It has enjoyed somewhat of a renaissance in recent years thanks to films including the Disney blockbuster Brave, which featured the ethereal vocals of Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis.
The Edinburgh Tattoo represents one of the most potent symbols of Scotland's cultural identity, attracting hundreds of thousands of tourists each year.
However, according to an academic, Scotland is a "hostile" environment for traditional musicians despite the "great sense of cultural pride" it elicits.
Simon McKerrell, Professor of Media and Music at Glasgow Caledonian University, said there was not enough formal support for musicians compared to countries like Ireland, where freelancers have access to generous tax allowances.
He led a petition, supported by tens of thousands of people but ultimately unsuccessful in its aim to persuade BBC Scotland to reverse a decision to axe traditional, jazz and classical radio programmes.
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He said pipe bands had "lost a whole generation" of children during the pandemic as tuition and recruitment ground to a halt.
Many musicians who lost commissions or jobs had not regained this income stream as festivals or clubs folded.
"There's a great sense of cultural pride in traditional music in Scotland," said Prof McKerrell.
"It's become very fashionable over the last 20 or 30 years [but] mostly none of that has had the hand of the state in it.
"It's been almost all groundswell from the bottom up.
"If you go to France they spend about 2% of GDP on the sector.
"We are spending in Scotland a tenth of what they spend in most countries on culture and the arts.
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"The really worrying thing is that if you speak to [government] ministers, which I have done over the years, they think we spend quite a lot of money on the arts.
"It's totally ridiculous.
"If you go to Ireland and you are a professional harp player you will earn income tax-free up to 40,000 Euros."
SNP ministers have been criticised for failing to adequately invest in arts and culture. Angus Robertson, the culture secretary, defended this year the government’s decision to cut the national arts agency’s budget by more than 10 per cent.
Prof McKerrell added: "One of the problems we have got is that the BBC has been acting as a proxy on cultural spending.
"BBC Scotland cut the budgets for all the live music broadcasts in Scotland by several hundred thousand pounds.
"There has been a reduction in real terms in spend on traditional music over the last few years and that's happened through local authorities and through the BBC and Creative Scotland.
"We have a hostile environment in Scotland."
Prof McKerrell was commissioned by Creative Scotland, the arms-length government body which oversees arts and culture, to carry out research looking at the impact of the pandemic on the traditional arts.
It found there has been a sharp drop in the number of people participating on a weekly basis, from 2019 to 2022, beyond Covid.
"The most alarming aspect has been the effect on young peoples' access," said Prof McKerrall, who played in the Strathblane Pipe Band.
"That to me is the biggest concern because there is a whole conflagration of things that has affected childrens' access to tuition, not just music education but even just spaces in their community where they can go for free.
"During the pandemic, schools withdrew peripatetic tuition and that in many cases has not returned, which is really alarming.
"They don't have the money to bring those things back in.
"Your local pipe band has lost a whole generation of kids.
"What normally happens is that they go into schools to recruit - what has generally happened is that they have not been invited back in.
"Because it's not a formal part of the curriculum, you've got to have very active school teachers to get things moving.
"In many respects it's a postcode lottery for music tuition."
He suggested councils should consider using tourist taxes to fund classes.
He said: "There are so many things we could be doing. In Argyll, there is a great project where they use the windfarm taxes to fund music lessons for the kids."
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His research found that around 75% of freelancers did not receive any financial assistance from the government during Covid.
A survey, carried out in 2019 and also funded by Creative Scotland, showed musicians rely heavily on employment beyond the traditional music sector in order to generate a living wage.
Just over half (51%) had additional employment, a quarter have two additional jobs and one in nine work three or more jobs.
Almost a fifth of respondents reported earning less than £10,000 as their maximum income for music activities.
Prof McKerrell said his own research had shown that "most people don't make money" from traditional music.
"But what I found talking to people, let's say you are earning £5000, that £5000 is really, really important and in 18% of cases it had been reduced or complete disappeared.
"In terms of the professional sector, small amounts of money have a really outsize impact on that sector.
"It's a hundred quid here or there for a workshop or a gig at a festival. Maybe the festival or club has folded."
He said another issue was that traditional musicians in Scotland are "statistically invisible".
"Because they are self-employed you don't get any aggregate statistics about them from HMRC," he said.
"They have very little lobbying power because we don't see them statistically."
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