Monday last week saw me flying to Paris, to talk about the Highland/Gaelic cultural side of Sir John Macgregor Murray. Most of the workshop papers were about Persian manuscripts he had either commissioned or collected, but the interesting common thread was his careful collecting of information about different aspects of life in India, whether religious, agrarian or otherwise. My paper was paired with a paper about his correspondence concerning the preservation of the Taj Mahal. You might not imagine that Highland culture had much in common with an Indian mausoleum, but in fact the papers sat together really well. They show an awareness of the importance of cultural heritage, and an appreciation of the need for fieldwork to document different aspects of that heritage.
If you follow this blog, then you’ll realise that I had done quite a bit of digging around to find out more about his Highland/Gaelic activities, since I previously only really knew of him in the context of his bringing Joseph Macdonald’s draft piping thesis back to Scotland, and assisting Alexander Campbell in devising an itinerary for his song-collecting expedition. I hadn’t intended to pursue his manuscripts etc any further after this week, but I suspect I may have to, since I can’t bear to think there could be something interesting lurking in some British or European archive or library that I haven’t unearthed yet. I haven’t yet found him writing ABOUT music other than reports of a few comments to the Highland Society of Scotland and their piping contestants – but what if there was something out there that I don’t know about? Oh, we can’t have that!
So, I’m very grateful to have been an invited speaker at the workshop, and to have been allowed an insight into the work people of other disciplines have been doing into the activities of this Highland chief, who is comparatively unknown today. Add to that a wonderful Italian evening meal at the end of the day, which had the added novelty of Japanese saki, brought by one of our session chairs from his home country.
(And I didn’t get myself lost on public transport, thanks to Google maps – remarkable for someone with absolutely no sense of direction. Not only that, but I found I was perfectly capable of buying beer and a bagel, coffee and a cake, en francais! I returned to Glasgow with my head held high … )
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 