Traditional song in the North Atlantic – NASC 2026
- 5 hours ago
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Traditional Music Development Manager Jordan Price Williams reports on his recent trip to the North Atlantic Song Convention in Edinburgh.
Amid the chaos and celebration of the France vs Scotland match of this year’s Six Nations, something rather special was taking place on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.
Myself, Jordan Price Williams, and musician and singer Angharad Jenkins, were supported to attend the fifth in person edition of NASC – the North Atlantic Song Convention - representing the Welsh song tradition.
NASC is a yearly gathering of singers from traditions across the North Atlantic. The only one of its kind, it was begun in 2020 through the joint efforts of Emma Björling and Brian Ó hEadhra with the focus of connecting traditional singers, initially as an online space to connect traditional singers during the pandemic. Since then, the convention has grown in both scale and ambition, and now takes place each year at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh.
The convention brings together singers of all backgrounds and levels of experience, alongside academics, organisers and cultural organisations. Over the course of a weekend they discuss traditions, share songs, exchange ideas and, above all, celebrate the joy of communal singing.
This year NASC brought together invited artists from Sweden, Ireland, England, the USA, Norway and Scotland, alongside invited guests from across Europe and the wider North Atlantic, including Angharad and myself representing Wales. These invited participants were joined by a whole raft of community singers – people who simply share a love of traditional song and the communal act of singing together.
The Scottish Storytelling Centre, home to TRACS (Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland), was our home once again this year. The building itself offers a light and welcoming shelter from the bustle of the Royal Mile, and helped nurture the particular atmosphere that makes NASC so special: one of generosity, openness and encouragement for every singer in the room.
The programme is built around a series of panels and workshops hosted by invited guests. These ranged widely in subject matter – from Norwegian mouth-music traditions to a panel exploring the contribution of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities to the song tradition of England. Interspersed between these sessions are the song circles, which are truly the heart of NASC.
In these circles, around sixty people gather in one large ring, each person offering a song from their own tradition. These moments feel like the very soul of the convention, the reason it exists. Voices from across the North Atlantic meeting in one space, revealing both the remarkable diversity and the deep common threads that run through these singing traditions.
The highlight of the weekend for me however, was Angeline Morrison’s keynote address: ‘The Sonorous Breath, Mythopoeic Singing and Enchantment for Decoloniality’. In this address Angeline’s focus was on her own experience as a Black English folk singer, the erasure of Black people from the narrative of English traditional song and the idea of ‘mythopoeic singing’ – the process of repopulating the shared imagined past with people we know were a part of it, but who have been intentionally ignored or erased. In this idea we can restore to the character of the ‘nut brown girl’ her racial identity, no longer narrowing her identity to a white girl with brown hair.
As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, this idea felt particularly powerful to me. It offers a way for those from many marginalised communities to reclaim a sense of inherited place within traditional culture; to recognise that these traditions belong to far more people than the narrow narratives we have been often given.
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of NASC is the opportunity it creates for meaningful connection between bearers of different song traditions. The entire weekend is underpinned by conversation, both formal and informal, where singers share their frustrations, challenges and hopes, while celebrating the rich plurality of traditional song.
For someone with a strong interest in the development of traditional music in Wales, NASC offered a valuable opportunity to learn from the work happening in other countries. In particular, it was striking to hear about the extensive digitisation of traditional music archives in Ireland and the Nordic countries. Singers of all ages there are deeply aware of the resources available to them online, and how these archives can support the study and revival of traditional music and song. By comparison, it feels clear that we in Wales still have work to do in this area.
Spaces like NASC also highlight how important it is for Wales to be present and visible internationally. Many participants had never heard the Welsh language before, nor encountered our song traditions. Although the event is based in Scotland, its focus is firmly North Atlantic, and many European traditions are strongly represented. There is still scope, however, for even broader participation from across the North Atlantic world, particularly from Indigenous and First Nations peoples of North America.
Within the European context, the Welsh song tradition clearly sits within a web of shared connections. It was a constant pleasure to discover echoes of our own practices in the traditions of other nations, especially those beyond the familiar contexts of the UK and Ireland.
One example came in the tralling or trallning traditions of mouth-music found in Norway and Sweden. Hearing these living traditions offered a glimpse of something once common in Wales but now largely lost, cerdd wefus – lip music: sung dance music used to accompany dancing when instruments were unavailable. Today it survives only in a handful of historic recordings and examples in song collections.
The exchanges between singers and traditions over the course of the weekend provided a great deal of inspiration for both Angharad and myself. We returned home with our heads full of songs and our calonnau wedi eu codi, our hearts lifted, by this remarkable gathering.
Many traditional song traditions developed in relative geographic isolation, shaped by communities whose contact with the wider world was limited. Today, however, we live in an era of unprecedented connectivity, where the music of the world sits in our pockets.
So why does it still matter to engage with our own unique cultural heritage?
For me, the answer lies precisely in that increasing connectedness. As we become more aware of the cultures and languages that exist across the world, many people feel a deeper urge to understand what lies beneath their own feet. This might be through recipes passed down through generations, through the songs our grandparents sang, or through any tradition that connects us to a particular place and community.
More and more people are seeking ways to reconnect with what came before them.
Our traditional arts, when shared in an inclusive and welcoming way, offer a powerful means of doing exactly that. They allow us not only to connect with our past, but also to find new meaning in these traditions today – holding them briefly in our care before passing them on to future generations.
Events like the North Atlantic Song Convention create a space for precisely this kind of exchange. They allow us to encounter our own heritage in dialogue with others, to celebrate both the differences and the common threads in how communities have used song and dance to lighten their lives and to express their grief.
In a world that often feels increasingly fractured, that shared human impulse, to sing together and to tell our stories, feels more necessary than ever.
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