Our Mission
SPAE is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to supporting Scottish Traditional Arts and Artists and to providing educational opportunities in Scottish Traditional Arts for St. Louis area schools.
Our History
Scottish Partnership for Arts and Education (a 501c(3) not for profit) was incorporated April 17, 2006. Within the first six months we sponsored a fiddle workshop for the St. Louis Fiddle Ensemble and a Scots song workshop at Carr Lane Visual and Performing Arts Middle School in St. Louis City.
Our work continued in 2007 with Artists-in-Residence Workshops at area schools. These workshops are intensive sessions that take place over a week’s time and involve 20 hours of contact with students by the artists. Brian McNeill, retired Head of Scottish Music at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) leads the fiddle workshops. Ed Miller, Ph.D. in folklore, and Caroline Pugh are the leading artists of the Scots song workshops. As part of the fiddle workshop students are offered the opportunity to play for qualification on the Scottish Traditional Fiddle Exams certified by the RSAMD. In 2007 eight Parkway students qualified on Level 4 of these exams.
These workshops will be the “flagship” event in the SPAE annual schedule. Participating schools in 2007 were Parkway Central High School, McCluer North High School and The Imagine Academy. We also provided some short sessions to Central Visual and Performing Arts High School in St. Louis City and to Parkway Central Middle School orchestra students. On October 13, 2007 vocal and orchestra students from Parkway Central and McCluer North High Schools performed their culminating concert at the Auditorium in the J.C. Penney Building of the UM-St. Louis campus. In addition, SPAE will continue to feature the artists in concerts at Focal Point and house concerts throughout the area.
Each year, beginning in 2008, SPAE will present a Teacher Professional Development Workshop that will feature a scholar, musician, collector who is working on new or little-known research in the connections between Scottish traditional music and culture and the music and culture of the United States. The inspiration for these programs comes from the fact that so much of the music and culture of the United States is rooted in Scottish music and culture, yet, we are not taught this in most school programs. The 2008 workshop in April will be led by Gordon McCann, folk-life archivist from Springfield, Missouri. He will present H.K. Silvey and Justin David, fiddlers and will discuss the roots of Ozark Fiddle music. In 2009 SPAE will present Willie Ruff, Professor of Music at Yale University, who will present his documentary on Line Singing as it is found in Gaelic Psalm singing, African-American line singing and Appalachian and Muskogee Creek congregational hymn lining.
These workshops and concerts are funded partially by grants from the Missouri Arts Council, a State agency, the Regional Arts Commission, individual donors, and partnerships between SPAE and the E. Desmond Lee Fine Arts Education Collaborative, HEC-TV, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, the Scottish St. Andrew Society of Greater St. Louis and the Focal Point.
