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Trad Talk 2017: Shaking the Tree

Trad Talk is the annual gathering of the Traditional Music Forum, its members and all interested in traditional music. Our most recent one which took place on March 11th at the Tolbooth in Stirling has ‘Shaken the Tree’.  A write up of the discussions will be posted soon. But in the meantime thanks to Jen Hill for inspiring us to think about  gender inequality in traditional music and from how artists adapt and survive (or not) within an unforgiving business and how we encourage young people and especially young girls to perform and be active in music. Questions we will be taking forward include “why are so few women making the move into professional playing – where are all those girls who learn traditional music?”, “how do we build confidence in young female musicians”, “is the business too brutal?”, “how can the business adapt to be more supportive of professionals”, “how can we build sustainable models of business which support artists”, “record companies need to understand the emergent audience and develop it more”, “how do we embed a culture of social capital”…

An overall theme of working together to make traditonal music a more equal and sustainable scene emerged from the day which also looked at different models of producing, promoting and publishing music as well as financing. The TMF will be taking forward a working party to look at this based on the discussions from the ‘taking a cooperative approach’ session. We will also be following up the many issues raised in our keynote speech and discussions. Watch this space and keep shaking that tree. 

Ellie Logan, Membership and Communications, 14 March 2017

More photographs from the event available at here