Rona Wilkie
Impact of singing on post-famine Gaelic Scotland
Wednesday 18 February 2026 | 13:00
Seòmar Shomhairle, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig
This seminar will also be live-streamed. Register below and a Zoom link will be emailed to you on the day of the seminar.
Through a close examination of the therapeutic benefits of musical performance, this paper considers how Gaels rebuilt in the years after the famine. Music-making was a central component of the lived experience of Gaels in the nineteenth century.
Gaelic Scotland was a society which used song to record its history, to debate, to entertain and to accompany every aspect of work. Firstly, this paper studies the emotional content of these songs to understand the concerns and cries of the Gaelic Scotland in the immediate aftermath of the famine.
Secondly, it contextualises the corpus by considering their performance settings, and applies theory from the fields of musicology, psychology, and music therapy to the music culture to draw some inferences about the likely impact of community singing and musicking on the mental health of Gaels throughout the period.