017

Sheila  Rowbotham

Evelyn Glennie

Hera Lindsay Bird

Laura Albert

Lura Waddell

Katy Mahood

Elif Shafak

Caroline Brothers

Harriet Walter

Macron's New Future

Promises a new dawn in France of progressive socialism – business friendly, more democracy in Europe, based on a stronger vision and identity for France. He’s a breath of fresh air in Europe, in the centre ground. Politics are no longer about out-dated empires or right or left (this is all good news for Scotland). 

Our divergence and diversity of views is our very strength and what makes us human. Clamping down on an ‘open press’ – turns us to our dark side; the side of fear of strangers or strangeness and the fear of the unknown - rather than be open to travel, to new ideas and to ‘otherness.’

Macron has offered France hope for another way – can we offer Scotland this too? The far right unionist media’s response is funny - they are a bit scunnered and they had been hoping for another crazy far right nutter in Le Pen with headlines – 'Populisms weeps across Europe.' (or sweeps)

Scotland has to choose now whether to be tied and restricted by a Brexit England, isolated from Europe and desperate for far away deals with corrupt and murdering governments – or wanting to be the 51st state of Trump’s America. It’s a prospect for failed capitalist, imperialist polices.

What will a foolish Brexit mean for the Arts, culture, music and writers? Or writing for an American or Chinese audience, while we try to ignore our European past? Yes in recent times we’ve had Hollywood cinema and Netflix, but when we dig deeper to the centuries before, we find our close ties and our very European past.

Suppression of Scottish Culture - Writers and Artists

Robert Burns statue bottom Leith walk

A recent tv program documented Burns success in American. There are 15 Statues of Burns there, more than to any other writer or musician. Yet in Scotland’s capital, which is covered in unionist statues along its Hanoverian new town streets there is one statue hidden away down the bottom of Leith walk. I was over for the Edinburgh festival and noticed all the George St statues, shockingly there is little on Scotland’s most famous son. 
This happened to the world’s greatest poet who was dismissed as simply a ‘heaven taught ploughman poet’ – when in fact he knew five languages and was a ferocious reader of the classics, philosophers and of the Scottish enlightenment. 

There has been devious, underhand, manipulative moves - not only to ignore the Scottish contributions to the world of the arts, writing, history, and science -.but to whitewash them out of history by those who support the Unionist establishment, the Anglicised Scots of all things English, who see their future in a House of Lords!

**As an example in 1854 the Irish poet Oscar Wilde was born and his mother named him - Oscar Fingal Ossian - ‘Isn’t that grand, misty and Ossianic” she said - yet today who has heard of James MacPherson's Ossian poems? More recently the 1980s there were moves by the English controlled Arts council to close the Scottish National portrait gallery and ignore Scottish art, which was strongly opposed, and thankfully has instead been refurbished and is flourishing today.

Oscar Wilde

This happened in Scotland’s schools where practically no Scottish history was taught until recently – nothing on the Scottish enlightenment, nothing on the great inventions, nothing of great Scottish writers, nothing of the medical inventions.

What I did learn was of Tudor England and of English writers such as Shakespeare, Wilfred Owen and some American writers. My only lessons in Scottish history were a couple of Burns songs with the Primary schools choir – Ca the Knowes, Comin Through the Rye. I was hooked. I feel angry that at school and college in Edinburgh, I learnt of French, American and English writers – but nothing on the great Scottish writers! Hopefully today with Scottish studies at our universities, this has improved in our schools too.

We need to ask - Why have we Scots forgotten? The idea has been to suppress the subordinate cultures such as Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Writers likes Burns and others fought against this in the years after the forced union. I was reading of the origins of Romantic poetry after I picked up a book at the National portrait gallery London on Romantic poets – of the Ossian poems of James MacPherson (read by Napoleon and worldwide), Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, Walter Scott, and of course the unparalleled Robert Burns - there was no mention - the international success of Scottish writers has been suppressed.

A few years ago my son graduated at the Royal college of Surgeons Edinburgh, where I was surprised to learn that we have the oldest centre for medicine in the world! There have also been many great Scottish scientific and medical innovations.

Artist and teacher Alexander Moffat and poet and lecturer Alan Raich, write in their informed book, Arts of Independence –“In most countries in their national galleries, half are devote to International Art and the other half to the Art of that nation itself." This is not the case in Scotland where Glasgow artists have been neglected too, as recently as the 1980s and they had to go to New York for recognition.  

I sat beside an Irish woman at a Celtic Connections concert once and I mentioned the wonderful Irish Writers museum in Dublin and by contrast  the tiny Scottish writers museum in Lady Stairs Close. She wondered, perhaps there are only a few great Scottish writers and she may well wonder….where are they and how are they remembered?

“Scots suffer from “virtual universal historical illiteracy’, says historian Tom Devine, “ perhaps that’s why they’ve struggled to engage with the Referendum campaign." 

I believe it is not only very important, but also time we honoured our great Bard, with a statue of him in St Andrews square (and not the other forgotten tyrant Dundas).

And that we also honoured Fergusson (Burn’s muse), Allan Ramsay and the many recent great Scottish writers along with the manygreatrecent authors with a decent Scottish writers museum.

Nationalism understandings matters – it matters to know and understand our roots, heritage and the stories that inform our nation. To understand the places and streets we walk upon. And not in an exclusive way but an inclusive way.

Hugh MacDiarmid

***The great Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid wrote, “To be truly international, you have to be national to begin with, to see the entire Scotland – and not an Anglo-centric or Anglo-American perspective that dominated media and 20^th century cultural analysis.“

“The idea that national self-determination can fuse and ignite art, safeguard its provision, be the ground from which self-knowledge, love of others and the optimism of curiosity grows.”