CLSNA' LamontCentral Forum

I got an email from a friend who is a fiddler of Scottish tunes who sent the following in the email.  She thought I might be interested in the musical link at the bottom of the webpage that is linked.  As I scrolled down the page to get to the musical part, I saw there were some projects having to do with a Scot Gaelic dictionary which is in progress.  Thought some of you interested in thast might want to know it's there and check out what they're doing.  Below is the email she forwarded to me.

Rick

Subject: Scottish Gaelic musical resource.
I’m pleased to inform readers especially those interested in Scottish Gaelic musical tradition that the manuscript “Original Highland Airs Collected at Raasay in 1812 by Elizabeth Jane Ross”, conserved in the archives of School of Celtic and Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh, is now freely available for downloading (at no cost) both in its facsimile form and in a modern typeset edition prepared by its editors Peter Cooke, Morag MacLeod and Colm Ó Baoill.

This is the earliest known staff-notated manuscript  collection of Scottish Gaelic music. It contains 150 airs including some 92 songs,  51 dance tunes and ports as well as six pibrochs and it probably represents well the musical repertory of islanders living in Raasay one of the islands forming the Inner Hebrides.  Raasay was the home of a sept of the MacLeod clan.  James Macleod of Raasay, the chieftain of the sept, and his wife Flora were excellent musicians and their niece Elizabeth Ross who lived with them was clearly a competent transcriber – but one who apparently did not attempt to ‘improve’ the tunes.  Raasay was also the home of the famous piper John MacKay from whom Elizabeth learned to play several pibrochs herself.   A major task for the editors has been to locate, document, translate and underlay song texts which might have been known to Elizabeth Ross, for she provided titles or first lines of verses or refrains for her airs but no texts.

Those wishing to browse or download these resources should visit the page:-

www.celtscot.ed.ac.uk/research.htm

and scroll to the bottom  of the page to find this publication.

You may also care to inform the librarians in your institution of the availability of this resource.

Peter Cooke
Formerly Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology and Honorary  Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.