Latest articles from John Purser

ESSAY Classic rock: The Scottish stones that have been making music for centuries

I’D best come clean from the start: this is Stone Age rock Music I’m on about. I was already 15 when Jailhouse Rock came out. That may seem a long time ago to most of you, but we’re headed way, way back beyond that – a good 4500 hundred years back, and when they talked about rock music in those days they meant real rocks – proper whopping great stones. It isn’t called the Stone

ESSAY Celebrating this neglected but hugely important Scottish composer

THAT Scotland is so central in the works of Ronald Center (1913-73) testifies to the truth that a county can be as big as a country or indeed a continent if the minds that inhabit it are open and aware. Here, John Purser introduces the work of this major Scottish composer, another unfairly neglected figure in the cultural life of our nation.

What we can learn from Gaelic rowing and waulking songs

THEY cancelled the Oxford versus Cambridge boat race this year. The one, you know, where a cox at the stern shouts “In-out-in-out” to a floating pencil-load of university students who respond energetically to this suggestive and unmusical exhortation. What’s wrong with them? Have they never heard of a rowing song? Have they no aesthetic interests whatsoever?

Why the work of James MacPherson was truly revolutionary

AFTER all the criticism thrown at James MacPherson from the 1760s to the present day, it’s a wonder the man’s work has any currency at all. Some say it’s in an 18th-century mannered style. It’s not. It was revolutionary. Find me anything remotely like it in English literature before MacPherson.