Folk, Jazz, Etc: Arts Council is neglecting the grassroots

Published on Thursday 8 May 2008 20:26

“FXO” is the current arts administration buzz-term. It stands for “organisations in receipt of flexible funding”, but “unidentified funding object” seems more appropriate and suitably elusive. Either way, it was much bandied about last week during the Scottish Arts Council’s (SAC) dispensation of flexible funding packages for 2009-10, which left grassroots traditional music organisations inflexibly fearing the future.

Among more than 100 applications for support from the 15 million of Arts Council largesse, two significant enablers of bedrock traditional music-making were among those left empty-handed – the Edinburgh-based Scots Music Group and the Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland (TMSA). Others who lost out included the Scottish Traditions of Dance Trust and, equally worryingly, two essential bodies nurturing the Scots tongue that informs and inspires so much folk song and much else – the Scots Language Resource Centre and Scottish Language Dictionaries.

Funding is inevitably contentious, and no-one would begrudge those such as the Drake Music Project – which works with disabled people – or the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra their success this time around. However, as volleys of indignant letters wing their way to Linda Fabiani, the culture minister, there is a feeling abroad among traditional music activists that the Arts Council is favouring high-profile stage performance (such as Glasgow Cultural Enterprises, which runs Celtic Connections) while neglecting the low-key but essential matrix of teaching and local music-making which allows traditional music to flourish.

On its website, the TMSA, which promotes traditional music through festivals, tours and other activities, suggests that the SAC is “being short-sighted in its emphasis on the paid performance end of the traditional music sector and ignoring the vital importance of encouraging participation from the ‘ordinary’ people of Scotland”.

The situation does seem extraordinary at a time when active interest in Scottish music has never been greater. It is to satisfy this demand that the Scots Music Project, and the Adult Leaning Project (ALP) from which it developed, were formed. As the SMG prepared to appeal against the rejection of their application for 60,000, its chair, Alastair Cameron, expressed concern at “a notion that art relies on a few stars who perform for people who listen passively. That is not a notion of art that I subscribe to, and I don’t think the arts council should”.

Nobody, not least this writer, is putting down the often formidably and inspiringly virtuosic folk “headliners” – or, for that matter, the SAC’s Tune Up scheme which helps folk, jazz and other groups to embark on tours that would otherwise be beyond their purses. But, without the essential “seed corn” of teaching and community-level music making, such excellence simply would not flourish.

In the meantime, a veritable hotbed of Scots song is guaranteed at Fife Traditional Singing Weekend, next Friday to Sunday, 16-18 May, at the Fife Animal Park, Collessie. No, I don’t know either whether the animals sing too, but guests include such seasoned sangsters as Jimmy Hutchison, Ellen Mitchell, Scots-based American Sara Gray and the peerless bothy-balladeer Jock Duncan, while the emerging generation is represented by RSAMD graduate Shona Donaldson. There is also a rare appearance north of the Border from the fine Northumbrian singer Brian Watson. Under the organisation of long-time singer-activists Pete Shepheard and Arthur Watson, traditional song and good craic will prevail, although I suspect that any FXOs will be off-radar.

&#149 See www.tmsa.org www.scotsmusic.org. For details of the Fife Singing weekend, see www.springthyme.co.uk/fifesing