The Queen Mary Harp, preserved in the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh
Music in Medieval Scotland includes all forms of musical production in what is now Scotland between the fifth century and the adoption of the
filidh in Scotland, who acted as poets, musicians and historians. After this "de-gallicisation" of the Scottish court in the twelfth century, a less highly regarded order of bards took over the functions of the filidh and they would continue to act in a similar role in the Scottish Highlands and Islands
into the eighteenth century.
In the Early Middle Ages there was a distinct form of
Faburden
, which allowed easy harmonisation according to strict rules.
The captivity of James I in England from 1406 to 1423, where he earned a reputation as a poet and composer, may have led him to take English and continental styles and musicians back to the Scottish court on his release. James III founded a Chapel Royal at Restalrig near Holyrood and his son James IV refounded the Chapel Royal within Stirling Castle, with a new and enlarged choir. James IV was said to be constantly accompanied by music, but very little surviving secular music can be unequivocally attributed to his court.
There is evidence that there was a flourishing culture of
folk songs
in the eighteenth century.
Sources
The harper on the Monifeith Pictish Stone, 700 – 900 AD
The sources for Scottish Medieval music are extremely limited. These limitations are the result of factors including a turbulent political history, the destructive practices of the
St. Kentigern, may preserve some of this earlier tradition of plain chant.[1] Other early manuscripts include the Dunkeld Music Book and the Scone Antiphoner.[3] The most important collection is the mid-thirteenth century Wolfenbüttel 677 or W1 manuscript, which survives only because it was appropriated from St Andrews Cathedral Priory and taken to the continent in the 1550s. Other sources include occasional written references in accounts and in literature and visual representations of musicians and instruments.[1]
Instruments
In the late twelfth century,
clarsach or Celtic harp[4] and the typanum probably a string instrument rather than a form of drum.[5] The identity of the chorus is debated. It has been suggested that the chorus is an early form of bagpipe, but John Bannerman suggested that this was the Crwth or Crowd, a stringed instrument similar to a lyre and played with a bow, which is mentioned in later Scots poetry and English minstrel lists. Giraldus Cambrensis also notes that these instruments used steel strings, rather than cat gut, but exactly to which instruments he refers is unclear.[4] Stone carvings indicate the instruments known in Scotland, including the harpists on the early Medieval Monifeith Pictish stone and the Dupplin Cross.[6] Two of the three surviving Medieval Celtic harps are from Scotland: the Lamont Harp, dated to about 1500 and the highly elaborate Queen Mary Harp, from around 1450.[7] From the late Middle Ages there is a gargoyle of a pig playing the bagpipes at Melrose Abbey[6] and the carving of an angel playing bagpipes at Rosslyn Chapel.[8] There are literary references in Scotland to the fiddle, often called the fethill, fedhill or rybid.[9] In the Late Middle Ages several churches acquired pipe organs.[10]
Detail from the "Trinity Altarpiece" by Hugo van der Goes, showing Sir Edward Bonkil, first Provost of Trinity College, Edinburgh, with an angel playing a pipe organ
Giraldus Cambrensis noted that "Scotland and Wales, the latter by grafting the former by intercourse and kinship, strive to emulate Ireland in the practice of music".
filidh in Scotland, who acted as poets, musicians and historians, often attached to the court of a lord or king, and passed on their knowledge and culture in Gaelic to the next generation.[11][12] At least from the accession of David I (r. 1124–53), as part of a Davidian Revolution that introduced French culture and political systems, Gaelic ceased to be the main language of the royal court and was probably replaced by French. After this "de-gallicisation" of the Scottish court, a less highly regarded order of bards took over the functions of the filidh and they would continue to act in a similar role in the Highlands and Islands into the eighteenth century. They often trained in bardic schools, of which a few, like the one run by the MacMhuirich dynasty, who were bards to the Lord of the Isles,[13] existed in Scotland and a larger number in Ireland, until they were suppressed from the seventeenth century.[12] Members of bardic schools were trained in the complex rules and forms of Gaelic poetry.[14] They probably accompanied their poetry on the harp.[15] Much of their work was never written down and what survives was only recorded from the sixteenth century.[11]
In the early Middle Ages, ecclesiastical music was dominated by
Lords of Parliament and the wealthy merchants of the developing burghs.[1]
From the thirteenth century, Scottish church music was increasingly influenced by continental developments, with figures like the musical theorist Simon Tailler studying in Paris, before returned to Scotland where he introduced several reforms of church music.
Guillaume Dufay developed.[23] In the late fifteenth century a series of Scottish musicians trained in the Netherlands before returning home, including John Broune, Thomas Inglis and John Fety, the last of whom became master of the song school in Aberdeen and then Edinburgh, introducing the new five-fingered organ playing technique.[24] Survivals of works from the first half of the sixteenth century from St. Andrews and St. Giles, Edinburgh, and post-Reformation works from composers that were trained in this era from the abbeys of Dunfermline and Holyrood, and from the priory at St. Andrews, indicate the quality and scope of music that was undertaken at the end of the Medieval period.[1]
In the High Middle Ages, the need for large numbers of singing priests to fulfil the obligations of church services led to the foundation of a system of
Faburden, associated with the Burgundian School, by which plainsong melodies, usually in the tenor voice, were harmonised according to strict rules that meant that rehearsal was unnecessary.[1]
St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle and it became the focus of Scottish liturgical music. Burgundian and English influences were probably reinforced when Henry VII's daughter Margaret Tudor married James IV in 1503.[25] No piece of music can be unequivocally identified with these chapels, but the survival of a Mass based on the Burgundian song L'Homme armé in the later Carver Choirbook may indicate that this was part of the Chapel Royal repertoire. James IV was said to be constantly accompanied by music, but very little surviving secular music can be unequivocally attributed to his court.[1] An entry in the accounts of the Lord Treasurer of Scotland indicates that when James IV was at Stirling on 17 April 1497, there was a payment "to twa fithalaris [fiddlers] that sang Greysteil to the king, ixs". Greysteil was an epic romance and the music survives, having been placed in a collection of lute airs in the seventeenth century.[26]
There is evidence that there was a flourishing culture of popular music in Scotland the late Middle Ages. This includes the long list of songs given in
folk songs in the eighteenth century led collectors such as Bishop Thomas Percy to publish volumes of popular ballads.[29]
^ abC. R. Borland, A Descriptive Catalogue of The Western Medieval Manuscripts in Edinburgh University Library (University of Edinburgh Press, 1916), p. xv.
^ abR. McKitterick, C. T. Allmand, T. Reuter, D. Abulafia, P. Fouracre, J. Simon, C. Riley-Smith, M. Jones, eds, The New Cambridge Medieval History: C. 1415- C. 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 319–25.
^ abD. O. Croinin, ed., Prehistoric and Early Ireland: Prehistoric and Early Ireland, vol I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 798.
^D. Hiley, Western Plainchant: a Handbook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 483.
^E. Foley, M. Paul Bangert, Worship Music: a Concise Dictionary (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), p. 273.
