Alexander Carmichael

This provides a brief overview to the collecting life and career of Alexander Carmichael, an exciseman, who recorded a great deal of the Gaelic oral traditions over a fifty-year period, mainly in Uist and on the mainland Highlands of Scotland.

My link to the European Revivals project began in 2009, when I was fortunate enough to present at the first conference – Myths, Legends and Dreams of a Nation.  That conference had an immediate effect on my own work, indeed I made reference to the Kalevala exhibition here at the Ateneum in my paper ‘Art as an Expression of Northernness’ published the next year. Thus the European Revivals project helped to focus my research networks and has continued to do so. What I want to do today is to reflect on that starting point in Helsinki in 2009 and think about future directions. I hope that what I will explore here at the Ateneum Museum in January 2020 will resonate with the experience of others involved in the project.

I give context to the Celtic Revival art of Scotland around 1900 by situating it with respect to earlier and later work, both in Scotland and elsewhere. At the core of the paper will be attention to Mary Carmichael’s work for Carmina Gadelica (published in Edinburgh in 1900) and the cultural activism of her daughter, Ella. The start date of 1760 marks the publication of the first elements of James Macpherson’s Ossian. That work became a key driver of northern European traditional cultural revival. Little known explorations of Ossian by J M W Turner in London in 1802 and Luigi Zandomeneghi in Venice in 1817, will be noted. 1955 is taken as the end point because it marks the publication of J. D. Fergusson’s Celtic influenced illustrations for Hugh MacDiarmid’s In Memoriam James Joyce, which will be considered in relation to George Bain’s remarkable Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction issued in 1951 by the same publisher, William MacLellan. A key concern will be the interdependence of revivalism and modernism.

This provides a brief overview to the collecting life and career of Alexander Carmichael, an exciseman, who recorded a great deal of the Gaelic oral traditions over a fifty-year period, mainly in Uist and on the mainland Highlands of Scotland.

Scottish musician Marjory Kennedy-Fraser (née Kennedy, 1857–1930) is known mostly for her "Songs of the Hebrides". From the publication of the first volume in 1909, her popularity and fame grew – in Scotland and England as well as abroad; her work received official recognition in the 1920s, when she was awarded both the CBE and an honorary Mus.D. (Edinburgh). After her death in 1930, her songs were still widely performed, but her work was increasingly exposed to criticism. While appreciated as a respected, albeit somewhat unfashionable, arranger of songs among musicians generally, both in Britain and beyond, Marjory Kennedy-Fraser was virulently attacked by trendsetting Scottish intellectuals, who accused her of having misrepresented Gaelic songs, publishing what was by then considered romanticized drawing-room arrangements, lacking in authenticity. Though still frequently maligned, her songs have been subject of a renewed interest in recent years, and have slowly begun to find their place among European art songs of the period, a repertoire which is largely based on, or at least influenced by, vernacular folk-songs from the different nations.

Apart from her memoirs from 1929, "A Life of Song", no biography has so far been published of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser. The aim of this thesis is to provide a detailed survey of Dr Kennedy-Fraser's professional life, and, furthermore, by relating her life and œuvre to her own time, to place her in context. It draws extensively on her own, hitherto unpublished working material, held by Edinburgh University Library, a multitude of newspaper articles and biographical publications, as well as letters from a wide range of sources. It thus offers as complete and nuanced a picture as possible of a long, comprehensive, and indeed impressive, career. Following an introductory overview of the Arts & Crafts movement, the mainly chronological biography explores her family background, international concert tours, and music studies in Milan and Paris. Her rôles as performer, teacher, lecturer, and author are assessed, as is her work as a suffrage activist and a parish councillor. The second phase of her career, when a collector and arranger of Gaelic songs, her publication of the "Songs of the Hebrides", as well as her numerous Hebridean recitals, given both throughout Britain and abroad, are all covered in detail. Her interaction with several important individuals of her time, including Sir Patrick Geddes, Dr Frederick Niecks, Dr Kenneth Macleod, Sir Granville Bantock, and Dame Ellen Terry, is also discussed.

The recent upsurge of interest in early twentieth-century cultural nationalisms has raised the profile of the Scottish rôle in the cultural and nationalist revival movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Especially during the key period between the 1890s and the First World War, the Scottish Celtic Revival movement witnessed a flowering of artistic, literary, and cultural activities that helped to shape incipient political and cultural nationalisms, both Scottish and pan-Celtic.

This interdisciplinary conference (1-3 May 2014) will be organised by the University of Edinburgh's department of Celtic and Scottish Studies and part-hosted by the National Galleries of Scotland. It will be supported by the Modern Humanities Research Fund and co-sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), and the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI), University of Edinburgh. The conference will bring together scholars working on the art, music, folklore collection, literary production, scholarship, politics, Gaelic linguistic revival, architecture, and material culture of the period, in order to reassess the role played by the Celtic Revival in the creation of modern Scottish identities. Through an examination of the roots, rise, and withering of the Celtic Revival in Scotland, the conference will reassess the successes - and failures - of the movement in its widest context.

Scottish musician Marjory Kennedy-Fraser (née Kennedy, 1857–1930) is mainly known for the several volumes of "Songs of the Hebrides" she brought out in collaboration with Kenneth MacLeod (1871–1955), based on her years of painstaking work collecting Gaelic songs. Increasingly popular and famous since the publication of the first volume in 1909, her work received official recognition in the 1920s, when she was awarded both the CBE and an honorary Mus.D. (Edinburgh). Gaelic songs were Kennedy-Fraser's second career, however, having previously travelled the world as her father's accompanist, studied music in Milan, in Paris, and – as one of its first women students – at the University of Edinburgh, subsequently building up a flourishing music teaching practice in the Scottish capital. Widowed at an early age, with two small children to support, in the 1890s, the young professional was busy teaching, performing and lecturing in Edinburgh, where she soon became part of the city's artistic avant-garde circles and met with Alexander Carmichael, Patrick Geddes, John Duncan and Phoebe Traquair – leading lights of the Arts & Crafts movement in Scotland. My paper will ask what sparked Dr Kennedy-Fraser's passion for Gaelic music and culture, outline her multifarious undertakings in public life generally, and discuss how her œuvre became increasingly exposed to criticism after her death, particularly in Scotland, where she was virulently attacked by trendsetting intellectuals, who accused her of having misrepresented Gaelic songs. I will conclude by considering the place of the "Songs of the Hebrides" in today's song recital repertoire.