============================================================================= = Scales and Modes in Scottish Traditional Music = = Jack Campin = ============================================================================= References ========== A good reference to music theory as applied to jazz, which includes a fair bit of material on modes, is Marc Sabatella's on-line textbook at . Peter Wilton has a page with a tutorial on the modes of Gregorian chant; a much more comprehensive site is , which even streams a "Gregorian Chant of the Week". Nicholas Lander's Recorder Home Page has a good survey ot the 12 modes as understood in the late Renaissance, with his MIDI versions of Vincenzo Galilei's Ricercares in the 12 modes. A compendious encyclopaedia of folk music (albeit with an American slant) is on Bill Markwick's "Folk File" at with links to information about intonation and temperament. Some of the ideas in the latest versions of this come from the New Grove Encyclopaedia, and in particular is article "Mode". Much of what I've included about non-Western modal systems can be found in more detail in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, but it's not organized in a way that makes it easy to refer to for this. B.H. Bronson, "The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads", is a massive four-volume collection which uses a scheme similar to mine. Phil Taylor uses both the Bronson scheme and something like mine in the tutorial material for BarFly, . There are many good collections of Scottish tunes, but there are so many good Scottish tunes to collect that no one book can possibly do it all. The best value for money, and the first one any instrumentalist should get, is Kerr's "Merry Melodies", a four-volume set with hundreds of tunes in each volume. This has been continuously in print for over a century. Less densely printed (and hence more readable) collections of about the same period are the "Skye Collection" and the recently reprinted "Athole Collection" and "Glen Collection", both aimed at fiddlers. There are many competing collections of bagpipe music, all very expensive, with a lot of overlap in their traditional material; the Scots Guards book is the most comprehensive. Players of other instruments mostly have to make do with books aimed at either fiddlers or pipers; my own CD-ROM is the first big collection for the flute in over a century, and no large anthology of Scottish music has ever been compiled for any other instrument, though there are many smaller collections for piano. For songs, there has only ever been one try at a comprehensive collection, the "Scots Musical Museum" of Johnson and Burns, and that was more than 200 years ago. It has been reprinted, and it says something about song scholarship in Scotland that it doesn't really have any competition. For the bare tunes, Nathaniel Gow's "Vocal Melodies of Scotland" is comparable, but has never been reprinted since the early 19th century. G.F. Graham's "The Popular Songs and Melodies of Scotland" has good historical notes but is not on the same scale. A very much bigger effort is the Greig-Duncan Folksong Collection, in eight volumes from the School of Scottish Studies and Aberdeen University Press; however, this is basically one man's work, what he could collect from the north-east of Scotland at the turn of the century, and there are many songs familiar all over Scotland that he didn't get round to. Campbell & Collinson's "Hebridean Folksongs" is the largest collection of Gaelic songs edited to a reasonable standard, but it leaves out many of the most popular ones. The best recent collection is Anne Lorne Gillies's "Songs of Gaelic Scotland", which also has a very good commentary. Most cheaper practical editions of Gaelic songs are in sol-fa notation and are hard to come by outside Scotland. ============================================================================= == (c) Jack Campin http://www.campin.me.uk/ August 2009 == == 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland == == == == these pages: http://tinyurl.com/scottishmodes == =============================================================================