Last year, colleague and researcher Brianna Robertson-Kirkland made a visit to Sydney Living Museums to explore their historical collection of bound nineteenth-century songs. A short video was made about her visit and what she discovered. It’s such a lovely video that I thought you’d appreciate watching it, so I’ll share the link here:-
Colonial Caledonian: Research Early Scottish Music at Sydney Living Museums March 2017
Private bound collections of songs are, of course, slightly different from the library-bound collections of legal deposit music, although they do share similarities: someone decided what to collate in each volume. But whereas a young lady might only have a few bound volumes of her personal repertoire, the libraries were dealing with a constant flow of scores registered at Stationers’ Hall, and had to make sense of them all, deciding what to include – or what to leave out. So – you could say the Sydney bound volumes are like, but not like! I’d still love to see them one day, though. Who knows …
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 