Dr Edward Emanuel Harper has a lot to answer for. As I mentioned in my podcast, I was awaiting a book of American organ/ harmonium pieces which included a number of short pieces by Harper. It’s quite a small book, and arrived from California – in a huge box – yesterday. As I suspected, they’re short, easy pieces. Amongst the 51 pieces are thirteen pieces by Harper, along with pieces by eight other composers, some of whom would still have been living, and some dead. (Nine pieces were by an American woman of English parentage. That’s not part of today’s story – but kudos to Bayley & Ferguson for including her. All the other composers were men.)
However, even if the pieces in this book – the second book in a series of six – are predictably straightforward, I shall still play them over, just out of curiosity. Notwithstanding the simplicity of the contents, the book itself had more surprises for me. And I fell down a rabbit-hole, as I investigated.
Here we have a book from a Glasgow/London publisher, including pieces by Harper (now in Canada) and the Anglo-American lady, and a German composer who had died some sixty-odd years earlier. It was first published a hundred years ago. Obviously, I’ve no idea whether it was a new copy, ie still in print, when the late owner apparently acquired it in the 1950s (bear with me, I can explain how I think it was then), or if they were given it by someone else, and subsequently wrote their own name on it. The book was ‘printed in Great Britain’ (so I guess that probably means it was NOT printed by Aird and Coghill in Glasgow) – but it was sold to a previous owner, by a firm in Adelaide, Australia – Cawthornes Ltd. How, I wondered, had the book got from Adelaide to California?
There are Doctors and Doctors …
The late owner’s name is on my copy. It was a distinctive name – so I looked it up, out of curiosity. In deference to their memory, I won’t name them, but the details proved really quite easy to find out, so it feels okay to share the barest outline of my discoveries.
The book had clearly belonged to someone in Adelaide. I can pinpoint the 1950s because the Australian owner gained their undergraduate, and then Masters degrees in Adelaide, having travelled thousands of miles across Australia to get there. They married there – indeed, their father conducted the ceremony. (This versatile pastor had also played the organ on an evangelical mission to a first nation community in his younger days.)
The newly-weds moved from Adelaide to California to further the career of the named individual on my American organ compilation – who became an eminent scientist. I do know, from the eBay vendor, that the book was one of a number of church-related music publications being disposed of. Although I don’t know for certain if the owner of the book was an organist, their name was on it. I like to think they played it. Does it matter? No, not really!
Of course, the singular, distinctive life-history of one single copy has no bearing whatsoever upon Edward Emanuel Harper, who was in his sixties in Canada by the time the book was published, and was long deceased by the time the book’s owner was a student in Adelaide.
The whole story is just a series of unrelated happenings during the course of its life. It just amuses me to think that an Anglo-Scottish book including short organ pieces by our second Glasgow Athenaeum School of Music Principal – a Doctor of Music – ended up being sold to an Australian scientist at the start of their career, remaining in their music collection as they gained their PhD in one American state and grew in stature and reputation in another – they were not the kind of medical doctor that we think of when we talk of hospital doctors, but certainly working very closely alongside them . I wonder if and when they last played this music?
Home Again
It would have left Britain between 1926 and 1958, went to Australia and then the USA, but now, finally, it is back in Glasgow, finally flown back to the home town of the former Bayley & Ferguson, where it’s being pored over by another musical doctor – this time a PhD rather than a Mus.Doc.
That’s quite a life-story for a humble little book of Church Voluntaries!
Image by Lumina Obscura from Pixabay
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 