Music, Memory, and Meaning: David Francis’ Keynote from Trad Talk 2024

📷 Photo above by Becky Duncan

As David Francis marks his retirement as Director of the Traditional Music Forum this week, we are delighted to share his keynote speech from Trad Talk, held in October 2024. In this thoughtful address, Dave reflects on the origins of the Traditional Music Forum, the enduring value of traditional music, and its significance to Scotland’s cultural identity. Blending personal anecdotes with professional insights, the speech underscores the importance of public support for traditional music and highlights the TMF’s efforts to preserve and promote this vibrant art form. It offers a powerful perspective on how music connects memory, identity, and community, while charting a vision for the Traditional Music Forum’s future.

— — — — — — — — — —

I’m going to talk a bit about the origins of the Traditional Music Forum, muse a little bit on how traditional music is valued, why it should be supported by the public sector, and finish with a brief look at the TMF’s aims and pathway.

1999 was both an annus mirabilis and an annus horribilis for me. The year started well with the birth of my second daughter in January, but ended badly, first with the death of my mother-in-law from ovarian cancer at the age of only 64 in late October. Second with the demise of Edinburgh Folk Festival of which I was artistic director at the time. Latterly called Shoots and Roots, we’d celebrated Hamish Henderson’s 80^th birthday in November. We’d started to turn the corner into profitability and were beginning to stem the tide of losses that had bedevilled the festival for years. That was the year when, at the beginning of December, my wife and musical partner, Mairi Campbell and I were invited out of the blue to perform at the Kennedy Center Awards in Washington DC in front of more celebs and stars than you could shake a stick at. Two days later I was back in Edinburgh in a back room in the Caledonian Hotel, present as the board of the Edinburgh Folk Festival decided that the prospect of clearing the accumulated losses was too remote, and formally wound up the organisation.

The summer of that year saw the opening of the Scottish Parliament while a few months earlier in the spring a report on traditional music which I’d worked on for the previous 18 months was published. It was the result of a major shift in focus within what was then the Scottish Arts Council, a shift that saw SAC taking seriously all forms of music and not just what, for want of a better term, we call classical music. The report was a comprehensive review of the sector at the time, and a collective proposal from all parts of the Scottish traditional music community, with its recommendations pointing to how the public sector could support the art form. Like any document of this kind some of its recommendations were taken up and others left for another, more appropriate moment.

The blow of losing a major folk event was softened somewhat by the positive reception to the report, including a hefty amount of additional money from the new Scottish Executive. The conjunction of the report and the new Parliament led to the setting up of a cross-party group on traditional music in the new Parliament. Unfortunately, its potential usefulness was derailed by flabby, directionless meetings and it eventually petered out.

So how to keep up the momentum and not waste the opportunity that the report had opened up? Could there be a more focused alternative? At first that alternative was a small group of active people – many of whom are still around –  that acted as a kind of advisory group to the Arts Council. It was first convened in 2003, comprising what I suppose you’d call ‘senior’ figures in the traditional music community, e.g. Arthur Cormack, Ian Green, Simon Thoumire, Brian McNeill, Sheena Wellington. It soon began to operate as a stand-alone group, with one of its first activities a contribution to the 2004 Culture Commission. Further activities followed, supported by funding from SAC, and the need arose to have a worker to monitor and support the projects that were emerging. I was appointed to do that on a very part-time basis in 2005.

The Forum continued with a loose structure and a closed membership until 2008 when it began to be clear that there was interest in opening up membership of the group.

So the Traditional Music Forum as a membership organisation was born with the intention that it should advocate for ‘traditional music as a vital and visible element of Scottish culture, valued by people, communities and the nation’. I’d done some work as secretary of the original group and was entrusted with the job of taking the new organisation forward. Yes, I was now a folk bureaucrat!

‘Valued by people, communities and the nation’. Let’s think about that question of how the music is valued.

When I was a lad at school, in our English class we had a small grey book that put the fear into everyone who was required to engage with it. The book was simply referred to as ‘Dubber’ after the sadistic soul who compiled it. It was a book of interpretation exercises where you were asked questions that seemed impossible (and in retrospect were actually excellent training for filling in Creative Scotland funding applications – nothing is wasted), where you were required to exercise essential life skills like identifying examples of metonymy and onomatopoeia.

However, one thing from Dubber that always stuck in my mind was a wonderful phrase which I’ve never forgotten – that ‘music is the mistress of memory’. I’ve googled the phrase on many occasions and have never been able to find who said it or where it came from. You all know what it means. I can’t hear a pipe band playing the Black Bear without being back on my dad’s shoulders in a seething crowd watching the Marymass parade in Irvine, and I’m sure you would all have your own examples; but less specifically than that and possibly more powerful than that is the ability that hearing a piece of music has to transport you immediately in your mind not necessarily to a specific incident but to a time, an atmosphere, a state of mind, a web of feelings. You’ll all have your own countless examples, all of which speak to the question of the value of music for us as individuals, the part it plays in our own life story, how it can stimulate emotions, shape our sense of well being – do all those things that language can’t convey, in short.

So part of the value that music has for us is the access it gives us to memory, an essential part of what makes us the person we are. A question arises – what about the value of music for us collectively? Many of you will be familiar with this passage:

The Highlandman McIvor tuned up his pipes and began to step slow round the stone circle by Blawearie loch, slow and quiet, folk watched him and the dark was near, it lifted your hair and was eerie and uncanny, The Flowers of the Forest, as he played it. It rose and rose and wept and cried, that crying for the men that fell in battle. And the young men stood with glum, white faces, they’d no understanding or caring, it was something that vexed and tore at them, it belonged to times they’d no knowing of. He fair could play, the piper, he tore at your heart marching there with the tune leaping up the moor and echoing across the loch.

I think Grassic Gibbon really put his finger on something here. What happens when the music is not the mistress of collective memory, when the past to which it refers has vanished in the minds of people. We in this room might find collective meaning in and value bothy ballads, for instance, as fragments of the lifeworld of people who came before us projected into the present every time they are performed, little pieces of artistic expression connecting us now with the people who shaped the land we live in. But if people dismiss it as belonging to times they’ve no knowing of or don’t understand or care, we’re kind of up against it.

📷 Photo by HES

The other name for traditional music is folk music. ‘Folk’, in other words, ‘the people’, the noun that gives rise to the adjective ‘popular’. The problem we have is that folk music, traditional music is not that popular. For all the Hoolies at the Hydro, Trad Awards, and World Pipe Band Championships, I don’t think it can be said to be truly popular. I think that is our biggest challenge.

My friend, Hamish Moore, whom many of you will know, is fond of saying you could go out in the street there and ask a thousand people if they knew what Scottish small pipes are, or who Rod Paterson was, you’d get a positive response of between zero and two. We’re still below the radar for the vast majority of people.

And yet the music of Grassic Gibbon’s piper vexed and tore at those uncomprehending young men. There was something there that went deeper than their lack of understanding, that went beyond memory. What gives me hope is that sense of tradition, the connecting thread – its interplay of survival and revival, its importance for the texture and meaning of our lives, its connection to the everyday and to the special occasion, all of that still lurks in the collective psyche. For the people who practise the traditional arts and enjoy them, it’s much more out in the open. For us, it’s maybe easier to appreciate and articulate that value might be found in the performance of emblematic material, a marker and reinforcer of identity, but equally their value might lie in the resilience of these arts, their persistence into the present, an insight into past lives rendered in their own terms, the convivial contexts within which performance takes place.

This is something that we have to hang on to, develop, and bring to the surface. Cultural memory is a kind of mental process that enables members of a group to bond by maintaining knowledge of the members’ past, the things that have contributed to their ways of life – things which can be lost if common knowledge disappears. Gibbon’s piper reached something in his hearers, but something buried deep. We have to work to give those inchoate feelings a shape, to give cultural memory staying power, to see that it reaches across generations. What gives it staying power is the forms that it takes, especially forms made by artists, and especially musicians, artists dealing in something that has a very particular access to the subconscious.

So while we, members of this network of traditional music educators, performers, enthusiasts work at the art form to give it staying power, studying it, practising it, expressing it, the network itself has to complement that work by doing the hard yards of arguing that traditional music deserves its place in the reckoning of public life. From cultural memory to cultural policy. Government policy now covers almost every aspect of our lives, a gradual process that has been going on for over two hundred years, as government has moved from being concerned mostly with influence abroad and the maintenance of a social order that enshrined wealth and privilege, to concern for the means of life for all its citizens – and yes, I’m as cynical about that as you. But if you think about it: health, industry, business regulation, education, transport, social work, housing, the environment, and at the fuzzier end of the scale, things like equalities and well-being – government has a hand in it through law, regulation, policy, covering everything from the sustainability of fish stocks, to pub licences, to local democracy, to the quality of water in reservoirs, and much more. Into that mix after the second world war came culture. Up until about thirty years ago that had a very narrow definition, a narrow definition that was prised open, in Scotland at any rate, by a report called the Charter for the Arts, written by the excellent Joyce McMillan, which made explicit the view that if a government was going to concern itself with culture then it had to be the culture of all its people, especially a culture – folk culture – that was seen as niche from some perspectives but from another was seen as fundamental to the identity of a country that was beginning to reassert itself as a nation, either a devolved one or an independent one, depending on your political preference.

Traditional music is of course not one thing. It covers a multitude of elements from Gaelic song in all its variety, to Scottish dance music and strathspey and reel societies, to pipe bands, to the contemporary sounds of Trailtidemanskippivore, to bothy ballads. You can all fill in your own examples.

French President Charles de Gaulle once asked, “How can you govern a country which has two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?” The answer to that is that you don’t worry about the number and diversity of varieties but rejoice instead in the fact that you all love cheese. Similarly, what the Traditional Music Forum tries to do is support and promulgate the diversity of traditions within what we call traditional music. The beauty of a network is that it is not hierarchical. Each part of the network is of equal value. Different nodes of the network can come to prominence depending on the demands of the time and the component parts can be as loosely or as tightly connected to each other as a situation demands. Becoming part of a network like the TMF means that the goals of the individual parts and the goals of the network reflect each other in a holonic relationship – a holon (the word was coined by Arthur Koestler in the ‘Ghost in the Machine’) is something that is simultaneously a whole in and of itself, as well as a part of a larger whole.

Ideally the Traditional Music Forum would be a system of reciprocal assistance, new ideas and fresh perspectives would hum along the lines of the network; we’d be raising the profile of traditional music, so that it is at least visible even if it’s not universally popular; we’d make partnership working easier for developing projects, share knowledge, foster personal relationships. We would be gathering energies, enabling reconfigurations of the network into clusters and hubs where necessary, and depending on the work in hand. These are all things I and the board of the TMF have tried to work towards. There’s still lots to do and I would hope that my successor would be able to take on aspects of the work I haven’t been able to get to satisfactorily – in particular building relationships with new communities in Scotland.

It’s been a privilege to serve this organisation and this community, and in the words of PG Wodehouse’s great servant, Jeeves, ‘I hope I have given satisfaction.’ Thank you.📷 Photo by Simon Baker