Scottish Traditional Music

Scottish traditional music splits between bagpipe and fiddle traditions, with a long song tradition running alongside. The fiddle uses heavier bow pressure than classical violin, with grace-note clusters (cuts and birls) and the snap rhythm of the strathspey — a short note followed by a longer one, the Scotch snap. Reels run at 32-bar dance tempos in 4/4; strathspeys are slower and dotted. Highland pipes hold their constant drones, and the chanter operates on a non-equal-tempered scale that doesn't quite agree with anything else.

The Gaelic-speaking Highlands and the Scots-speaking Lowlands developed parallel but distinct traditions. Niel Gow (1727-1807), the great fiddler-composer of Perthshire, codified much of the modern fiddle repertoire, and his slow lament Niel Gow's Lament for the Death of His Second Wife (1784) survives as one of the form's emotional reference points. Cecil Sharp's nineteenth-century English collecting overlapped with Scottish revival work. The 1970s and 80s saw Silly Wizard, the Battlefield Band, the Tannahill Weavers and others build the modern concert tradition.

On Silly Wizard's The Valley of Strathmore (1981), the Scotch snap — short-long in a dotted figure — is the rhythmic signature that distinguishes a strathspey from a reel. On any recording of Niel Gow's Lament, the bowing on the low strings is where the emotional weight sits.

Niel Gow's Lament for the slow side, then Silly Wizard's The Valley of Strathmore for fast reel-and-strathspey medley. Two tracks bracket much of the idiom.

Highland bagpipe scales sit slightly higher than concert pitch, so pipes and other instruments rarely play in tune together. That seeming defect is also why pipes sound the way they do.