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.
Monday mornings are contracted research time. And research there will be. I have a couple of things to proofread, for a start, quite apart from picking up the threads after last week’s chaos.
The Thrills
Reader, if you like the thrill of the unexpected, and a break from normal routine – go for the total rewiring of an Edwardian house. The chasing round the landscape for TrashNothing and Facebook Marketplace free cardboard boxes. The filling and stacking of them. The hotel stay, the restaurant bills, and the, ‘Could you possibly come back a day later? Making sure your ceiling doesn’t come down is going to add a bit of time to the job’ kind of thrill.
There were three high points: we went to the cinema. Unheard of! I swam lengths for a solid hour in the hotel pool. And discovered that Terikyaki salmon fillets are my absolute favourite food. Other than that, it was a question of just getting through the experience of being away from home, and without my own car. In a room with one desk and one chair, but two occupants, I never felt less like trying to do any research, so it’s a good thing I wasn’t expected to.
Chaos
And then we returned home. The Edwardian house is now rewired (ceilings intact); spotted with plaster patches in walls and ceilings – meaning I’m currently getting redecorating quotes – and it was so dusty that we were grateful to have arranged a full, in-depth clean. And of course, everything needs unboxing. But not everything all at once, right now, if decorators are to start doing things to walls and ceilings! My books are back on shelves, though I don’t know for how long – still, they give the impression that everything is settling down again.
Unsettled
But worst of all, it seems that some of us are very, very unsettled at such major upheaval. And it feels as though I’m on the receiving end. I never want to hear about our discarded lampshades again! But I will. Repeatedly. (Frankly, I don’t CARE if our old dusty lampshades were discarded without our agreement. Now we have new ones.)
And … Breathe!
It will be with a great deal of relief that I open my work laptop tomorrow morning, take a deep breath, and try to think only about research for 3.5 solid hours!
A smell. (My nose is as finely-tuned as my ears are not.)
A melting fuse.
One thing led to another, and we’re getting the whole old house rewired this week. I’ve rearranged my part-time morning and taken my part-time day off. And I’m not going through to Edinburgh. With everything packed up in boxes during the upheaval, and ourselves displaced, I simply can’t get on. I hesitate even to tackle emails, in case I forget where I got to in the different aspects of my work. I can’t simultaneously get my head around the intricacies of research, which explains why I’m not blogging as much as usual.
It appears that the ‘semi’ part of my retirement is to be dedicated to caring for the old house. (Elderly houses have their own unique requirements and challenges, different to older humans. At least Himself doesn’t have dodgy ceilings and won’t need redecoration.)
In semi-retirement, it falls to me both to coordinate things – and sometimes repeat things. (I’m the only one with hearing aids. Although this is disputed, I find they work fine, as evidenced by the fact that I get to repeat what the electrician said!) And, particularly but not entirely, because a rewire is stressful for all concerned, I find myself on the receiving end of quite a few adverse comments. (I’m apparently frequently very annoying.)
I’ll be glad when this week is over. My kind and unfailingly courteous historical publishers await me!
It’s not as though I’m unaccustomed to what I’ve been doing in odd moments for the past few days. Over the years, I’ve opened dozens, indeed hundreds of old song books and other music publications, trying to read their prefaces, annotations and harmonic arrangements as though I were a contemporary musician rather than a 21st century musicologist. Looking at music educational materials is likewise not new to me.
Enter Dr Walford Davies and his The Pursuit of Music
He was the first music professor at the University of Aberystwyth, but he was also hugely popular in the 1920s-30s through his broadcasting work – fully exploiting the new technology of wireless and gramophone for educational purposes, and to share his love of music with the ordinary layman wishing to know more about all they could now listen to. This book was written after he’d mostly, but not entirely retired.
It wasn’t exactly what I expected! If I thought he would write about what made the Pastoral Symphony pastoral, or Die Moldau describe a river’s journey, I rapidly had to change my expectations.
His audience was apparently not just the average layperson, but also young people in their late teens, not long out of school. If the reader didn’t play the piano, they were urged to get a friend to play the examples for them. (Considering the book is over 400 pages, you can imagine how long they’d be – erm – captive!)
Dedication
Examples for your friendly pianist to play!
And this was aesthetics, 90 years ago. I struggled to get into the mindset of a layperson wanting to know what music (classical, in the main) was ‘about’, without knowing what a chord was, or realising that music occupies time more than space. Would I have benefited from that knowledge? Would being told in general terms what the harmonic series was, have helped me appreciate the movements of a string quartet? Or Holst’s The Planets?
It wasn’t about musical styles over the years. I didn’t read it cover to cover, but neither did it appear to explain musical form and structure as I would have expected.
Davies’ biographer, H. C. Colles, did comment that it was a mystifying book, and suffered from the fact that the author’s strengths were in friendly and persuasive spoken, not written communication.
I’ve only heard snatches of his spoken commentary, so I can’t really say. Apart from which, Colles made an observation about Davies’ written style. Colles was a contemporary authority who knew Davies personally – and he may have been picking his own words carefully, so as not to cause offence. My own disquiet is more a matter of content: was it what his avowed audience needed, to start ‘understanding music’?
I think I have been mystified enough.
I wonder what the Nelson editors made of this book by one of the great names of their age? They published it, and I think regarded him as a catch, but what did they actually think?!
And did the layperson, assuming they got through the 400+ pages, lay it down with a contented sigh, feeling that now they understood music?
It would be remiss of me not to point out that Routledge’s Black Friday sale makes the e-book version of my book very affordable! (Maybe someone might even buy you it for Christmas?).
Those preferring to read a hard copy might point out to their library that there’s no time like the present…
You can look as hard as you like, for as long as you like, with as much concentration and determination as you can muster from every inch, every fibre of your body … but not everything you want to find, will have survived to the present day, whether in archives or attics, boxes or basements.
Thus, the Thomas Nelson archive may have a handlist, but even the handlist (a second or third version of a handlist made by unknown hands at some point in the past) may document items that no longer exist. I struck lucky with my searches for correspondence about the four Nelson Scots Song Books (1948-1954). Of course, I still don’t know if there was further correspondence between the song book editors (by which I mean the compilers), as well as that between the compilers and Nelson’s in-house editors. But I found enough to be interesting, and to document the general story of their coming to fruition. It is possibly significant that they were published post-war, by the educational department editors, who had all been in Edinburgh for years by now.
However, for the past few weeks, I’ve been looking for correspondence between the author of a 1935 (ie, pre-war) book aimed at the general reader, and Nelson’s in-house editors. There was correspondence as early as 1932 – I know that much, but I can’t find it. Not only have I completely failed to find it, but we’ve discovered at least half-a-dozen boxes are missing. I bet you anything the missing correspondence is (was) in one or more of those missing boxes! Now, Nelson had offices in Edinburgh and London. The editorial staff for educational materials seemed to have been based in Edinburgh before the Second World War, whilst some – but not all – of the other editorial staff joined them from London’s Pater Noster Row at the start of the war. Thus, my 1935 book – not a school textbook – may have been edited from the London office, not in Edinburgh. Hold onto that knowledge.
Missing in Enemy Action?
When the London offices were bombed, the remaining London editorial staff, including the juvenile literature department, were found temporary office accomodation with another publisher. If my missing correspondence was lost either during a move to Edinburgh, or during the London raids, or in the general upheaval that followed, then they will never be found.
Ironically, when I was researching in the British Museum for my Masters degree, there was a particular Augustinian plainsong manuscript that I desperately needed to see – I’d travelled from Exeter to see it. But I filled in the paper slip (this was 1980 – that’s how you did it) – and got the slip back, marked ‘Missing in Enemy Action’. I rather think I have come up against the same problem again!
And the handlist? The original copy could even have been made by Nelson’s own staff, maybe in Edinburgh, but incorporating letters that had come up from London.
There remain four ‘temporary boxes’ at the end of the sequence, which may contain my prey. And a handful of other boxes that I can’t look at until the next time I’m in Edinburgh. But I’m preparing myself to accept the almost inevitable. In this particular instance,
Anyone who has spent any length of time on archival research will agree with me that there are days when nothing of interest really turns up! This week has been a case in point.
On the positive side (and this relates to research time beyond the archives), I used to have ONE spreadsheet listing all the significant names – and relevant dates – of the individuals I’ve encountered over the past year or so, be they Thomas Nelson editors, authors, or connected in some other capacity. I now have a second spreadsheet, charting the weird and wonderful departmental codes appearing on letters and memos to/from the Parkside (Edinburgh) and Pater Noster Row (London) offices; I’ve again listed names associated with those offices. This is likely to be of interest to me, but little interest to anyone else. Still, there’s a quiet satisfaction in having clarified who did what, where and when. Whilst I was working on that, I discovered that one of the earlier editors had previously been an HMI before joining Nelson’s. That was a gratifying discovery, even if he had been a geographer, and had nothing to do with publishing music education materials.
I’ve also continued reading a book about an individual who published a book with Nelson’s in 1935; I’ve borrowed another; and recommended a useful e-book to my home institution library. It hasn’t been a wasted week.
But, glancing through my archival notes and social media postings, there weren’t any significant discoveries. I had a long list of boxes to trawl, in my hunt for interesting correspondence with one particular author, but on Tuesday I realised I’d already seen all that was worth seeing in two boxes, whilst the third box contained ‘the editor regrets’ letters to would-be authors. (A whole boxful of dashed hopes for dozens of would-be authors, ninety-odd years before my own disappointment in an unproductive, rainy day.)
Dutifully Flicking through Pages (FOMO)
Back I went to Edinburgh yesterday, eagerly anticipating fresh discoveries. Did I find the sought-after correspondence? No. There was plenty to amuse, but I can’t say I learned anything more about music education publishing. For example, my curiosity was piqued by a book proposal for a collection of prayers. The editor wrote to a colleague that he didn’t think they wanted any prayers, but he would decide finally when he saw how the would-be author had prayed. I wish I knew what he decided!
I shook my head sorrowfully at the rather naive author who wrote to Nelson’s asking if they published a particular genre of material. I suppose in the 1930s, it was less easy to find out, but could they not have gone into a library or bookshop and ASKED? Again, there was no copy of a response.
Another book proposal that presumably foundered, was the one unappealingly entitled, ‘The Unamiable Child’. I don’t think they offered the author a contract. (More recently, wasn’t the Horrid Henry series so beloved by children and their parents, about precisely such a child? Maybe the earlier hopeful author was just ahead of their time.)
Queen Margaret University / Edinburgh College of Domestic Science
I did, however, come across some correspondence which might be of interest to a historian of domestic science education. It appears to be a long time since anyone seems to have published anything about one of QMU’s earlier forerunners, the Edinburgh College of Domestic Science. (Tom Begg wrote a book, The Excellent Women: The Origins and History of Queen Margaret College, in 1994.) But if you know anyone currently researching it, then I can advise them that 1933 saw a run of correspondence with Thomas Nelson about a book they were producing. I can let them know which folder to consult, if they’d like to follow this up!
Time for Tea
As I approached the end of my second day in the archives, one final memo made me smile. (Again, this had absolutely nothing to do with music – I was just dutifully flicking through pages to ensure I hadn’t missed anything.) A memo was sent to three of Thomas Nelson’s Edinburgh managers in July 1956. They were warned that they might have to entertain a couple of visitors from Melbourne whilst their colleague was away. There were a couple of points that they needed to be aware of. I didn’t read past the first of these!
‘It might be wise to point out that Mr C is a teetotaller’.
Let’s hope they remembered. Reading between the lines, ‘hospitality’ was clearly not always a cup of tea and a scone!
Music graduates and linguists across the UK (and beyond) will have been aghast to learn that the University of Nottingham is suspending its Music and Modern Languages degree courses. Allowing present students to complete their courses, that is, but not taking any new entrants.
Now, I’m not a Nottingham graduate – I’ve no connection with the University at all (apart from having declined a graduate library traineeship back in 1982, for reasons entirely unconnected with Nottingham University Library). Nonetheless, I know, after my own academic music-related career, that the department has an excellent name. I also know – since I have a BA (Hons), MA and PhD in Music – the value of a music degree.
The decision to suspend teaching music seems to me to be a very retrograde step. It is true that students can still be offered the chance to sing in choirs, play in orchestras and so on, but recreational music, at however high a level, is hardly the same as academic study. To suggest that ‘they can still make music’, puts me in mind of 1920s and 1930s pedagogy, where music was often considered a ‘practical’ subject like sewing, art or woodwork, rather than an academic discipline. Don’t get me wrong – I am certainly not denigrating these subjects. Indeed, if I’m not studying or making music, I can usually be found with a needle and thread. I ama creative individual. However, I wish to make the point that even ‘practical’ creative subjects can be studied in a scholarly sense.
So, since I’m now semi-retired, what can I do to help? Arguably, not a lot, but I can use my voice to make a bit more noise. Let me outline what I studied in my own music degrees, decades ago; and then I’ll share how the knowledge I gained has been put to use in my subsequent career. Nottingham’s Music Department homepage offers expertise across: musicology, performance, composition, technology, global music and society and community – a similar, but updated list of what I studied in Durham, Exeter and Glasgow.
My Own Undergraduate Music Experience
Score-reading
Harmony & counterpoint
Aural training
Music history (musicology)
Music analysis
Ethnomusicology (not global; I studied Javanese Gamelan music)
Electronic Music
Composition
Writing about music
Acoustics
My own Masters and PhD Music Journey
Music history (musicology)
Analysis
Cultural and social history
Writing about music
I studied librarianship after my first, unfinished PhD, spending my career as a music librarian, but I returned to research mid-career and thereafter combined librarianship and research. I didn’t become a teacher, which was one of the traditional destinations for music graduates; neither could I find a way into arts administration. So, music librarianship seemed a sensible choice. I worked briefly in the public library sector, and then in academic librarianship. But ask around, and you’ll find music graduates in all sorts of careers.
What did I gain from my music degrees? Well, as a music librarian with appropriate academic music qualifications, I was very much a subject specialist, and was appreciated as such. Simply being in a choir or student orchestra, without the academic study, wouldn’t have made me as knowledgeable.
The Value of Knowing Your Subject: the Evidence
Many thanks for all your efforts in finding all this music!
I showed the class the print-out from this CD record sleeve, which was very relevant
Thanks very much for your enlightening and entertaining contribution yesterday.
A very thorough and impressive piece of research
Thanks! HOW do you do it? I can hardly contain my exuberance. When I’m running the planet, you’ll get the money your worth and 3 extra vacation days. Promise!
Just wanted to thank you so v much for all your help yesterday. It was a great help to come in and find all the music ready
Thanks for your efforts – they are very much appreciated.
[they said] the Library was a great resource: [they had] come in to find four fairly obscure things and we had (and helped find!) all four.
Will mention your wonderful help in the programme notes! 🙂
This very useful, thank you!
And as an organist and choir director? I use my skills on a weekly basis: arranging music; transposing it; writing it; choral training; and planning/developing repertoire.
Lastly, as a music postdoctoral fellow? Enough said. I wouldn’t be researching at a postdoctoral level if I hadn’t studied it at university first. My research has often focused on the region where I live, but also on music in education and society.
It seems to me a crying shame to cut music degrees, denying students future opportunities, and (presumably) cutting staff with immeasurable expertise in their subject. The city of Nottingham, too, will lose out from the expertise that is lost to the region.
Modern languages are every bit as important. How can you have a university that doesn’t teach modern languages? You want translators? Teachers? People who can conduct business, or write books, or manuals, in a language other than English? Or careers where language graduates bring their own aptitudes? (A friend of mine went into computing, because their linguistic skills apparently made them eminently suitable for that path.) So you need modern language graduates!
My late music-teaching, comprehensive school head of modern languages father will be turning in his grave!
At Tuesday’s Women who Dared book launch, mention was made of the Wikipedia ‘Women in Red’ project, to which I once attempted to contribute. It’s a valuable project; there’s no denying far too few women are represented in Wikipedia.
I got nowhere with my own attempt, as I was the only person who had researched and written about ‘my’ Elizabeth Lambert (married name Williams), so I couldn’t provide the requisite references by respectable authors. She wasn’t ‘daring’, but she definitely made a worthwhile contribution to St Andrews University Library, in cataloguing their legal deposit music so borrowers knew what was available to borrow. (Her other private interests were interesting, too. She was an acknowledged expert in conchology.) I’m pleased to see she at least has a Wikidata entry now! Anyway, thwarted in my Wikipedia ambitions, I posted a biography on the present blog.
You might also find my article about St Andrews’ Copyright Collection of interest. Again, Miss Lambert gets several honorable mentions. And I found another posting that I’d forgotten all about, this time in 2021 for a University of Stirling research project. I might as well share details of these pieces, to get her a bit more exposure!
‘A Music Library for St Andrews: use of the University’s Copyright Music Collections, 1801-1849’, in Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society no.15 (2020), 13-33.
Earlier this year, IASH blogged about an exciting book that Ben Fletcher-Watson and Jo Shaw would soon be releasing. And yesterday, I attended its launch – the third book of the Dangerous Women project:-
The Art of Being Dangerous: Exploring Women and Danger through Creative Expression (Leuven University Press, 2021) edited by Jo Shaw and Ben Fletcher-Watson
Dangerous Women: fifty reflections on women, power and identity (Unbound, 2022) edited by Jo Shaw, Ben Fletcher-Watson and Abrisham Ahmadzadeh
Women Who Dared: From the Infamous to the Forgotten (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) edited by Ben Fletcher-Watson and Jo Shaw
It was a lovely book launch, and we had excellent speakers, who had all contributed to the book: Jo Shaw, Sara Sheridan, Ruth Boreham and Jo Spiller.
Women who Dared is an anthology of short biographies – all of them historical ‘women who dared’. I chatted with the speakers afterwards, and enjoyed hearing more about their work. There are so very many women of note, whom history has entirely forgotten about, so books like this are both very welcome, and very necessary.
Folks, I got distracted again tonight – beguiled by bamboo pipes, in fact. Let me explain!
Have you heard of Margaret James (1891-1978)? I wouldn’t be surprised if not, but believe me, she really started something in the 1920s. Someone gave the Gloucestershire school teacher a bamboo pipe from Sicily, and she realised this was something that kids could make at school. They weren’t expensive to make, either. (I read an observation that they were made from materials readily available in many homes.)** It apparently took off! Kids liked actually making an instrument then learning to play it. It was certainly another means of practical music-making. Crafting bamboo pipes briefly became the latest thing in classroom music, or so the literature would have us believe. Although unmentioned in the Board of Education’s Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers in 1927, either in the music or the handcrafts sections, by 1933 the idea was being recommended in Board of Education literature and by HMIs (His Majesty’s Inspectors). I do tend to wonder how many pipes were actually being made across the country – did the numbers match the rhetoric? Anyway, Margaret organised courses, wrote books and made at least one recording. Judging by the number of publications, there surely must have been sufficient interest. This is a quick, but not exhaustive, list of works Margaret had a hand in:-
The adjusted treble pipe : the rhyme & reason of it, how to make it (Pipers’ Guild, 1933)
Directions for making the bass pipe, with diagrams by N. Gibbs (1936)
Directions for making the extended treble and alto pipes (Cramer, 1942)
Exercises and airs for pipes (Curwen, 1941)
Folk dance tunes : for bamboo pipes / transposed by Margaret James (Novello, 1934)
How to make a bamboo pipe [Diagram] (Published for the Pipers’ Guild, ca.1933)
The Pipers’ Guild handbook / Margaret James; with drawings and a chapter on decoration / by Nora Gibbs. Cramer, [1932]
Supplement 1 to the above, [1932-5]
Indeed, Vaughan Williams even wrote a Suite for Pipes (Oxford University Press, 1947), a quartet which was certainly more difficult than the average school pupil could attempt. Here it is, albeit played by a recorder quartet:-
The bamboo pipes do sound sweet, pastoral, traditional – very ‘English’. (I say that in inverted commas, because the question of what sounds ‘English’ is a whole dissertation in itself. I’m not going there.) Which makes it all the more ironic that her original gifted pipe was Sicilian! Anyway, we can agree that their folksy sound is part of their appeal.
Margaret herself started the Pipers’ Guild, which lasts to this day. I did wonder if her bamboo pipe-making movement made it as far as Scotland – was it something Scottish teachers were also doing? Judging by newspaper evidence, the Guild did have a small presence up here, but perhaps not quite as enthusiastically as in England. I won’t hunt further.
Since my research interests are currently in a Scottish publisher producing educational music materials for a widespread market, then I thought maybe I should see if, or how often pipe-making got a passing mention – because their music editor/advisor was nothing if not on the ball. However, by 1939/40, it appears the humble (and ready-made!) recorder had gained supremacy. See this observation by one of Thomas Nelson’s authors:-
[…], who has done a lot of work on pipe playing in schools, composed pieces for them, and might be asked to write a first book on recorder playing, since they’re attracting more interest than pipes now. […] My own opinion is that there is already sufficient pipe music but not sufficient first stage recorder music.’
Similarly, Thomas Nelson’s four classroom books of My Music Guide (1953) mention recorders, but are silent on the question of pipes or pipe-making. Bamboo pipes evidently remained a minority interest, albeit for a long time.
** Glancing at my own garden canes, I doubt they’re wide enough to do anything with. I don’t know if our toolbox is equipped for such a project, anyway.
Picture of Pipers’ Guild Handbook sourced from eBay. (I didn’t buy it.)
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 