She hurtled down the hill at very high speed, the wind blowing through her hair, and the first part of this jig came into her head. But she fell off the bike half way down and she only had the first part of the tune.
Sources of Fiddle Music
Fiddle Music from Trolls, Trows and the Haltadans
“The story goes that, a few hundred years ago, there was a man walking back, taking a shortcut through the hills, and he heard music. He hid down behind a peerie bruck. Dancing around were the Trows. In the middle was a fiddler and his wife. The fiddler was having to keep playing to keep the Trows dancing.”
Scots Fiddle Festival Celebrates 25 Plus 2
The Scots Fiddle Festival is 25 plus 2 years old. The “delay” of 2 years was due to the effect of the pandemic. The important “birthday” for the festival was marked on Saturday, 19 November 2022 by a ceremony in the Café Bar at the Pleasance in Edinburgh featuring a...
John Mason’s Salute to Cape Breton
The SFO is set to tour the north eastern seaboard of the USA and Canada in March and April 2020. The tour will include a concert in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Tartan Day 2020, 06 April 2020. To quote Wikipedia: “Cape Breton fiddling is a regional violin style which...
First Principals to Second Fiddles (Life in an Orchestra that’s not the SFO)
[Note that this article first appeared in the SFO Newsletter for December 2018 (no. 78), available to download here]. The Irish Times ran an interesting piece about the RTE orchestra during November 2018. Though this is a professional and classical orchestra, there...
A Review of Scots Fiddle Festival 2018
The Scots Fiddle Festival (SFF) took place in Edinburgh on the weekend of 16-18 November 2018. I’ve been at every SFF since 2008 and have seen it go through venues from the Assembly Rooms, Queen’s Hall / King’s Hall, Queen’s Hall / Summerhall and on to a new venue...
When You Discover You Have a Personal Connection to a Historic Fiddle Tune
(SFO Member, Peter Brash, explains how he discovered he had a surprising "personal" connection to a tune by Scottish Fiddle Music legend, James Scott Skinner). Though it’s a few years since it featured in the SFO’s regular programme, Scott Skinner’s Cradle Song has...
Scots Fiddle Festival 2017
The Scots Fiddle Festival (17 – 19 November 2017) is over for another year but what a fantastic weekend of music, workshops and sessions the 21st festival proved to be. Given that some of the musicians now appearing on the main stage originally attended the festival...
The Niel Gow Scottish Fiddle Awards 2017
Niel Gow is arguably the father of Scottish fiddle music. The first Niel Gow Scottish Fiddle Awards will take place at Blair Castle, Blair Atholl, on Sunday, 26 March 2017 from 10am until 5pm. As a worthy successor to the Glenfiddich Fiddle Championship, for the first...
Scottish Fiddle Music Versus Irish Fiddle Music (A Non-Competitive Duel)
In one of several well-known online variations on a theme, words attributed to the 16th President of the USA, Abraham Lincoln (who died in 1865), have him commenting that “The thing about quotes from the internet is that it’s hard to verify their authenticity.” One...