How the songs of Robert Burns originally sounded

The songs of Robert Burns have been stripped back to how they originally sounded, and while some will like them others may not find them easy listening. Burns' songs are normally associated with a fiddle, guitar and accordion and often played in the back room of a pub, but the University of Glasgow has recorded them how they were originally intended by Robert Burns himself, and they sound very different. Burns' audience when he wrote his collections during the late 18th and early 19th centuries was a growing affluent middle class who often collected his work as a show of status. They were in book form and often sat on shelves never played, but for those who did perform Burns' "new" music it sounded very different to how many of his songs are performed today. Burns' songs were tailored for the parlours of the middle classes, performed on Baroque harpsichords, cellos and violas. Professor Kirsteen McCue, who led the research for the University's Centre for Robert Burns Studies, explains: "People don't really know what Burns' songs sounded like because the songs have been taken out of context and have become what they are today which is a bit of everything. So it's all about the context of the time.