Traditional arts and the state: The Scottish case

Abstract

Since Scottish devolution from the UK in 1999, there has been a sustained and growing commitment to Scottish traditional music, storytelling and dance – collectively defined in Scottish cultural policy as the “traditional arts”. The public policy discourse of traditional arts is at once politically related to a growing Scottish confidence and intimately bound into a personal and national politics of identity. Today, in this transitional time around the referendum on Scottish independence, the potential for Scottish traditional arts to make a substantial and more sustainable contribution to cultural life in Scotland is within reach. However, there are some underlying problems that need to be addressed by the community of policy-makers and artists. In this paper, I examine the commodification and professionalization of Scottish traditional arts in broad terms and then go on to use this as a means to understand the recent emergence of a national cultural policy of intrinsic worth for the traditional arts since 1993. I finally consider the possibilities and opportunities for a more robust cultural policy for the Scottish traditional arts post-referendum. In recognizing that traditional music has entered a new and self-conscious period of commodification today, we open the door for a debate about the ways in which traditional arts in contemporary society can be performed and supported in a more equitable national cultural policy.

Keywords:

• cultural policy
• Scotland
• traditional music
• arts
• nationalism

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to David Francis and Dr Gary West for sharing their ideas and comments.

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/L006502/1].

Notes

1. “Authenticity” is a complex and plural term that has been particularly problematic in scholarly discourse; however, I use the term to describe a process of social discourse by a particular cultural community seeking internal consensus about nature or characteristics of shared values in their creative practice. For further reading around this complex term and its meanings in the traditional arts, see Bohlman (1988), Boyes (1993/2010), Gelbart (2007), Knox (2008), McKerrell (2011), McLaughlin (2012), and Storey (2003).

2. Following the policy literature, I include the performance of song in the description of “music”.

3. Although it has been working independently of government, established by Royal Charter in 1967.

4. Fèisean nan Gàidheal (lit. “Festivals of the Gaels”) is a national Scottish movement that exists to provide and promote Gaelic arts tuition mainly for children (see http://www.feisean.org/en/).

5. This paper deals only with national state-sponsored arts funding for the traditional arts in Scotland. Local authorities currently account for approximately 30% of total cultural spending in Scotland (Mark O'Neill, personal communication, April 10, 2013).

6. Enterprise Music Scotland is a body funded by Creative Scotland (and formerly The Scottish Arts Council) to distribute funding to voluntary groups for music tours, concerts and educational groups, in the main focusing upon funding workshops and concerts of classical music (see http://www.enterprisemusicscotland.com).

7. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2013/04/7232/3.

8. TRACS website: http://www.tracscotland.org.

9. See the definition of ICH and a range of case studies on their website at: http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00002.

10. One of the recommendations of the final report was that the inventory be housed in a wiki. This has been established at http://www.ichscotlandwiki.org/index.php?title=Intangible_Cultural_Heritage_in_Scotland; however, it remains in neonatal form.

11. See, for instance, the instrumentalist arguments for the funding of traditional arts from Indonesia (Yampolsky, 2001).