The Beggar's Opera piece satirised Italian opera, which had become popular in London. According to "The New York Times": "Gay wrote the work more as an anti-opera than an opera, one of its attractions to its 18th-century London public being its lampooning of the Italian opera style and the English public's fascination with it." Instead of the grand music and themes of opera, the work uses familiar tunes and characters that were ordinary people. Some of the songs were by opera composers like Handel, but only the most popular of these were used. The audience could hum along with the music and identify
Music of Scotland in the eighteenth century is also evidence of adoption of the European-style fiddle. There were numerous publications of traditional tunes in the period, particularly when the oppression of secular music and dancing by the kirk began to ease between about 1715 and 1725. In the late eighteenth century the music of the Highland bagpipes began a revival, particularly the ceòl mór (the great music), which had developed for ceremonial purposes for the Gaelic aristocracy from the seventeenth century. The Italian style of classical music was probably first brought to Scotland by the cellist and composer Lorenzo Bocchi, who travelled to Scotland in the 1720s.