Waulking songs (Scottish Gaelic: Òrain Luaidh) were working songs that were sung by groups of women in the Highlands and islands of Scotland as they waulked (beat) tweed by hand to shrink it. The songs were traditionally sung as communal activities to pass the time and were usually led by one woman singing a verse with the rest of the women taking over in the chorus. The waulking songs would start at a slow pace and gather speed as the tweed softened, always staying in time with the repetitive synchronised beating of the cloth.
The intention of this piece is to bring waulking songs into a new musical conversation, juxtaposing historic and present-day women’s labour relations by mirroring a musical performance of labour with a performance of musical labour. By mirroring the movements and physical arrangement of the waulking process (six pianists opposite each other as if they are at a table waulking the cloth), I hope to explore the musical, communal, and physical aspects of this tradition in order to understand how they may relate to contemporary female identity and labour relations.
Song One
Cha Tèid Mise, Hill è hò gù, Nochd dhan Bhuailidh. Recording from the Tobar an Dulchais/Kist o Riches archive. SSSA ref: SA1958.101.2. Contributor: Flora MacNeil, Reporter: James Ross.
Song Two
Recording from the Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Courtesy of the Association for Cultural Equity.
Song Three
Recording from the Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Courtesy of the Association for Cultural Equity.
Anna Michels
Ischico Velzel
Jia Ning Ng
Yura Zaiki
Alexia Eleftheriadou
Edyta Mydlowska
Elise Haller-Shannon is a composer, musician and educator based in Edinburgh. Her research is focused on using contemporary music as a tool to explore the scope for communicating female subjective experience. She is currently undertaking a PhD at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland supervised by Oliver Searle and Alistair MacDonald.
