Thomas Erskine, Early of Kelly

Editor's Preface

Thomas Alexander Erskine, Lord Pittenweem, Viscount Fenton, Sixth Early of Kelly, was also colloquially known around his native Fife as "Fiddler Tam". His father had been a Jacobite laird, suffering imprisonment for the cause, but Thomas eschewed the family involvement with politics, becoming a classical composer as well as a dabbler in the traditional musical scene. However, unlike the majority of his C18th Scottish fellow-composers, who generally wrote in an Italianate Baroque style, Erskine adopted the more modern sound of the Germanic Classical style, travelling to the musical centre of Mannheim to study with Stamitz. Nonetheless, he shared with the majority of his upper-class compositional compatriots a non-professional status, despite the popularity of his work amongst those classes in the Edinburgh musical scene. According to the English music historian, Charles Burney:

The late Earl of Kelly, who was possessed of more musical science than any dilletanti with whom I was ever acquainted, and who, according to Pinto, before he travelled into Germany, could scarcely tune his fiddle, shut himself up in Mannheimwith the elder Stamitz, and studied composition, and practised the violin with such serious application that, at his return... there was no part of theoretical or practical music, in which he was not equally versed with the greatest professors of his time. Indeed, he had a strength of hand on the violin, and a genius for composition, with which few professors are gifted.[1]

Kelly's reputation, then, is that of a gentleman amateur of high musical accomplishment, much like that of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, who studied in Rome under Corelli in the previous generation before giving up composition for a more respectable career in politics (in the opposite camp to Erskine's father - Clerk was a willing signatory of the Treaty of Union of 1707!). But with Erskine, Scottish art music moves from the Baroque towards the Classical, from Italian influences towards German, from the sonata towards the symphony, and from the Enlightenment towards the C19th.

Steve Sweeney-Turner, Edinburgh, September 2000

[1] Charles Burney, A General History of Music (London: 1776-1789), Vol.4, p.677.

This edition © Ogmios Press 2000 (all rights reserved) Source text published by Thomas G. Stevenson, Edinburgh 1839.