When Kathryn Tickell steps out on to the concert stage of the Sage Gateshead on Saturday (June 23), the audience will be applauding not only the world’s greatest exponent of a fiendishly difficult local instrument, but also the woman responsible for bringing the traditional music of the North East to a global audience.

The 40-year-old Northumbrian has been playing the Northumbrian smallpipes professionally for more than 20 years. She has worked with artists as varied as her fellow Tynesider Sting, playing on four of his albums, and Master of the Queen’s Music Sir Peter Maxwell Davies,whose specially composed chamberpiece, Kettletoft Inn, she premiered last year with the Northern Sinfonia orchestra.

The Northumbrian smallpipes are not to be confused with their more famous, and noisy, cousins from north of the border. They are elbow-powered, with end-stopped pipes that give them a peculiar ruefulness. Seen in repose on a table, with their eccentric keys and multiple drones protruding from a bag, they look like an improbable squid. Animated by the hands of a virtuoso such as Tickell or Alistair Anderson, they produce a sound that can be plangent and reflective, and then as open and windblown as its landscape of origin.

What is happening here is not another folk revival, but rather the rediscovery and opening up of a tradition that never looked like dying. One reason why the music has hung on in homes and pubs in the area is that Tyne and Wear, for all its size, is the most isolated conurbation in England.

It is also home to the country’s only degree course in traditional music. Started in 2001 at Newcastle University with Tickell and Anderson among its lecturers, it now has about 80 students, all of whom must have received a grade eight or equivalent on their primary instrument to gain admission. For the first half of the four-year course there are compulsory modules including composition and arrangement, and the historical and political contexts of the traditional canon. Given the tangled and often violent past of the border’s debatable lands, this is a rich area of research. In the playing of the best of the local musicians, it is not hard to detect an embattled tone finding its way into even the most exuberant pieces.

Tickell herself is historically tied to the area. She says this is as true emotionally as it is genetically; sometimes, playing the old airs, she has a sense of being inhabited by her own ancestry. “My grandparents were Robson, Hall, Armstrong and Dodd,” she explains. “Four of the biggest families – although I don’t mean in the sense of landed, just going back a long way. I was very much brought up with that, hearing people talk about the old links all the time. Before she was married, my grandmother was a Hall. ‘But not the false Halls,’ she would say. It was all about something that had happened hundreds of years ago. It’s there in The Ballad of Percy Reed, in which the Halls betray Percy to the Croziers of Liddesdale. My father used to delight in singing it to her as she got quite upset about it.”

Such stories remind you that the tradition is a deeply oral one, and pose the question of whether it can be taught in more formal and academic ways. “It’s an interesting problem,” Tickell agrees. “I’m quite ambivalent about it. You could say it’s contrary to the tradition, but then the old ways of learning aren’t there like they used to be. The communities have changed. You can hear the difference in the music they are playing. If you go into certain pubs in Newcastle, it’s absolutely heaving with traditional music. And many of the musicians are young and learning from from Scots or Irish or Swedish players. So although it’s true that the specific styles are being diluted, you now have a lot of young people and they are playing to a much higher standard than when I was their age.”

Wherever you stand in the debatable lands of oral versus formal, there’s no denying that the best of the tunes are meticulously made, with a sense of form and progression that is, in its own way, classical. In fact, Tickell says she is always heartened to hear her partner, AgustÍn Fernández, a Bolivian-born composer and lecturer at the university, affirm the structural soundness of the folk pieces.

“The context of traditional music is changing,” she says. “It used to be for dancing or listening to in houses, but now it is on the concert stage, being played to people from a completely different background.”

What will happen to the students once they have graduated? Some, such as the piper Paul Knox and the piano accordionist Shona Kipling, have no doubt that they want to play for a living. The case of one graduate, the guitarist Ian Stephenson, appears to prove Tickell’s faith in the course; she has recruited him for her own band.

Kathryn Tickell performs at the Sage Centre, Gateshead (www.thesagegateshead.com 0191-443 4661), Jun 23

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