> It sounds like a wonderful opportunity for those who can take advantage
> of classes, and a great way to carry on transmition of the tradition.
I've been to a few of ALP's classes; the only teaching I've done was
one half-hour talk and leading a slow session for a while. But I can
say something more about how it started.
About 20 years ago there were a few people in Edinburgh interested in
libertarian socialist ideas on education, particularly those of Paolo
Freire. (Anybody who knew that stuff would also have read the simpler
things by Ivan Illich, Everett Reimer etc). The main person I remember
pushing this was Colin Kirkwood, then of the Worker's Educational
Association (a somewhat stuffy outfit with dodgy origins in nineteenth
century Fabianism, i.e. the idea was that if you got the working class
interested in self-improvement they'd drop any revolutionary notions
they might have). This wasn't specifically aimed at musical education
at first; Freire's ideas were about the working class rediscovering
their own culture in general and teaching it to themselves, with the
Marxist aim of encouraging class self-consciousness.
Kirkwood obviously wasn't going to lever the WEA very far in this
direction, so other people formed the Adult Learning Project with the
same aims. The other groups within ALP - doing community history,
women's studies and a network of related stuff - have continued doing
Freire-inspired work over the years. Music was an obvious aspect of
culture to slot into this framework, but it never quite worked in a
Freirean way. One inspiration at the time was the samba schools of
Brazil (as described by Illich; apparently he idealized them a bit,
but his description was influential anyway). These (as described by
Illich) are a democratic, expert-free form of collective creation.
There were two things you could do with this precedent in music. One
was just to port samba to Scotland; this was was done successfully, but
not by ALP. The Edinburgh samba schools of that period have multiplied
and thrived; e.g. there are now two lesbian samba schools, and fusion
groups like Bloco Vomit (anarchist samba-punk, one of whose movers and
shakers, Ian Heavens, was a good friend of mine who committed suicide
a few months ago). These groups still operate in a somewhat leaderless
way, albeit without the spontaneously eruptive community base that
Illich described.
The other was to put Scottish traditional music at the centre of the
project, perhaps with an associated ideology that valued it as the
musical voice of the Scottish working class (an idea which I think
needs a good many ifs and buts, but never mind for now). It *might*
have been possible to organize a Scottish traditional music project
on the samba-school model (for song, anyway) but ALP's Scottish Music
Group didn't take that route. Instead they got expert tutors to run
classes in much the same way as the local authority already did in
other fields; the result is that there are now two rather different
organizations, one nominally part of the other, operating from the
same office and with the same paid personnel. ALP's funding is partly
from class fees and partly from the local authority; perhaps if they
hadn't decided to be part of the local state early on, things might
have gone differently. And many of the tutors had the political
awareness of the average oyster, which made fitting them into a
Freirean project a tad problematic. The Scots Music Group intended
to split off from ALP last I heard. (Bits of the Scots Music Group
do function in a samba-school-like way, e.g. Old Spice, a band made
of people mostly over 50 who do a lot of community performances and
who generate their own ideas without a salaried expert. But that
kinda happened by accident).
A local precedent ALP might have had in mind was the Edinburgh Shetland
Fiddlers, who were active well before ALP got going, inspired by Tom
Anderson; Anderson was a music teacher and the group operated more like
samba schools *really* do in Brazil, i.e. there was always a musical
authority in charge. (In its re-formed version, it's more loosely
structured).
> Where I live one has to be very motivated to become a traditional
> musician. Very good opportunities exist, but usually open up only
> after one has acquired a good amount of skill, and beginners must
> either be very motivated indeed or lucky to persevere to the next
> levels where more support is available (e.g. through the community
> of a regular session, etc.).
The relevance of the above being that your situation is probably
different. When ALP started doing traditional music classes, there
was already a clear demand for them, some of the performers who had
created that excitement were prepared to teach for very little money,
and their organization had run classes/workshops on other aspects of
Scottish culture and was hence well placed both to get their music
programme underway with only small expenditure on publicity, and to
argue with the local authority that throwing a bit more dosh their
way to give it a boost was part of the same community-development
project. In Bush's America your chances of getting a community arts
project funded are presumably nil, you won't have an existing network
that sees Scottish music as a legitimate extension of its remit, you
are unlikely to have an expert tutor prepared to teach for peanuts,
and you're unlikely to have the pre-existing buzz of interest we had.
Which, as I see it, throws you back willy-nilly onto the samba school
model. There is precedent for self-teaching in this sort of music;
that's the way it used to work in Shetland, albeit in an individual
way. And you've now got the Internet to help assemble groups of
interested neighbours (or you would if it were not for the culture of
mindless fear that stops most Internet users from saying where they
live).
The sort of reading matter that got ALP off the ground (these are
still on the shelves in their library, I don't how much they are
looked at these days):
- Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
- Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
- Everett Reimer, School is Dead
- and various writings of Hamish Henderson, who adapted Gramsci's
analysis of the politics of culture to the Scottish situation.
The traditional music part of ALP isn't overtly political, but it
has grown up inside a politicized milieu, which gives it a certain
depth and outward-looking character that a typical local authority
night-school class hasn't got.
Perhaps somebody could tell us about parallels in Glasgow? as I
understand it the Castlemilk Whistle Workshop is a samba-school-type
politicized creation, whereas the Glasgow Fiddle Workshop has narrower
aims. Neither is anywhere near as high-profile as ALP.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/
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