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.
I received an invitation in connection with my next research project. It was irresistible in research terms – and I needed no excuse to be out of Testosterone Towers and away from the redecorating project.
Early rising
I found the east coast much windier and wetter city than the west. (Windproof brolly, my foot! I rocked the fashionable drowned rat look instead.) It was darkish when I arrived around 9.38, and is darkish now at 12.20.Â
I’m still entangled in ethical approval procedures, so this was an observational experience rather than ‘data gathering’. Worthwhile, nonetheless, and a reminder to myself that what I’m researching involves, and involved, real people in real time.
Yes, I did stop off in my favourite coffee shop on my way back to the station. (Wouldn’t you?)
And now I need to type up some ‘first impressions’, in the most general sense.
Parkinson’s Law was apparently a saying coined by Cyril Parkinson in 1955. But today, I’m watching time expand to fit the work available, rather than the other way round. In our case, the work we expected to take four or five days, began at the end of one week, ran through last week and is still ongoing halfway through this present week. And I’m the site manager – but only insofar as I’m chasing up workmen and trying to keep the residents of Testosterone Towers happy.
You mean we have to keep looking at THIS?
Aged people and neuro-divergent people really do struggle with chaos and uncertainty, and there are bucketloads of chaos and uncertainty round here. It makes them uncomfortable and on edge.
Fortunately, I work part-time. The rest of my time is being spent making futile attempts to keep everything else under control. Testosterone Towers’ residents have clean, dry, ironed clothes. They can see as much carpet in our lounge as the slow progress of the work elsewhere will permit. (I can’t put things back in their rightful places whilst there are still dustsheets, plentiful dust, and ongoing work all over the place.)
The residents are fed on time (because one of the residents is comforted by timetables); and the supermarket shopping is still happening to the usual plan. I’ve been using oven-ready meals.
What is harder for me is endeavouring not to annoy the most easily annoyed resident. As for keeping tabs on the project, my struggle is to keep a balance: enough for my efforts to be perceived as diligent, without actually annoying the working people I’d rather not offend!
I’ve booked a cleaning team for next Tuesday. But will they be able to come then? Watch this space.
I forgot to add .. the decorating delays are apparently our fault for having so much stuff. It’s my books and music in the dining room that the painter’s alluding to. (He has no idea about Himself’s collection, many of which were originally secretly delivered to his workplace so that I wouldn’t see them, and are now scattered in various parts of the house.)
Last November, one of the electricians also innocently asked why I had so many books. I answered lamely, ‘Well, so I could write these two.’ Which didn’t seem terribly convincing to me, but seemed to satisfy him!
Scholar
Former librarian
Organist
Writes books about music books …
I don’t feel guilty about the books, but I really must reduce the collection before my family have to clear the house once I’m gone! Some are going on eBay, others to the charity shop.
I’m working, but my mind is scattered and my physical surroundings are a nightmare. This is not the place to describe the unique hell of a redecorating project where everything is in boxes, piles or under dustcloths; floors are paint-and-plaster-dusty; deadlines are consistently missed; explanations are sketchy; and it emerges that the 9-5 by which I have structured the past 42 years is a concept entirely alien to our decorator. As is the concept of Monday-to-Friday. Hence the total absence of workers today.
Lounge? LIVING Room?
Throughout the pandemic, I managed the 9-5 quite effectively from my home-office alcove. Small, cramped, but entirely within my control. Take me out of my alcove into another room in which one can neither lounge nor live comfortably, and I am like a fish out of water. I need two small coffee tables – but the tables are glass – the mouse is ill-at-ease on them. And I’m accustomed to using a mouse rather than the trackpad. Makeshift arrangements make this just about workable. I have carved out a whole morning of peace and solitude, and by and large, it’s working.
Yes, it’s stressful. And I’m not alone – I live in Testosterone Towers, where habitual stress is bad enough, but habitual + domestic upheaval stress makes things extraordinarily difficult, and my caring responsibilities are challenged to the max. (Remember, I said that I’m annoying? I am reportedly becoming more annoying by the day, and I don’t seem able to help myself inadvertently doing it. It’s not that I don’t try to be good, either.)
Can I blog about research today? No, I don’t think I can. I’ve just ordered all the tech I need for my forthcoming oral history project – that felt like quite an achievement! – and I have just received a wee book that a kind Ancestry-user sent me about their ancestor, who happens to have been the brother of the professor I was researching in my post-Christmas idleness. The best thing I can do this morning is to read it from cover-to-cover, then get back to compiling a repertoire list that I started last night. (My need to occupy the lounge – ha! lounge?! – may be keeping Testosterone Towers from their daytime TV, but last night I found I could perform activities like searching the British Newspaper Archive quite effectively, whilst ignoring the TV entirely, happy in the knowledge that Testosterone Towers is not being inconvenienced at all.)
I saw an academic event on Eventbrite that I’d have liked to sign up to, even if it’s a non-working day. I dare not sign up to it. I can’t imagine the redecorating being finished by Tuesday.
My apologies for moaning. Maybe things will be better by this time next week!
Published online today, 12 January 2026, in the RMA (Royal Musical Association) Research Chronicle, by Cambridge University Press, on Open Access:-click here.
Writing this article was enormously fulfilling. I had encountered these ladies whilst researching my latest monograph, and I became convinced that they deserved profiling in their own right, and not merely as bit-parts in the larger picture occupied by their husbands, fathers and brothers.
The kernel of the abstract states that, ‘This article focuses on a group of Scottish women who did not make their names solely as art music composers or stellar performers, and for whom piano teaching was only part of their musical work. Four were related to the Scottish music publishers Mozart Allan, James Kerr, and the Logan brothers; the fifth published with Allan and Kerr, and also self-published.’
And all had fulfilling portfolio musical careers. Read on, and I’m sure you’ll agree!
Followers of this blog will recall that our Edwardian home was rewired at the end of November. ‘We’ don’t take kindly to upheaval, of which there was plenty, so I had to unpack and put back a lot of goods (including hundreds of books) afterwards – notwithstanding the need for remedial decorating – in order to make the place bearable for Christmas. Note the ‘We’ and the ‘I’.
Redecorate: Magnolia and White
Today, the remedial redecorating commences (not a DIY effort), so I’ve been repacking goods all over again. I’m the youngish, averagely fit one – and I’m already knackered! Even my FitBit agrees. My back has only just recovered from November/December; my fingers are sore; I’ve run out of empty boxes (how, I can’t imagine); and am almost out of floor on which to stack stuff. We have too much stuff.
I have done my employed research for the week. Does anyone else working from home recognise this kind of thing?
‘I thought you might have started cooking dinner by now?’
‘But I work until 5 …’
And I did work. Then I cooked. Then I packed and stacked, and continued stacking and packing this morning. The lounge looks like a library on the move – and is now so much smaller, in terms of cubic air volume, that it’s actually perceptibly warmer with the same heater settings.
But even women who feel as though they’ve been dragged kicking and screaming back to the 1970s, against their will, have their limits. The kitchen is being decorated first, so it’s fish and chips for tea. There will be no cooking here.
Research?
I’m only contemplating research to the extent of acquiring a decent recording device this weekend! I’m starting an exciting new research project soon, and as soon as the ethical approval process is complete, I’ll be raring to go. Monday will see the Magnolia and White project going on elsewhere in the house – hopefully my own working environment will by then be spick-and-span – with me sitting enjoying remote training to ensure that the new research project goes well.
Now, what colour shall I inject into my magnolia and white dining room to make it a joyful zone in which to work …?
Remembering my fruitful walk on 3 January 2023, I looked outside today – yes, the third of January again – saw the sun shining (athough the temperature was literally freezing out there), and decided to go on another research-and-exercise outing. What could possibly go wrong?
I’ve been exploring the story of a Victorian Glasgow music professor, so I headed for St George’s Cross by subway, to see a former church where he had once been organist. He had started his tenure in an earlier building, which was burned down in a fire, but a new one was built in a mere two years, so he must have resumed duties at that point. I already knew that, as with organist Maggie Thomson’s Paisley church, this Glasgow church had likewise now been converted into rather classy flats.
St George’s-in-the-Fields, Glasgow
Unperturbed, I headed next to the Mitchell Library, and up to the fourth floor where the old music card catalogue lives; it has never been digitized. This eminent individual certainly composed enough, but mostly in a light-music vein, and not published by any of Glasgow’s bigger music publishers. However, I was still surprised to discover that he is completely unrepresented in the card catalogue.
Ottoman Coffeehouse
To drown my sorrows, I headed next to a celebrated Turkish coffee shop in Berkeley Street. (The premises had once been a club for Glasgow musicians, and our hero had been included in a song-book that they sponsored; clearly I needed to have a coffee there in his honour.) Foiled again! There was a queue out to the pavement, just to get inside the cafe. Back I went to the Mitchell Library cafe, to get my coffee more quickly!
It was still bright and sunny outside, so my next port-of-call was India Street (on the opposite side of the M8, near Charing Cross station). This had been both of professional significance and latterly home to our hero, and although I knew modern developments had taken place, I still hoped that I might be able to walk the length of the street. Thwarted! Scottish Power sits squatly and solidly across the line of the road, and pedestrian access is blocked by ongoing building works before you even get to it.
I could have headed into the city centre to gaze at the Athenaeum, but I’ve passed it hundreds of times, and there are plenty of pictures on the web – it wouldn’t have felt like much of a discovery. Sighing – for the mere glimpse of a road sign at the wrong end of India Street had not exactly thrilled me – I headed for the bus home.
But fate had one more twist for me: whilst I was looking on the travel app to find out when the next bus was due …
… the next bus sailed past my stop.
I decided that maybe walking briskly to the Subway would be quicker than waiting for another bus. At least the Subway dates from the era when our hero was in his prime and doing well.
‘How did you get on?’, I was asked, when I got back home. I was forced to admit that, apart from St-George’s-in-the-Fields, I had really seen virtually nothing.
On the plus side, my FitBit is as happy as Larry. Finally, it said, she has realised that Christmas is over, and it’s time for the healthy living to resume!
On this day, 3 January 2023, I went in search of this late Victorian lady’s grave in a Paisley cemetery. She’d been a noted local celebrity, reputed to be the best accompanist in the town. Sadly, she lost her mind to grief after her mother’s death, and died in an asylum.
The gravestone was extravagantly impressive – even though the obelisk has sadly been taken down for health and safety reasons.
Nonetheless, her story is interesting and moving, and her connection with Paisley publisher Parlane ensured her a mention in my book.
I also wrote a more detailed biographical article for the Glasgow Society of Organists, and reproduced it in this blog.
Postscript. I went on another 3rd January expedition this afternoon. More of that another day!
So, 202 years ago today, William Motherwell received Smith’s letter with accompanying draft preface. He would attend to the Scotish Minstrel Preface, he assured Smith. But …
… it would take him a week to get over his Hogmanay celebrations.
However much had he celebrated? Too hungover to do the task, but capable of writing back immediately?
Musician Robert Archibald Smith edited six volumes of The Scotish Minstrel(yes, Scotish) between 1820-1824. It was a project coordinated by Lady Carolina Nairne and her committee of ladies.
On this day, 1 January 1824, Smith wrote to William Motherwell, who was supposed to be writing a preface for them. To speed things up, the ladies had written text that Motherwell was now asked to edit as he saw fit.
Motherwell did reply by return of post, but not with the edited preface. However, that’s a story for tomorrow!
Image of William Motherwell, from National Galleries of Scotland
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 