A melodic figuration consisting of a stressed semiquaver followed by an unstressed dotted quaver, usually applied to melodies that fall or rise by step. It was current in European art music between 1680 and 1800, and in Scottish strathspeys from 1760 to the present. Its origins are obscure. In Italy it was regarded as a Lombard characteristic; in France it was called the manière lombarde. Quantz (Versuch, 1753) wrote: ‘This style began [in Italy] about 1722, but it seems to resemble Scottish music’. Burney, writing of Italian opera in London in 1748, deprecated the over-use of the ‘Scots catch or cutting short of the first of two notes of a melody’, blaming Cocchi, Perez and Jommelli for this fault. These comparisons imply that Scottish dance music was performed with Scotch snaps many years before the first printed strathspeys appeared in the 1760s. The art sonatas of the Scottish composers James Oswald (Airs for the Four Seasons, 1755) and John Reid (flute sonatas, 1762) show confluence of the Italian and Scottish traditions.
Purcell was using Scotch snaps long before Quantz's date of 1722. None appear in his earliest works, but they are well established in the coronation anthem My heart is inditing (1685). Purcell's source for the figure may have been the French Notes inégales or Scottish folksong: both French and Scottish music were in vogue in London in the 1680s. In his song Twas within a furlong of Edinborough town (1694) the figure has rustic overtones; elsewhere (e.g. in the recitative leading to ‘When I am laid in earth’, Dido and Aeneas, 1689) it is associated with elegance and passion. In Handel (e.g. Musette of Concerto Grosso op.6 no.6, 1739) and other British composers of the mid-18th century the figure has exclusively rustic or naive associations. The same is generally true of its appearances in the works of Mozart (several serenades and string quartets) and Beethoven (finale of the Serenade op.25).
After 1800 art music melodies became concerned with Romantic expressiveness at the expense of speech-rhythm; at this point composers lost interest in the Scotch snap. It continued, however, as one of the main figurations of Scottish dance music, and has occasionally been used for its Caledonian flavour by such later composers as Mackenzie, MacCunn and F.G. Scott. It is also a staple rhythm of present-day Scottish folksongs, giving melodies a flexibility that matches the irregular rhythms of Scots dialect.
DAVID JOHNSON