`This festival, focusing on Scottish and Irish music, would have been unthinkable 15 years ago. There are strange things happening." To this fresh-off-the-plane Irishwoman, Glasgow University's Rob Dunbar, speaking at a seminar on "Gaelic and Politics", was understating the astonishing nature of Glasgow's three-week-long Celtic Connections festival. True, the thick, glossy programme was bedizened with the names of stars: John Prine, Paddy Keenan, De Dannan, Carlos Nunez, Ronnie Drew, Altan, Dolores Keane, Iris De Ment, Michael McGoldrick, Alasdair Fraser, Natalie McMaster, Kate Rusby, Brian Kennedy, La Boutine Souriante, Donal Lunny, June Tabor, Sharon Shannon, Eric Bogle, Seamus Heaney with Liam O'Flynn - and a whole lot of Scottish performers of whom you've probably never heard for reasons discussed below. However, I had to climb the stairs of Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall and find it literally throbbing with roots music to believe it was all going to happen.
Lovers of Irish traditional/roots/folk music expect to be marginalised. They do not expect to find this music in a concert hall and definitely not in a royal concert hall. They do not expect to find a folk festival which is managed with such professionalism, which has its own T-shirts, its own shop, a press room with hot coffee on tap and little bottles of mineral water on mounds of ice.
Why not? The festival co-ordinator at the Royal Concert Hall has never been to the Republic of Ireland, but he says: "I always imagine that in Ireland the music is all around. In this country, it's more of a concert-going thing, and the sessions are secondary. In Ireland, the sessions are the thing and the concerts are secondary."
Maybe, but the attitude towards the music in Ireland that he refers to causes a lack of respect towards it. Neither is it good business sense - the 2,000-strong audiences for events at the Royal Concert Hall looked like they belonged to one of those "niche" markets that music promoters keep telling us about. Scottish music is being taken seriously and is being positioned to sell internationally. Last weekend, the British Council flew music promoters from all over the world - from China to Colombia - into Glasgow to listen to 15 Scottish bands.
Ireland is the brand leader in what is called "Celtic" music, but that is not necessarily going to last. It won't be helped by an arrogant attitude which makes the Irish public surprisingly unaware of other traditional music - the father and manager of Mercury Award-nominated English singer Kate Rusby told me he had difficulty placing her albums in Irish shops because the assistants would say: "Folk music? That's the Irish music section over there." No-one would like to see Ireland's session culture die, but it would be wonderful if it could be complemented by events like Celtic Connections, which cleverly throws musical traditions together and lets them cross-fertilise. And by the way, the festival also has an excellent festival club and legendary sessions.
The relatively light baggage that Scottish traditional music carries in Scotland means that the word "Celtic" can be used, without referring to ethnicity, as a marketing term. "Nobody could ever agree on a definition for `Celtic music'," says Colin Hynd. "But in Scotland, if you say `Celtic music' everyone knows what you're talking about."
Hynd has been with the Concert Hall since it opened, and only got involved with Celtic Connections when it became clear, seven years ago, that they would need something special to lure money out of Glaswegians' pockets after the excesses of Christmas and Hogmanay. Its timing has now become the festival's great asset - no-one, including the musicians, has too much else to do. "I remember January before Celtic Connections, and it was dreich," wrote one enthusiastic Glasgow Herald critic. Hynd has shown genius in the way he has thrown acts together to tease out the links and the dissonances in the music. Friday's String Sisters concert was a highlight of the festival, and a prime example of a Celtic Connections event: six fiddling women, from the US, Ireland, Scotland, Cape Breton and Norway, were lined up on stage to make music together.
Listening to them play, for instance, beautiful mazurkas learned by fiddler Catriona MacDonald from fellow Shetland fiddler, Michael Ferrie, reminded me of an old map of "The Seas of the North" I saw in Sweden. These were the freeways of another era, and tunes sped up the Baltic from Poland to Scandinavia to Scotland and even to Ireland, as some of Altan's Donegal tunes prove. Annbjorg Lien's swooping meditation on her Haardanger fiddle stood out as the most different tune in the show, but still its huge leaps against an underlying drone brought the Scottish pipes-influenced "piobrach" tradition to mind. CDs and jet planes mean cross-fertilisation happens more quickly and deliberately now. Liz Carroll (from the US) played one of her own tunes, in 7/8 time, and "with that de-de thing that's in all your Scottish tunes" - a sort of musical hiccup or stutter.
String Sisters was obviously conceived as a touring show, and the sheer visual effect of the women, with Ireland's Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh facing them at one end, stamping the tune so that you'd think there was a pump under her foot, and Scotland's Catriona McDonald jumping from side to side at the other end, not to mention Cape Breton's Natalie McMaster tap-dancing in a sequinned bodice and spray-on trousers, will surely make it a winner internationally. However, the swirling motifs twinning an "F" with a treble clef projected onto the stage could be lost, or developed. The example of Riverdance in showing how traditional music can be staged to please the crowds seemed obvious at Celtic Connections, notably in Alasdair Fraser's Skyedance show.
Although Scottish fiddler Fraser is a brilliant player in the Scottish tradition, his Skyedance band's influences seemed to be more heavy metal, however. Eric Riggler took to his bag-pipes like Braveheart to an Englishman, his long blonde hair tossing hither and thither - though the tight leather trousers and silver shirt were more Gibb brothers. This was an unfortunate musical fusion, with electric keyboard, bass and percussion drowning out the fiddler and flute, so that, unlike the electrotrad pioneered by Moving Hearts, the music had lost its delicacy and its loneliness.
What fiddler Martin Hayes calls "the lonesome touch" is intrinsic to Irish and Scottish music, perhaps more a yearning of the soul than of the body. Another gig at the Old Fruitmarket, saw "Celtic" music being forced into a union with Cuban salsa and absolutely resisting the marriage - salsa was born in the sun and it won't cry in the rain if you play it on fiddle and lowland pipes. However, one of the bands singers, sporting a perky kilt, got a huge reaction from the crowd, who obviously enjoyed the twinning of Scottish identity with an international and arguably anti-imperialist one.
A more interesting experiment in fusion was conducted by Karen Marshalsay over the bones of St Mungo in Glasgow Cathedral, in one of the new music commissions made by this exemplary festival. On fiddle, gut strung harp, wire strung Scottish clarsach and Renaissance bray harp, the band moved through a set which ranged from ancient Scottish tunes such as Prince Charles's Medley, through Venezuelan folk music, to a new reel and strathspey, composed by Marshalsay.
SHE performed the premiere of The Neo Gosteg, a response to a piece from the earliest body of harp music in Europe, the Welsh Ap Huw manuscript, written in 1613, and also Promises to Keep, inspired by Robert Frost's poem. For me, she did not dare enough, staying within pleasing melodic sequences, and, as happened too often at Celtic Connections, breaking the regular dance beat of Scots and Irish music to move into a rhythm which sounds Balkan. Obviously, there was an awful lot of identity stuff going down at this festival, and with characteristic brilliance, it was channelled into a series of debates under the auspices of the Strathclyde University.
I thought "The Hyphenated Scot" was going to be about being called Frazer MurdoMcLeod, but that shows the catching up we have to do in our concepts of identity. Instead, it was about creating a multi-ethnic Scottish society, where you can be Italian or Pakistani but still Scottish, by having what The Scots- man's Joyce MacMillan called "a civic nationalism, not based on who your grandmother was, but on who you are now". The fact that you could have a "Black British" identity, but not a "Black English" one showed, she said, how dangerously narrowly Englishness was defined by contrast.
One speaker from the floor wondered aloud whether the experience of the clearances hadn't lent so much loss and vulnerability to Scottish identity that it was easy for it to assimilate other cultures. Robbie Robertson, described as a "highlander and educationalist" warned against developing a "victim mentality" which had served Ireland and Israel badly. But sociologist David McKrone said he had gone to school 100 miles from where the clearances occurred and had been taught nothing about them, "as part of a carefully designed process which has been happening for centuries." Scots were, he said, "forced into a situation where you have to recover your memory."
A Glasgow Herald vox-pop on Saturday may have thrown up suggestions for a Scottish national anthem including Maggie May by Rod Stewart, I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor and Ironic by Alanis Morrisette, but as long as Celtic Connections continues there won't be musical memory loss in Scotland. In the middle of a workshop on Scottish "mouthmusic" (peurt a beul) hosted by Chrissie Stewart, Lewis-born singer Ishbel McAskill stood up and said: "After Collodden, when our instruments and our tartan and our language were proscribed, the puert were a way of keeping the music alive - because they couldn't burn the human voice. We have it, and we're not letting it go, are we Chrissie?"
Celtic Connections runs until next Sunday. For information phone 00-44-141-2875511
