The Celtic Connection
Language level: Advanced
Source: www.speakup.com.br
Every January Glasgow is home to “Celtic Connections,” a two-week Festival with over 1.000 performers from around the world. In many respects it is remarkable that this event is taking place in Scotland because, in the past, many Celtic traditions were kept alive elsewhere. For example, when Scottish step-dancing was banned in the 18th century, the tradition was continued in Nova Scotia in eastern Canada by Scottish immigrants. So, many of today’s Scottish step-dancers have learned the moves form Canadians! During the Festival, visitors can learn about Scottish lullabies, Irish pips or whisky-tasting in one-day workshops. More importantly, the Festival puts Scottish children in touch with their rich cultural heritage. Education manager Tom Daizell explains how this works:
Tom Daizell
(Glaswegian accent):
We also do instrumental workshops, which we call “Come and Try” workshops, where we go into a school, we’ll work with of a whole class or about 30 kids, and we’ll take over the school dinner hall or sports hall, and we’ll go into a school with a Clorsach tutor, which is the Scottish harp, or a fiddle tutor, a bodhran tutor it’s the Irish drum, and a tin whistle player. We take over three corners, so there’ll be a tutor in each corner, and the kids will come in, we’ll put them into three groups, and they’ll have a shot, they’ll go round all the instruments, have about 20 minutes doesn’t sound an awful lot on an instrument, but it’s amazing, because, for instance on a tin whistle, in 20 minutes we can teach them one or two tunes.
THE BEAUTY OF FOLK MUSIC
One of the Festival’s star performers is Gaelic singer Ishbel MacAshkill. She was born on the Hebridean island of Lewis and, unlike the school kids of Glasgow, came to traditional music at an early age. She gave her first concert in her local village hall when she was four. Today she has a varied repertoire, from beautiful pipe ballads, though fast moving “mouth music to the light hearted “walking songs” of women tweed workers:
Ishbel MacAskill:
The songs were made by people like us, for people like us, who worked hard, certainly in peasant societies, worked hard, they suffered triumphs and disasters, and sorrows, and of course, it’s an experience that they had and would write about. And it was a wonderful way of recording the life that they led at that time. And I think this is partly why folk music has such an appeal, because there is a thread running through it that appeals to all nations and…because music, after all, is the universal language, and folk music, particularly, it strikes a chord in people, with their suffering and their joys.
A DYING LANGUAGE
Ishbel MackAskill was recently on tour in Australia and Canada, promoting the music and language of her home country. Back home in Scotland, sadly, the number of Gaelic speakers is at an all-tie low. Only 60.000 use the language on a daily basis.
However, more and more parents now choose to send their children to a school where every subject is taught through Gaelic. For MackAskill, who in the ‘90’s acted in a Gaelic-language soap opera on Scottish television, language is the key to Scottish identity:
Ishbel MackAskill:
I wouldn’t like us to rely purely on the music to keep our culture alive because, if you lose the language, you are losing the culture and we are left with just music. I think Ker Breton is an example of this, and they are fighting extremely hard to keep the language alive. And thee’s a Gaelic prover that says: “Tir gun canan, tir gun anam,” “a country without the language is a country without soul.”
More information:
Ishbel MackAskill’s website is http://freespace.virgin.net/ishbel.macaskill/
Her CDs, such as Sioda (Silk) from 1994 can be ordered through www.folkmusic.net or www.scotsloads.co.uk , where you can also listen to selected tracks.
