(Scots Gael.; pronounced ‘porsht’; pl. puirt). A term for a short harp prelude of a particular character, composed and played in Scotland in the 16th and 17th centuries. It is a grave, formal genre not suggestive of either singing or dancing. Ports were mainly composed for aristocratic patrons, sometimes in honour of famous harpists. No notated Scottish harp music survives from the period, but ports were often transcribed at a slightly later date for lute and other instruments (e.g. Lady Margaret Wemyss’s Lutebook of c1645 contains Port Robart, believed to have been composed about 70 years earlier for Robert Stewart, Earl of Lennox). After 1700, ‘port’ lost its precise designation and came to mean simply an instrumental piece. A notable 18th-century example is Rory Dall’s Port, probably composed about 1755 by James Oswald, for violin and continuo.
The term puirt-a-beul means ‘tunes with the mouth’, and refers to a type of singing used in Scotland to accompany dancing when instruments are not available (see Scotland, §II, 5(ii)).
K. Sanger and A. Kinnaird: Tree of Strings (Temple, Lothian, 1992), 170–91
DAVID JOHNSON