Wayfarers: confronting the past through history and traditional music education in schools
Published: 27 February 2024
Commentary, Explainer
Guitars, mandolins, fiddles and other instruments that make up a contemporary traditional band resonate with historical associations. This project explores how music can aid the teaching of controversial histories.
The Wayfarers project was an interdisciplinary project which drew on the disciplines of music and history, affording young people in a secondary school in Scotland the opportunity to reimagine and re-create songs and tunes from the catalogue of contemporary roots music. Not only did the school pupils create new versions of some classic songs, but they also explored some of the challenging aspects of the history of people who produced the original music from which the contemporary versions are created.
From the eighteenth century onwards thousands of Scots and Irish moved to Appalachia – ‘the wayfarers’ in our title. These emigrants to the U.S. took with them a vast cultural inheritance of music and storytelling that would become filtered through the American experience, producing new forms of cultural expression and artefacts, that would, in turn, make their way back to Scotland. This historical process was, and continues to be, marked by cultural transformation and learning. Distinctive material artefacts, musical instruments such as the guitar, banjo, fiddle and mandolin, function as the mechanism of transmission. Our original wayfarers, the people who made these extraordinary migrations beginning in the eighteenth century, produced a cultural record ringing with sonically encoded narratives that expressed their hope for something better and their loss of something irreplaceable. They narrated their migration, expressed their hope for something better, and constituted their lives in the new places where they made their homes. And they did this through their music and their cultural practices.
While the heritage of the Wayfarers now feature in the Scottish school curriculum, the vast array of challenging factors, including forced migration and segregation, are not yet fully considered in schools. To address this need, the project team at the University of Glasgow and Royal Conservatoire of Scotland worked in partnership with a specialist traditional music school in order to co-develop music and history-focused resources to enhance secondary school practices surrounding music education and pupil engagement with challenging histories. The participating pupils were helped by their music instructors and teachers, producing not only audiovisual recordings of the pieces, but working in partnership with the two institutions to create teaching packs with resources for other schools wishing to try this out for themselves. The project enabled the school pupils to explore the transformations of music and culture that took place in the development of this genre of music, focusing on the challenging aspects of its history, in its genesis between Scotland and the United States.
Read more about the project on the Wayfarers webpage.
Relevant Links
- A peer-reviewed article in International Journal of Music Education
- Five songs with associated teaching packs, available on the project website at The Wayfarers – music, history, education (gla.ac.uk)
- Funder: ESRC Impact Acceleration Account: User Engagement Fund
First published: 27 February 2024