Annotation:New Town of Edinburgh (1)

Back to New Town of Edinburgh (1)

---

NEW TOWN OF EDINBURGH [1]. Scottish, Reel and Strathspey. A Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABBCD. The tune was printed in Robert Bremner’s A Collection of Scots Reels and Country Dances (1769), a rather smallish collection of 28 tunes. The melody also appears in Joshua Campbell's A Collection of New Reels & Highland Strathspeys where it is set as a strathspey, and also in Campbell's A Collection of the Newest & best Reels and Minuets, set as a reel. Both volumes were printed in Glasgow about the year 1788. Campbell's collections were predated by a few years by London publishers Thomas Straight and Thomas Skillern, who printed it in their Two Hundred and Four Favourite Country Dances, vol. 1 (c. 1775).

The New Town of Edinburgh is, according to Wikipedia [1], "often considered to be a masterpiece of city planning...It was built in stages between 1765 and around 1850, and retains much of the original neo-classical and Georgian period architecture." A design competition was held in January 1766 to find a suitably modern layout for the new suburb, and was won by 26 year old James Craig.

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Joshua Campbell (A Collection of New Reels & Highland Strathspeys), Glasgow, 1789; p. 46. Straight and Skillern (Two Hundred and Four Favourite Country Dances, vol. 1), c. 1775; No. 115, p. 58.

Recorded sources:

---