Last night, I thought I’d try to devise a mind-map to demonstrate the many directions the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall research has taken me – and could, indeed, take us further as a network. After twenty minutes spent manipulating triangles in a Word document, I realised the error of my ways. Never mind the mind-map – I could just list the topics. So, here goes:-
The whole corpus of legal deposit music in the late 18th and early 19th centuries:-
- Where it went
- How it got there
- What was retained
- Who was involved in its immediate and subsequent curation
- Whether it was used
- What about the materials not retained?
- The approach to this material in different institutions
- Women composing music
- Women performing music
- Women teaching music
- Music composed in response to war
- Music in cultural history – what was popular, when, with whom?
- Music for dance
- Music pedagogy prior to the mid-19th century
- Music for particular instruments (eg harp) or ensembles
- Musical arrangements, music re-purposed in some way (and copyright issues)
- National music – privileged in terms of retention?
- Religious music – I haven’t separated out any strands here yet
- Hymn books – published with and without music. Another strand I have yet to explore
- Documentation, cataloguing
- Big data (when more collections are catalogued online)
- Comparison of retention patterns between different libraries
- Digitisation
- Performance possibilities
- Finally, last and by no means least – The big picture. Even acknowledging the contribution of the European great masters to music of this era, have we underestimated the importance of contemporary British music? Some is good, admittedly some is bad, and some is indifferent – but much of it is significant in revealing cultural trends at the time. This, I believe, is the true importance of the Georgian legal deposit music corpus.
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 