The first written-out Northumbrian variations are from around 1800. In Scottish music they go back nearly 100 years before that, and it's clear that bagpipers all over Britain had fixed sets of variations that might as well have been written down back in the 17th century. The piobaireachd variation form is as explicit and fixed as any written notation and goes back to about 1500 - it was based on European forms that you can trace on paper back about 1300. The reason Northumbria looks different is that it was one of the few places where variations could still get an audience - aristos like the Armstrongs and Percys could employ a piper to perform big listening pieces, and variation form is an obvious way to construct those out of traditional materials. The fiddlers to the Scottish aristocracy did the same. Further south, the aristocracy could afford the larger forces of full-on art music, and that had more prestige, so the link between folk and art music idioms was mostly cut. I'm sure somebody at the college in Gateshead is doing fusions of jazz and Northumbrian variation-mongering but I haven't heard anything like that. Northumbria never seemed to pick up on jazz the way Scottish trad did in the mid-20th century (Willie Johnson's Shetland guitar style from the radio station in Schenectady, Angus Fitchet's strathspeys with bal-musette chording).
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