Dr Karen McAulay explores the history of Scottish music collecting, publishing and national identity from the 18th to 20th centuries. Research Fellow at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, author of two Routledge monographs.
Stumped for a present for your Scottish music enthusiast? My new book is affordable as an e-book! (Just sayin’ …)
Why did Scottish music publishers produce so many songbooks and dance tunes? Who took Scottish music overseas to the diaspora? How did classical composers interact with local publishers?
I’ve discussed all this and more. Full details on the publisher’s page, link above.
It’s Monday – a semi-retirement day, and an appropriate day to bake the Christmas cake. Abandon any ideas of little old ladies cosily enveloped in warm, Christmassy smells as they briskly bake a time-honoured recipe.
Oh, I’ve researched this cake. ‘Himself’ was told he was pre-diabetic a while ago. More recently, it appeared this wasn’t quite right – he’s pre-pre-diabetic. (A term I’ve probably invented – you’re welcome!) Anyway, a huge, hugely calorific and sugar-laden Christmas cake didn’t sound very sensible. You can imagine the glee with which he contemplated a Christmas without treats.
One of my first career ideas, aged 13, was to be a nutritionist. That went by the board when I realised I’d need to take biology. Who’d have thought I’d end up devising pre-pre-diabetic Christmas cakes in semi-retirement!
I took to the internet for recipes. Oh, I found diabetic fruitcakes, all right. But I couldn’t see how something baked with carrot, banana, courgette and apple would keep as long as something with dried fruit. I reflected ruefully that Mrs Patmore, the fictional Downton Abbey’s cook, probably never saw such an apparently bizarre ingredient list! (Indeed, the real, fin de siècle Scots whom I’ve been researching might not even have had a Christmas cake – Scots Presbyterians made virtually nothing of Christmas, but had a right good knees-up at Hogmanay – New Year’s Eve.)
Back to the drawing board. More of the dried fruit with lower sugar content (marginally!). Cut out the treacle. Splenda instead of sugar. Rapeseed oil instead of butter. Wider tin so we get more, smaller portions …
I left the fresh fruit and veg in the fridge. Another time!
Working with two recipes, one of them using American cup measurements, posed its own problems. How much butter is a cupful, and how much oil replaces it? Google sorted that out. I measured water into various cups before realising I could use the measuring jug itself. Hey-ho.
Meanwhile Himself, almost (albeit reluctantly) resigned to a no-cake Christmas, has agreed fairly willingly to a new concept:-
Portion control.
(I was going to say, watch this space! But the scoundrel has just beetled off to demolish a KitKat …)
Our talented son, Scott McAulay, has just shared with us an image of his latest triumph – a foreword in another Routledge book. (He’s less than half my age, so who knows how much he’ll have published by the time he reaches my advanced years!)
So, this year, between us we’ve had a hand in three Routledge books, or four if you include the paperback edition of one I contributed to earlier:-
Scott McAulay (foreword), in Mike McEvoy, Street-by-Street Retrofit: A Future for Architecture (2024)
Karen E. McAulay, A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland’s Printed Music, 1880-1951 (2024)
Scott McAulay (chapter and a co-authored chapter) in The Pedagogies of Re-Use: The International School of Re-Construction (2024), ed. Duncan Baker-Brown, Graeme Brooker
Karen E. McAulay (chapter) in new paperback edition of Music by Subscription: Composers and their Networks in the British Music-Publishing Trade, 1676–1820 (2024, hardback 2022)
I’m a little bit obsessed by this aria. It’s one of the arias in the so-called ‘Mad Scene’ in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. It was the popular showpiece of a soprano whom I’m currently researching, and she performed it numerous times within just a few years, in the late 1920s. She never sang it in an operatic context, just in concerts, and she didn’t record it – but several women did. I wanted to know what it was like, and why she might have been drawn to it. I was keen to hear an earlier recording, to get chronologically closer to ‘my’ singer. This one goes too far the other way, dating from 1907 – it’s Luisa Tetrazzini on a Gramophone recording:-
The aria has been analysed and written about. There’s much about female madness and female agency. (The heroine has been deceived into marrying someone else, to keep her from marrying the man whom she wants to marry, and of course the ‘jilted’ lover is furious that she appears to have done the dirty on him. So, realising she’s been tricked, she murders her new, unwanted spouse. Then goes downstairs and tells the guests …)
It’s based on Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor. I got very excited about this, thinking that ‘my’ soprano must have been drawn to it for its Scottish content. However, so many people were singing it, that I am forced, pragmatically, to conclude that she probably just thought it was a great showpiece aria which would suit her high soprano coloratura voice. Moreover, when the opera was premiered in the UK in 1838, there were comments that it couldn’t be much less ‘Scottish’, with just a couple of characters in Scottish costume and nothing more to hint at the origin of the story.
Oh, all right! You’d like to hear it in a better recording than the 1907 one? No offence to Tetrazzini, it’s not her fault that recording techniques were quite primitive in 1907! Here you are, have a listen to Joan Sutherland in 1959. No-one would blame you if you played this several times over – I think it’s fantastic!
The question of glass harmonica or flute as obbligato instrument is another entirely. Donizetti’s glass harmonicist walked out, so he used a flautist – as in the Sutherland recording. There’s a very nice recording of Jessica Pratt singing it with glass harmonica, which is a longer version than in the Sutherland performance:-
I’m not going to delve any further into the history of the aria. It’s fascinating, but not really part of my research!
Now, what do I do with these observations? Ah, well, I have a piece of writing to do. I do tend to sweep the net wide when I’m researching a topic, because it helps me to see the central subject in context. Whether I start writing this side of Christmas is another question entirely. It may turn out to be the writing blitz that tends to overcome me somewhere between the fourth and twelfth days of Christmas!
Buja, Maureen, ‘Who’s the Maddest of them All? Lucia di Lammermoor’, Interlude, April 2nd, 2023. https://interlude.hk/whos-the-maddest-of-them-all-best-performances-donizetti-lucia-di-lammermoor/
Metropolitan Opera, ‘Madly in love’
https://www.metopera.org/discover/education/educator-guides/lucia-di-lammermoor/madly-in-love/
Parker, Roger, ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’s mad tragedy in Donizetti’s mad life’, The Guardian, Jan 28th, 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/jan/28/lucia-di-lammermoor-donizetti
Smart, Mary Ann, ‘The Silencing of Lucia’, Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Jul., 1992), pp. 119-141
Main image from Pixabay
I attended a meeting about grant applications, today. There was lots of good advice, including the development of a five-year career plan. A very sound suggestion. However, most early career researchers are really at the start of their research career, whilst I? I’ve done less research in my research career than a full-time researcher – obviously, as I got my PhD aged 51, and since then I’ve mostly been a 0.3 researcher – and my research development has thus been spread over a longer period. Similarly, I do have some teaching experience, but not an enormous amount. So …
In planning the next five years, young researchers have different parameters (making a good start, developing their strengths, possibly more able to relocate geographically, possibly without family responsibilities), whilst old ones are trusting they’ll still be fit and well in five years’ time; might not be able to relocate; and might well have family or caring responsibilities. (Should the plan also have the equivalent of a runaway truck ramp or escape lane, in case personal circumstances change unexpectedly?!)
Five years at the start of a working life are different from five years somewhere nearer the end. I want to go on forever! Realistically, that’s impossible. (I might live another three decades, but who can say if I’ll still be researching at 96?!)
However, I read a posting the other day about the use of metaphors in health care, and I can see a parallel for scholars here; they talk about a journey with an illness, whilst we use metaphor to talk about our research journey.
To continue with the journeying, travelling metaphor: I climbed the librarianship hill as far as I could get. I didn’t reach the top, but I made reasonable progress. Looking around, I saw other hills I’d like to climb. You could say I’ve used the state retirement age as an opportunity to come down from the library hill, so I can spend more time climbing elsewhere.
I’d like to write another book. But I’ve only just published my second; I need at least three or four more years to do enough research into a new topic to merit a book. And I haven’t decided what exactly it will be about yet, though this might well become apparent in the next year or so.
Despite all this, a five-year research plan does seem desirable. I must apply myself to devising it!
‘How’s semi-retirement?’, you ask.
The truth of the matter is, I’ve had five months of it, and I still haven’t got the hang of it! What have I done? Revised my second book, and had a book-launch when it was published. Written and submitted a very long article. Done some of the research for another, which won’t be quite as long. Mulled over yet another idea, still to be fleshed out. Peer-reviewed a research proposal. Done some maternity-cover teaching on campus. Given a research exchange talk at RCS, and been a keynote speaker in Birmingham. Visited my aged parent, twice.
And I’m now gearing-up to my IASH Heritage Collections fellowship at the University of Edinburgh from January to June next year.
I haven’t yet had a suitably semi-retirement-related holiday, although I’m sure I should have done something to mark my change in status! The truth of the matter is, I retired from librarianship, but I’ve no intention of retiring from research for a good long while yet. I got a new contract as research fellow, two days after I retired from the library. (I did have ONE day of not being employed!) So, I don’t feel retired, except when I wake up and think, Oh good, I don’t have to dash out for a bus at 7.45 am today! I seem to be constitutionally incapable of restricting my research activities to 1.5 days a week – it’s what I like to do.
If one thing is certain, I have watched not a minute more daytime TV than the lunch-hour watching that has been our custom since the pandemic forced me to work from home. And I’m getting better at not checking my work emails…
‘She’s living her best life’, as my former line-manager observed at the awarding of my honorary RCS fellowship.
Perhaps I’ll have a holiday in 2025 …
I’m honoured to have been awarded the Mervyn Heard Award by the Magic Lantern Society (UK) in recognition of my research into Scottish publishers Bayley and Ferguson’s Services of Song for magic lantern shows in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Their booklet, Wee Davie, containing a script for a reader, and suitably religious songs, was possibly the first thing they published – or certainly one of the first.
The Mervyn Heard Award is awarded for any written work, archival research or smaller-scale digitisation project.
I’ve talked about these service books in research lectures as honorary Ketelbey Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews in 2023, and at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Exchange Talks series. The discovery of these wee books certainly inspired me to delve deeper into the social history around amateur music-making, other entertainments and educational or religious events, so I owe a debt to the original author Revd. Norman Macleod and his moralistic story, Wee Davie, for starting me off on this particular research strand.
In due course, I’ll be writing more about this topic, most particularly for the Magic Lantern Society itself.
It was foggy all day, I’ll always remember that. The mist still swirling outside, I went to bed and went over in my mind all the places I’d visited.
We met in a small cafe – always a good idea to start off with coffee! It was a short walk to our first stop, the place where much of the city’s music was printed.
A minibus took us to our next port of call – by the river – and then across the river to see where one of our publishers got married. (This raised a few eyebrows, but in fairness, it might have looked different 150 years ago!) From there – to see where he traded from, and then (wishing it was open) past a museum and on to the premises of another local publisher. Again, faded glories, I’m afraid. But it would have been very handy for the shipping!
Our new businessmen would have used trams to get into the city, until the subway started in the 1890s. We took the subway – no trams nowadays! It was time to visit a couple more publishers’ premises in the city centre, not to mention the former Athenaeum. Time for the minibus – there were a couple of former churches to visit (one still standing, another very definitely not); another educational institution, and the street where three music publishers finally found themselves merged into one single entity.
Where next? The Mitchell Library, with all its historical collections, or a nearby cafe? Or indeed, the library cafe? What would everyone prefer? We talked about what we’d seen, and whether it had changed our opinions of all that cheap music, so popular with earlier generations.
I dozed, until finally my busy mind gave in to sleep.
It’s time to confess – the whole story is simply a figment of my imagination – I was dreaming. It never happened – but I’ve thought about it so much that maybe it might have some mileage after all. Would you be interested in such a tour? There are few places we could could actually go into, but I am convinced that a tour of key places would bring the history alive in a way that books can only hint at. It would certainly tie in brilliantly with my second, recently published book. I’m going to think about it a bit more imaginatively … watch this space!
Never let it be said that I’ve ‘only’ published a monograph this year!
Now, in the Folk Music Journal Vol.12 no.5, pp.127-9, my review of a new edition of the Tolmie Collection, a significant Gaelic song anthology.
Kenna Campbell and Ainsley Hamill (eds). Stornoway: Acair Books, 2023. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index of titles in English and Gaelic. ISBN: 978-1-78907-109-2 (hbk). 978-1-78907-142-9 (spiral-bound). ww.acairbooks.com
I begin my review:-
Frances Tolmie (1840–1926) grew up and spent her final years on the Isle of Skye. She lived briefly in Edinburgh as a governess, later as a lady’s companion in the Lake District, and for a while in Oban on the Scottish mainland. Her collection preserved a rapidly dying repertoire of Skye women’s communal songs …
(Not yet readable online unless you’re a member of EFDSS, or your library has a subscription to the journal. It will appear in JSTOR in a couple of years from now.)
Facebook has just reminded me it’s 15 years since my doctoral graduation. Heavens, where did the time go?
Summer 2009 was quite a summer! I submitted my thesis. He had two knee replacements, three months apart. He walked comfortably at my graduation ceremony.
Since then? Too much to enumerate. The thesis became a book. I contributed chapters to others’ essay collections. I published another book last month.
Someone asked that, before I even started. I think I’ve demonstrated why.
Someone asked that, too. It seemed a good move at the time, and I have recently been doing a little teaching cover, proving that this wasn’t such a bad idea, either.
If one thing is certain, I wouldn’t now have a semi-retired existence as a postdoctoral research fellow, if I hadn’t found three old flute manuscripts in a cupboard that was being dismantled, a couple of years before I started the PhD.
No regrets.
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 