NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 37th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 19 January 2023. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net’s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.
While cohost François Matarasso takes a break, I got to speak with David Francis, Director of the Traditional Music Forum in Edinburgh, Scotland. I first met David 14 years ago when I visited Scotland to speak at a conference, and I’ve been pleased to follow his work at a distance ever since. I caught him at a good time, because he’s going to be moving on before the year ends.
David is based at the Scottish Storytelling Centre on the Royal Mile in the heart of Edinburgh’s Old Town, home to Traditional Arts & Culture Scotland (TRACS), the umbrella organization for three forums: the Traditional Music Forum, the Scottish Storytelling Forum, and Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland.
David explained that the Traditional Music Forum is “a national network of individuals and mostly organizations that cover every aspect of the traditional music life. So, academic departments, community music organizations, probably the largest sector, as well as shading into the commercial music industry, labels, venues, festivals, all of that. We cover the complete spectrum of activity across that arena. It is probably a feature of our world and our community that a lot of the people who are engaged in the commercial side of things are also engaged in the community side of things; their style can actually exist in both in both dimensions simultaneously.
“The forum was was set up initially as an advisory group for what was then the Scottish Arts Council. And that came on the back of a fairly major report that I authored in the late 1990s, which was a pretty comprehensive look at traditional music in Scotland and came at a time when the Arts Council—the kind of mainstream arts funding body—was looking to bring it in from the margins, as it were, because up until the early 90s, their focus had been almost exclusively on what you Arlene called the velvet curtain and red carpet side of things. So that was fairly major. From that advisory group, we opened it out to become a membership organization. And then, about 12 years ago, we combined forces with the traditional dance people and the storytelling people and made this consortium called Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland; I’m also a part of the management group for that. Our role is principally advocacy, but we we have a stake in education, in community cultural development. And in fact, for TRACS that has been a pivot towards community cultural development through the medium of intangible cultural heritage, if that doesn’t sound like too much of a mouthful.”
It might be a mouthful, but definitely worth chewing on. UNESCO, the UN’s cultural agency, has a strong global role in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, by which they mean “oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts,” as opposed to physical artworks, buildings, monuments, and so on. TRACS has been named an accredited NGO advisor on intangible cultural heritage; here’s an article about some of their work in that regard.
When I asked how he got involved in traditional music, David told me that he writes songs and had a professional career as a musician, beginning with sixties folks music which occupied an oppositional space not unlike rock music in those times, “looking to stir things up while still remaining true to the tradition they felt themselves to be part of.”
“For many years,” he explained, “I worked in a duet with my wife, Mairi Campbell. We had a brief moment in the limelight when one of our songs was used in the first Sex in the City movie. It kind of catapulted us to solvency. We performed at festivals and toured abroad, and when our kids came along, I kind of took a dogleg into into arts administration, but I still play for dancing, our equivalent of square dancing or contra dancing. That’s really how I got into music in the first place. And it’s just always stayed with me, because it has such strong roots in community.”
I asked what types of music the Traditional Music Forum encompasses. “It’s mostly Scottish because we have very rich instrumental tradition through the fiddle and the bagpipes, as well as a very strong song tradition. The term traditional music has become the kind of default term because folk music, especially in the US, has come to mean just like anybody who plays an acoustic guitar or sings their own stuff to the accompaniment of the acoustic guitar. But traditional music is very much the preferred term, because it makes that distinction, it has that reach into the past.”
Thinking about tradition and renewal, I paraphrased French human rights activist Francis Jeanson talking about cultural democracy as “reinventing for the benefit of the living the legacy inherited
from the dead.” What is the balance or relationship between preservation and renewal or reinvention? Is there a dialogue between past and present?
“Most of the activity,” David said, “is on the renewal and reinvention side of things. There’s a tremendous amount of music written in the idiom, always in the back of their mind is a reference to the tradition. It’s become a kind of point of identity for a lot of young musicians, that even though they may not have been brought up with purely traditional music, that has been kind of an anchor for them. They’re able to use that to thoroughly understand the idiom, and then go away and look at it afresh. We’ve got lots of bands with bass and drums and all of that, but fronted by traditional instruments. Even though the sound that comes out can sometimes sound a bit distant from the music that it’s rooted in, the fact that they use those instruments and have those cultural references is a really important kind of identity marker for people, especially young people.”
Scotland is a small country with a fierce love of freedom. Even visiting there for a short time, I was able to see how scale suports culture, as community artists I knew would drop around the corner for a cup of coffee and sit down to chat with government ministers who’d had the same idea.
“Although we’re working in the traditional arts sector, we’re very much part of the wider cultural sphere,” said David. “One of the things that that I set out to do way back, when I was producing that report back in 1999, was to connect up traditional music, traditional arts, with the wider concerns, because if culture is under attack, we’re under attack as part of that, if music education is under attack, that affects us as well. So we have to make these alliances in order to protect our mutual interests. And as you say, Scotland’s a small country, it’s only five, six million people. So it’s very easy to get to know people that are working in adjacent spheres, and we’ve very much become embedded in those areas, like cultural advocacy, music education, and so on. We have a cross-party group on music, for example, at the Scottish Parliament. You go to that those meetings, and you’ll see the same people that are at music education meetings or community meetings. There’s a very much a sense of a community of people that’s enabled by the size of the country, and there’s much more direct communication with the politicians. Where my office is here, it’s like 500 yards from the Parliament building. There’s been a huge difference since the Parliament was devolved. We’re not completely independent, but we are devolved from from the UK Parliament. In 1999 that happened. Prior to that, the chances of talking to a Scottish minister or a UK minister was very remote. But what devolution has done has brought the politicians much closer to people. There’s a kind of informality about the relationships between the politicians and the likes of ourselves.”
Being a cultural policy wonk, I talked with David about the cultural policy working groups he’s been on over the years. He told me his “slightly flip motto was, ‘I go to meetings so that you don’t have to.'” He described victories that have unfolded as “the push to devolution and the push to independence have become part of the cultural fabric,” and also challenges, especially the way the Scottish government suffers from the austerity program of the UK government.
Then David talked about the massive movement to learn traditional music in non-formal community settings and the role played by festivals, starting with the Fèis Bharraigh in the outer Hebrides on the west coast of Scotland. That led to a really interesting account of the role the Traditional Music Forum has played establishing a code of practice and quality framework based on the experience of people actually doing the work. And from there, all the other things the Forum does, including a wonderful community cultural development project called The People’s Parish, an ongoing TRACS initiative that started in 2021 with emergency COVID funding and aims to include every civil parish (not a church thing, but an older unit of government) in Scotland.
I promise you will learn a lot and find inspiration in this episode!
Here’s something different: MOTHER SPEY, WOODS & WATER, the first of eight short films in which David Francis tells a story set to music by Hamish Napier. You can find the other seven on YouTube too.
Order my book: In The Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Educated?