Widely regarded as one of the finest fiddlers of Scotland, Alasdair Fraser has been a major force behind the resurgence of Scottish traditional fiddling—by his innovative playing, his teaching of the craft, and through the record label he founded in 1986. Well-grounded in both scientific and music disciplines, Fraser finds freedom in the expression of traditional music. Film credits of this former petrophysicist with the British Petroleum Corporation include performances on such soundtracks as Titanic, Last of the Mohicans, and Spitfire Grill. Fraser, first-ever and continuing Artist in Residence at the prestigious annual Celtic Connections Festival held in Glasgow, also maintains the Valley of the Moon Scottish Fiddling School, a summer camp he started in 1983 in northern California and a summer course which he began giving in 1987 at Sabhal Mor Ostaig Gaelic College on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. NAV met with Fraser between sets at the 29th Annual Stone Mountain Highland Games & Scottish Festival held in Georgia.

NAV: How would you describe Scottish music?

FRASER: Well, first of all I’d say that if you get inside the music and go searching over 300-years of repertoire you can find music to satisfy and express a great deal of the human condition. This would surprise a lot of people because they would associate that with labors of the great composers such as Mozart or Beethoven, but traditional music expresses the soul of the people. Scotland has a very colorful past—much of it being a struggle for survival—and this shows in the music and art of the nation. You have the rural idiomatic music of the Gaels in the west, that of the Perthshire heartland, the Scandinavian-influenced northeast, the border country, the cosmopolitan centers of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen—all this combined with influences from neighboring England, Ireland, France, Italy and Spain. You have the great dance traditions, including the strathspey, with its unique rhythmic signature; you have the ancient modes with their own particular flavor and a strong vocal and instrumental tradition.

NAV: How does Scottish music fit into the tapestry of world music?

FRASER: There’s a composer in Scotland called Ronald Stephenson who made the observation that Scottish music has the potential rhythmic sophistication of the African tradition and the melodic potential of the East Indian tradition in terms of how it wants to vary itself and the harmonic potential of the Western world, which is a great juxtaposition of ideas.

NAV: What would you say is your signature sound?

Fraser: That’s a hard one for me. It’s a combination of all kinds of things—it’s my humanity flowing into that instrument; it’s the way I touch it. I think it’s mostly the emotional makeup of the performer that defines the sound. I’m someone who likes to explore the whole emotional spectrum from the wildest, craziest dance pieces all the way through to the most poignant, beautiful tonally sensitive areas. I care a lot about light and shade and colors. If you actually spend quality time in each note and shade it while you’re in there, you increase your palette of sonic color and you increase the emotionality of the performance so that it then contains a much bigger message. That alone can raise the temperature of the communication.

NAV: What fiddle do you play?

FRASER: I play almost exclusively on a fiddle made by David Gusset of Eugene, Oregon. David has been much lauded for his fine workmanship. Back in 1991, David and I decided it would be a good idea for me to play one of his instruments and give it a good road test—which it certainly has had in the last ten years. Everywhere from the beautiful theatres of Europe to the smoky bars and kitchens of many a fine ceilidh, the fiddle has responded well to all these challenges.

For my recording called Legacy of the Scottish Fiddle, Volume One I used a Scottish-made violin by George Duncan from the late 19th century as I enjoyed the idea of recording on an instrument which was made by a contemporary of many of the composers represented on the CD.

NAV: What is your background?

FRASER: I was born in the village of Clackmannan, which is right in the center of Scotland between Glasgow and Edinburgh. It used to be a coal-mining town. My father’s family is from the Highlands and my mother’s family is from the Glasgow area, so, I suppose a big part of me was exposed to a Highland mindset. Actually I always felt that growing up in the center of Scotland gave me a good vantage point to roam across the whole country which is something I still enjoy doing, listening to all the different dialects and ways of speaking and expression.

My father is a piper and plays double bass as well. Both my father and mother grew up in households that enjoyed sharing music in the traditional way. The older I get the more I realize how important it was that I was around it so much in my early days. My grandfather played the fiddle a little bit. He, along with one of my dad’s cousins was one of the founding members of a fiddle group in Scotland called the Stirling Strathspey and Reel Society, so in many ways it’s no great surprise that I ended up playing the fiddle.

NAV: Were your parents more interested in classical, or traditional music?

FRASER: Actually, my parents were interested in all kinds of music—for example, the big bands, which were so important to people before and after the Second World War. I loved that music also, and my mother would sing it and many of the other songs of her day while working in the kitchen. I shared my parents’ love of their generation’s music, which wasn’t confined to Scottish music by any means. It’s been part of my journey, though, to re-establish Scottish music—to re-seed it in some ways, in Scotland.

As a youngster, I was sent to violin lessons in school and I learned a lot of the classical repertoire. I did a lot of the chamber work, did solo and orchestral work for years. At the same time, though, I was playing traditional music at home and learning by ear, so I feel like I was lucky in that I got that training, that exposure to music from many different angles. I also got to learn the old Scottish songs at home and sit down at the kitchen table and learn pipe tunes from my father. This led me to wonder about the differences in approach between traditional and classical art forms and ultimately led to my deciding to devote my musical career to traditional Scottish music in all its varied colors. While at Edinburgh University studying physics I played in the University orchestra and at the same time was very active in traditional music circles.

NAV: Who most influenced you in your music?

FRASER: One of my heroes was a great fiddler from the Northeast named Hector MacAndrew. I also love Alfredo Campoli, the Spanish violinist. Fritz Kreisler, I just love his playing, and he had a humanity and vulnerability in his sound that I preferred to [Jascha] Heifetz, the king of the studied phrase and impeccable technique. Kreisler also had a wonderful kind of playfulness and such a superb tonal range. Many players have influenced me over the years and I think a common thread is that I’m drawn to players who exhibit a certain spontaneity and joy in their playing.

NAV: You have two sons. How are they musically?

FRASER: I’m excited. Galen is 10 and he’s playing fiddle. He’s the living proof of what I say about the music being a language which can be learned by immersion. He’s heard fiddle music all his life, as though it was being spoken in the house, and he speaks it. He takes his fiddle out and he plays. He sings fiddle tunes to me in the car on the way to school and he plays the bodhran, so he has music in his life and he has the aptitude. Right now he wants to get together with his school chums and form a rock band. I said, ‘Well you get some fiddle in that rock band, you know?’ My other son is only three, but he’s always up there dancing and sawing away on his little fiddle.

NAV: Would you tell me about the founding of Culburnie Records.

FRASER: My wife Sally and I founded Culburnie Records in 1986 with the release of Skyedance, an album I made with keyboard player Paul Machlis. Paul and I used to meet regularly at my house in the early eighties to play the music from the old Scottish collections, and this recording grew out of the joy of rediscovering that music. I started the Culburnie label because I wanted to have full artistic control of the content and because I wanted to release music which perhaps didn’t fit into anyone’s preconceived idea of what was marketable. I also wanted to use the label as a vehicle to help re-establish some of the old music in the center of the common repertoire. Culburnie is the area in the Highlands of Scotland where my family has had a croft [small farm] for many, many years. I feel that owning my own label has enabled me to release albums which reflect my artistic journey and to not be concerned with the compartmentalized thinking that often is associated with the marketing of music. It has enabled me to roam over territory ranging from the contemporary sounds of the band Skyedance all the way back to the core 18th century repertoire of the Scottish violin as in Legacy of the Scottish Fiddle and to the Highland Gaelic-influenced sounds of Return to Kintail and The Driven Bow. This would have been much more difficult to achieve with a larger record label, which most likely would want to constrain my music to a particular genre.

NAV: As we’ve mentioned, you’ve named an album The Legacy of the Scottish Fiddle. What would you say is the future of Scottish music?

FRASER: We’re talking about music that regenerates, that can be appropriate to the next generation—and it has always been there for us for 300 years. I see a steady increase in awareness. There was a big blip, a big high on the popularity chart when the music was taken to the big stage and it was dressed up and presented as a big show like Riverdance. That’s all fine and good, but that’s not where this music lives primarily. The energy center of this music is in the grassroots and you measure the health of this music by asking ‘How many young people are playing it? How many sessions are happening, whether it be in homes or bars or clubs or coffeehouses?’ That’s where I put my Celtic barometer, and in Scotland it’s been rising every year for the last 15 years along with an increasing awareness of language and regional dialects and the ways that people like to express themselves. I’ve always lived basically at that grassroots level. All the teaching I do is about that, about fanning the flames and getting kids and adults to express themselves in this emotional language, which happens to be Scottish. I do see a general awakening. Music was never really designed to be fashion conscious. It’s much more close to the soul than that.

NAV: What do you teach your students, to fan the flames?

FRASER: I think a lot of energy and enthusiasm can come from the fact that they can make this music their own. A lot of us grew up in an education system that was full of ‘do’s and don’ts,’ and here is the proper way to play Mozart, or the correct way to play Bach, and that becomes very debilitating after a while. When you say to people, ‘Here’s the music; here are these old melodies,’ you can do your homework and listen to the old players play it or the old players sing these songs, and then you can say, ‘this is the way I sing it,’ and a lot of adults look at me and say, ‘Are you kidding? You have that amount of freedom?’

NAV: Is today’s traditional music more free than in those days?

FRASER: No, I’d say it’s more likely the other way around. Standardization is the enemy of regional variation and we’ve seen a lot of attempts at all kinds of standardization in the past 200 years. I think people in the 18th Century would have had a much longer attention span. Maybe this is a good time to mention the attention-span reducing effects of TV watching and general media-soundbite thinking. If you listen to pibroch, (ancient music of the bagpipes, dating back to 1600) as it’s played in the present day you’d find that it has become very standardized and shortened in comparison to days of old. In modern pibroch competition each pibroch lasts approximately 20 minutes, but we know that in older days each pibroch went on for an hour or more, and people just aren’t used to doing that anymore. And it’s the same with the fiddle tunes. If I look back through the old manuscripts I can tell that they played for a long time on one tune because they’d be exploring all the possibilities of that tune. Now there’s a tendency to play it twice and move on to the next one. Nowadays we see a lot of decisions being made in music based on short attention spans—the three-minute hit single. I relish going back to that time where I do get to explore the palette and I’m challenged by it. And I often issue that as a challenge to students—‘Pick your favorite tune and play it for 20 minutes, never play it the same way twice, and make it interesting—always vibrant. You will find more in it.’ One of the wonderful byproducts of this approach is that by unleashing your creativity on a certain tune it will often lead to a whole new tune.

NAV: Celtic musicians play very fast sometimes and they play without any written music. How is that done, especially when they play in groups and they all seem to sync so well?

FRASER: Well, I use the word language very deliberately. After growing up learning to read music and also being in musical situations where written music is redundant, I realize it’s about more than memory. It’s about knowing and internalizing the music and being at play with it even when you’re off the instrument. Oftentimes I’m in teaching situations where I’ll be talking with classically trained musicians who’ll talk about memorizing this piece or that piece. I’ll say, ‘No, you don’t want to memorize.’ It’s actually better if you never see the music. If you hear it, it is then stored in a different part of your brain, it seems. Music is first and foremost an auditory function. It really has nothing to do with the written page. It’s something you hear and once you develop that ear and become fluent in that sonic language then you hear things and you know them, just as you do when you learn a language.

NAV: Do you feel that music can talk to people who are concerned or grieving?

FRASER: Absolutely. Very definitely, and very importantly. I’ve seen myself that many people turn to music in those times.

NAV: Do you sometimes play with that in mind?

FRASER: Oh yes. I can’t ever ignore it—an awareness of a need in a room full of people and the possibility of responding to that need is ever present. There is often a pathos in this music that can be brought to the surface. I like to pick up on the emotional energy of people and go with it or try to shake them into a different place or to grieve with them, or to say, ‘let’s celebrate the joy in life.’

NAV: Do you find yourself aware now, of focusing more on that aspect of your music?

FRASER: I suppose I do because I see the need for it in people’s eyes. It’s all around us.

NAV: Maybe they’re reaching to you more than they would ordinarily.

FRASER: Yes, I think definitely that’s happening and I think it’s the job of a musician or an artist to be of service to that need. It’s very spiritual. My whole spiritual past is based on music and what I’ve uncovered by following my fiddle. I feel more in touch with the connectedness of everything. It just takes me closer to that oneness. I feel very lucky to be able to spend my time doing it. I think first and foremost music is a language of emotional communication. There are many ways you can heal. You can heal by dancing in a crazy way or by being meditative. And what I love about the music, again, is that it goes back over 300 years of people using the music to do precisely that. They knew they could use music when they didn’t have anything else. Something I find myself saying often is, ‘if we can go back to that place…’ because we have to remind ourselves that there’s a body of knowledge in this music. It was like using herbal remedies—the music is around you and you can explore those qualities that the music has, and learn how to use them.

NAV: Earlier you mentioned East Indian music. Do you think the fiddle and sitar combine well?

FRASER: I do. I toured one time with a bunch of fiddlers from different countries. I was representing Scottish fiddling and we had Irish, French, English, Swedish, American old-time, Cajun and East Indian—so we had the various ways that the violin can speak being represented on this tour. The tour was called, “Fiddles on Fire.” We had an East Indian violinist named K. Shivakumar, and he was just amazing. I was very much impressed and enchanted by his use of the violin to express the language and the soul of his culture. I think that the violin is an instrument that has the fluidity and range to produce a very vocal sound, and he was a very vocal player. In his playing, as I have noticed many times in Scottish music, the power and depth of music played to the solitary accompaniment of a drone was abundantly apparent. Such overtones, dissonances and resonances, creativity and beauty of phrasing were a joy to hear!

NAV: The strings and drums are universal for both Indian and Western music—especially Celtic. How do you see that connection?

FRASER: I see a connection in that each musician has a need to explore both the rhythmic and melodic ends of the spectrum. When you put these two together, you have more of a complete musician and a complete experience. All of these fiddlers were representing dance music as well as other forms, so these elements have to be present. Something I like to do is get musicians to really explore their rhythmic soul as well as their melodic one. There’s a great emphasis in Western music on melodic and harmonic sophistication and in many ways we’ve lost the place when it comes to rhythmic sophistication. You almost have to go to other cultures, to meet people who are fundamentally fluent in rhythm. A lot of Western musicians and audiences don’t go there.

NAV: What would you like to tell us about your latest album, Skyedance Live in Spain?

Fraser: Over the course of several band tours in Spain, our original music began to reflect an appreciation for the rich cultures of the Basque country, Asturias and Galicia—especially on our second release, Labyrinth. We wanted to pay tribute to those traditions besides having a great time making music, by inviting some of the amazing artists from these areas to perform with us. They are Mercedes Peon, a beautiful singer from Galicia, Kepa Kunkera and Joxan Goikoetxea, two Basque accordionists; Jose Manuel Tejedor, a piper from Asturias and Mikel Laboa, a great singer and poet who I think of as being the poet laureate of the Basque country. We used Basque percussion instruments that haven’t been heard for a long time. These regions in Spain are also awakening to their own sound and their own emotional characteristics.

NAV: Who’s on Skyedance with you?

FRASER: Chris Norman on the flute and piccolo, Eric Rigler on pipes, Paul Machlis on piano and keyboards, Mick Linden on fretless bass and Peter Maund on percussion.

NAV: Thank you, Alasdair.