The first network steering group meeting took place a couple of weeks ago, and in the past week more networking has taken place. I’ve already blogged about Monday’s highly satisfactory meeting with retired University of Aberdeen music librarian Richard Turbet, in Norfolk.
Back in Glasgow, on Friday I attended a collaborators’ meeting for another new network, this time at the University of Glasgow: the Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded Romantic National Song Network. It is spearheaded by Principal Investigator Professor Kirsteen McCue and Postdoctoral Research Assistant Dr Brianna Robertson-Kirkland. My own doctoral research was about late 18th and 19th century Scottish song-collecting; I had examined collections both with and without accompaniments. The new network focuses largely on collections with accompaniments, and certainly – like my own research – on collections with music, aka, “songs with their airs”.
Although the focus of my research has changed slightly since my PhD, I can see that the work I did on the borrowing of “national song” collections from St Andrews University library could be pertinent in the context of the RNSN. I am also enthusiastic about the possibility of revisiting some of my favourite nineteenth century Scottish song collections!
Mrs Bertram’s Music Borrowing: Reading Between the Lines
Moving on to another research network, I recently wrote a blogpost for the EAERN (Eighteenth-century Arts Education Research Network) . “Mrs Bertram’s Music Borrowing” occupied quite a few evening hours when I stumbled across a reference to her in my perusal of the early nineteenth-century St Andrews University borrowing records, and I was very pleased to have the opportunity to write it up in to a coherent piece for EAERN. Yes, I’ve stretched a point – we’re talking about the long eighteenth-century here! Nonetheless, I think it will demonstrate the value of interrogating archival records in minute detail. After my many years spent cataloguing music materials for the Whittaker Library, my endurance levels for dealing with repetitive detail are exceptionally high! It’s very rewarding when hours of capturing data can be turned into a human story about someone who lived, breathed and – most importantly – borrowed music from the library! Do visit the EAERN website.
And lastly – some more networking news about the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall network. We now have a Facebook page:- https://www.facebook.com/ClaimedStatHall/ – and I’ve also set up a Jiscmail list, so at some stage this week I’ll be sharing details with people whom I think might be interested in joining in the discussion about this fascinating, but often overlooked body of music.
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 