By Rachel Bani
Invited annually, graduate schools of music present the Presser Graduate Music Award to an outstanding graduate music student whom they select. The program is designed to encourage and support in a special way the advanced education and career of truly exceptional graduate music students who have the potential to make a distinguished contribution to the field of music. The Award is a cash stipend of up to $10,000, which is made available to a graduate student designated by the institution.
Rachel Bani received the Award in 2020-2021 from Florida State University. Through her project “Scottish Gaelic Song of the Highland Clearances and Land Agitation Movement (1750–1912),” she conducted research about the displacement or eviction of 100,000 Gaelic people in the Scottish Highlands and how songs composed and performed in Gaelic communities during the Highland Clearances (c.1750–1860) and the subsequent Crofters’ War (c. 1870–1886) are a powerful record of the experiences of Gaelic people.
Background
Between 1750 and 1860, over 100,000 Gaelic people were displaced or evicted from their homes in the Scottish Highlands and the Hebrides. Many of these evictions were sanctioned by wealthy Scottish landowners who removed their tenants to make way for lucrative agricultural ventures such as the enclosure of open fields for livestock or the development of hunting estates. Those people most acutely affected by the Clearances were poor, rural Gaelic speakers, and their forced removal from ancestral homes and livelihoods speaks to both the historic marginalization and the ongoing marked decline of traditional Scottish Gaelic political and social systems.
Through this project, I seek to understand the lasting consequences of these evictions for Gaelic people. Singers and songwriters were and still are a central institution of Gaelic cultural tradition, acting as historians and record keepers in addition to advocating for the concerns of their communities. Màiri Nic-a’-Phearsain and other township bards and regional vernacular Gaelic-language song composers grappled with issues such as the betrayal of ancestral tenants by wealthy landowners, the resettlement of entire Gaelic communities to accommodate new Lowland Scottish tenants, exorbitant rent increases, and the fundamental destruction of their traditional ways of life in favor of economic progress for wealthy Highland landowners.
In addition to expressing anti-colonial and anti-landlord sentiments, song was also used to incite Gaelic people to action in defense of their homes and communities during the Land Agitation movement, a period of political resistance by tenants and activists against the Scottish landowning class. Song was an important tool of protest, encouraging Gaelic speakers to stand together in defense of their communities and their ways of life. Songs such as “Eilean A’ Cheo [The Misty Isle],” elucidate the role that song played in encouraging the establishment of land reform policies across Scotland. The performance and publication of Gaelic-language songs drew national attention to the inequities wrought by poor land management practices, and the lack of protection for tenants under Scottish law. For modern Gaelic people in Scotland and in Scottish diasporic communities in places such as Nova Scotia, North Carolina, and Florida, Gaelic-language songs also preserve memories of their ancestral communities that have not survived in any other archival form. For many living descendants, these songs are a bridge between the present and their ancestral cultural heritage.
Research
For my project, I had access to eighteenth- and nineteenth century newspapers, pamphlets, travel journals, and political publications. Two collections of particular importance were the “Correspondence of Professor John Stuart Blackie and His Family, 1798–1915,” and the Glen Collection of Scottish Music. The John Blackie collection included numerous manuscripts and notes written by Blackie, dealing with Gaelic song and issues surrounding the Highland Clearances. The Glen Collection of Scottish music included numerous rare nineteenth- and early twentieth-century published song collections of Scottish Gaelic song-makers. These song collections have aided me in writing my dissertation, as many of these songs have not been published elsewhere.
At the University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections, I focused my attention of the Marjory Kennedy Fraser collection, which houses the song-collector’s personal papers, including correspondence, folksong transcriptions, and Gaelic-language song arrangements. This collection included manuscript copies of rare and unpublished works of Kennedy Fraser, as well as her correspondence with other Scottish composers, musicians, and academics of the time. This collection illuminated my understanding of Kennedy Fraser’s life and career, as well as her method for transcribing Gaelic songs.
Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre
As a part of this research trip, I was also able to spend a week on the Isle of Skye, at the Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre. This archive, located in the town of Portree, is home to hundreds of manuscript documents related to the Highland Clearances and land agitation movements on Skye. While at the archive center, I focused my attention on the Kilmuir Estate Collection, which contained correspondence and estate papers dating between 1854 and 1883. These papers included letters between the estate owner Captain William Fraser, and his land factors, illuminating many of the issues faced by tenants during the land agitation period of the late-nineteenth century.
My project helps inform the historic roots of these political acts as an ethnocultural issue with a long history grounded in colonial discourse. At this important political juncture, I had the opportunity to critique the history of ethno-cultural divisions within Scotland and within the United Kingdom as it relates to song culture, as well as to demonstrate the importance of oral musical traditions as a living European historical record.
Impact
The time that I spent in Scotland has proven to be foundational to my research on Gaelic songs written in response to the Highland Clearances and land agitation movements of the nineteenth century. I am currently using the material I worked with in Scotland to write my dissertation, and I have plans to defend my dissertation and graduate from Florida State University in the spring of 2023 with my doctorate in Musicology.
Rachel Bani is a doctoral candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She completed her Master of Music degree in Historical Musicology at FSU in 2018. Her master’s thesis engages with songs written by and about Scottish women involved in the Jacobite Rising of 1745. Rachel’s dissertation research focuses on Scottish Gaelic-language songs written in the wake of the Highland Clearances, tying this history to the continued fight for land reform in Scotland today.
Rachel is a current Member-at-Large for the Society for Eighteenth Century Scotland, and co-chair of the Society for Ethnomusicology Special Interest Group for Celtic Music. She is a recipient of a 2021 American Musicological Society Eugene K. Wolf Travel Grant, a 2021 Florida State University Dissertation Research Grant, and a 2021 Presser Graduate Music Award.
She has presented her research for professional organizations such as the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the North American British Music Studies Association, the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
