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 never really understood Flow State Theory, beyond knowing that it has something to do with being deeply immersed in what you’re doing, and achieving your best work as a result. (People will have written theses and books about it, but I’m afraid that’s the extent of my understanding of it.) It certainly means having a calm and single-minded focus, in an environment without distractions. Concentration was easy in St Andrews, which is why the Fellowship was such a delight.
Anyway, there I sat at home in my alcove yesterday afternoon, working away at my book revisions and getting on just fine – in the flow, you could say – when Someone sat down beside me and started watching this:-
My state of flow screeched to a halt. Static. To say I felt traumatised and misunderstood is hardly an overstatement. ’Surely you’re not so easily distracted?!’, scoffed the perpetrator. But when you’re trying to weave in links between chapters, and to strengthen a historical thread, you do need all your wits about you, and all your concentration on the task in hand.
I regret to say that, with all the other festive domesticity needing attention, I think my state of flow had diverted itself elsewhere. I wonder if I’ll find it again this side of Christmas? 
Because I am retiring from the Library next summer, this is the last Christmas I’ll be working full-time in the run-up to the Christmas holiday. And I have a book deadline. It’s self-inflicted – I was asked when I thought I could get the revisions done by. And I said …
The start of January.
Am I insane? December has always been the busiest month for us. Our Christmas is low-key, but we’re also church organists, and that brings its own challenges. I’ve had the Ketelbey Fellowship in St Andrews as well. The experience was fabulous, but I covered approximately 2700 miles in Scotland in 3 months, which all takes time.
There was only one solution: I tried to ignore Christmas for as long as I could. Did it wait for me? No. ‘You knew it was coming’, said the critic at my shoulder. ‘You should have been more organised.’ (Don’t get me started! Why should WOMEN be more organised? Particularly those who are working *and* keeping everything in the home afloat!) I bought the Christmas pudding and the Paxo stuffing ages ago, anyway!
My Christmas circular was written at the weekend, and most of my Christmas cards were sent. I ordered some presents online, and told myself there was plenty of time.
Mishaps come in Threes
Don’t you just love it when you try so hard to get everything right, and then a different thing goes wrong? I recorded my new carol for the two instrumentalists who had kindly agreed to play with me and the choir … and crashed my Finale software creating cornet parts in Bb. (It wasn’t the cornets’ fault that I accidentally left a file open when experience should have reminded me to close it properly – but it took a five hour system-restore to get the audio back …)
I’ve been taking odd bits of annual leave to get writing done (an alternative definition of ‘working at home’), which meant I could justify doing a supermarket shopping order at 9 am yesterday. I felt guilty, even though it was my time, because I knew I should be writing… and yes, I was too late to book a delivery slot. I have to go and collect it tomorrow evening. But the veg box came by van. It was on the doorstep early this morning, neatly draped in plastic to protect it from the rain. Phew!
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are the biggest chapters, and as I revised, I found myself adding in stuff that I’d discovered during the Fellowship. Chapter 4, which I most enjoyed (and was pleased with – always fatal) led me a merry dance. I splurged on more old teaching materials on eBay. The critic at my shoulder balefully watched small jiffy bags periodically being delivered. Only yesterday, I received a very expensive scan of a delightful new find. (Thankfully, it wasn’t in yet another jiffy bag.) Anyway, it resulted in a new paragraph. Just one, but it was worth it!
I revised Chapter 5 yesterday. Chapter 6 was just about done today – little has had to be done. It’s just a question of weaving in loose ends …
Second Mishap
But we had a service at church tonight, accompanied by Govan Salvation Army Band. It was time for something else to go wrong. This time, in my anxiety not to be late, I misread the clock and inadvertently fed the family an hour early. I’ll never live it down! However, I did get there in plenty of time, and all went well. My carol (about the women who must have been present at the Nativity) met with almost universal approval – well, from the people who were kind enough to comment, at any rate! 
And a Third
Finally, home again, can I catch a break? Well, no. I missed some items off the Sainsbury’s order. I’m twirling like a top …
Being a Fellow has been a sheer delight. I’ve met a lot of interesting people; heard interesting research papers; given a public paper (in the Laidlaw Music Centre) and a research paper for the Institute of Scottish Historical Research (ISHR); and availed myself of the invaluable resources of the University Library. As a result, I’ve been able to explore a couple of specific aspects of my research topic – resulting in facts and findings that I’ve incorporated into my book revisions. 
Desk cleared …
I said I would get on with monograph revisions, and I have done so – I’ve written a new Preface, and revised the Introduction and first four chapters. There are three more to go, but I’ve broken the back of it, because Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are the longest ones.
Those are tangible outputs. But for me personally, the Fellowship has also been an opportunity to embrace my research scholar identity a bit more, before I retire from the Whittaker Library in July 2024 and become solely a (part-time) researcher. The experience has in that sense given me a powerful sense of endorsement: that another insitution has embraced me as a scholar, and given me a chance to enjoy that status. For that I am very grateful indeed.
Farewell to St Katharine’s Lodge
Here for the final day, I’ve nipped into the Martyr’s Kirk Research Library to look at a couple more old classroom music texts. (I had a little argument with myself about the dates of a few titles advertised on the back of one particular text, but finally concluded that the date of a preface inside a book doesn’t mean that everything advertised on the back outside cover was available at that date. The copy in my hand could, after all, have been printed several years after the text itself came out, and the adverts might well have reflected the later date when the copy was printed, not the date when the text was published.)
I was looking for Scottish song texts, whether ‘folk songs’ or fin-de-siecle songs written for educational purposes. I must confess, I expected to find more than there actually were in these two sources. Still, with glee, I pounced upon ‘My heart’s in the Highlands’. 
Too soon. The compiler had set it to … a tune by Mozart! (Very curious, considering the patriotic attitudes of that particular compiler! Why ever did they think that was a good idea?)
I met a colleague and one of their friends for lunch, to discuss a research idea.
And (besides taking my library books back), I started a preliminary check of Chapter 4 of my book, which has grown a little during its revisions.
Remember, I was looking forward to receiving a pile of old Sol-Fa music the other day? Well, it proved as interesting as I expected. And in amongst the copies that I was expecting, were a couple of choir booklets for ‘The Glen’ concerts – which were annual open-air concerts on the Glennifer Braes in Paisley. I’ve written about these concerts, actually. (You’ll see, when my book comes out!)
As predicted, the programmes were mainly of Scottish songs, but the first song in 1915 was an Irish one – ‘Killarney’. I carefully read the score – I have no problem with the Sol-Fa note pitches, but I can’t have learned the rhythmic notation quite so well when we did it at school! And then, I wondered if I could find a recording of the song, to see if I’d got it right!
I found a YouTube recording of 1905 by Marie Narelle. I have not the first idea who this lady was, but it occurred to me that her singing style probably wasn’t a million miles from what the Paisley United Choirs would have considered a good rendition. It was a strange feeling, to be listening to something 118 years old, and the closest I could get to what was sung on the braes that afternoon.
Killarney Lake, sung by Marie Narelle (1905) Edison Gold Moulded Record 9081
But that’s not all. On a completely unrelated note, I remember reading about the fascination people had for echoes in the Georgian era, when I was researching the early 19th century Scottish song collector, Alexander Campbell. Alexander Campbell went to Fingal’s Cave with a bagpiper in his boat, just to hear the echo. And I read somewhere that in Ireland, people did a similar thing at Killarney Lake, where they’d take a few instrumentalists in the boat to listen to the echo – but sometimes the musicians would ask for more cash before they’d play a note!
Maybe it was my destiny to find that YouTube recording!
Soon, very soon, all will be revealed! It’s been quite a quiet year, as far as publications go. Very quiet. But I have had one article and two chapters waiting at their publishers, and this weekend will at least see the article published in History Scotland. Featured on the cover, too.
‘I was talking’, said a colleague, ‘to someone who found a stash of an elderly relative’s music ….’
Now, you’ve possibly picked up on my mixed feelings about donations. Grateful, curious, but also sometimes experiencing a sinking feeling when I realise that a recently donated bagful of music really can’t be added to the library stock. We welcome music if it’s historically important, or a serviceable copy of core repertoire. However, the bottom line is that we want our musicians to use up-to-date or at least respectable standard editions, and a lot of old music is neither historically important nor serviceable core repertoire.
So today, I cautiously asked what kind of music it was?
Sol-Fa.
Postcard from eBay – school and date unidentified!
How often have I sighed at that word? Our students don’t use old Sol-Fa notation. It fell out of use by the mid-1960s, and ‘modern’ or avant-garde classical music never made it into Sol-Fa; the system doesn’t lend itself to harmonically and rhythmically more adventurous music. But today was different, because my own research has meant my spending quite a bit of time finding out more about the use of Sol-Fa in elementary music education. And to cut a long story short, I am very much looking forward to seeing this music. I now know what I should be looking out for, from the perspective of ‘my’ Scottish music publishers. A few tantalising snaps of this donation have really whetted my scholarly appetite. What will I find? How will it augment what I already know?
I can’t wait!
If you find Granny’s old Sol-Fa music in the attic, do give it more than a passing glance. See what the music is. See who published it, and where. (Scotland? England? Somewhere else?) Was it for children? Adults? A male-voice or ladies’ choir? Church? A municipal choir? A school or college? Is there a date on it? (You’ll be lucky! But you never know.) Is it part of a series?
What at first sight looks humdrum, mundane, and unusable can sometimes prove to be a fascinating piece of a musical history jigsaw-puzzle. And strangely enough, you don’t actually have to sing from it, to learn more of that history – a close inspection tells so much.
I woke at 4 am again today. Could I get back to sleep? No. As I rode into town on the bus, I reflected that many of my wakeful thoughts had revolved around scholarly sharing. My mind seemed to bring out a series of issues, examining them one by one.
Tell me Everything
The breathless, ‘Tell me all you know’? Flattering, endearing, and with a piquant irony, considering one of our academic colleagues asked, more than two decades ago, ‘what does a librarian want with a PhD, anyway?’ Indeed, it was around that time that I overheard two graduate librarians opining that librarians don’t actually need degrees at all. Another academic told a colleague that they were ‘only a librarian.’ (Postscript. That librarian subsequently went on getting postgraduate qualifications too!)
So it’s nice that, as the postdoctoral librarian approaches retirement, she is acknowledged to be possessed of Useful Knowledge. Even if it’s scholarly knowledge, which now sits in books on the library shelves.
Quote (Unattributed)
Then my thoughts turned to the individuals whom I would characterise as academic vacuum cleaners, noting your pearls of wisdom and later quoting them, unattributed. I know it’s good to share, but it leaves a bitter taste when your sharing is taken advantage of, whether it’s scholarly research or professional assistance. On the other hand, if we acknowledge help given, it reflects well on both the sharer and the sharee!
The problem is that I’m a librarian AND a scholar. And as librarians, we’re accustomed to sharing. I sometimes find it hard to decide where a line has been crossed.
I Can’t. Please Can You …?
Similarly, we librarians share our expertise about referencing, but there’s perhaps a subtle difference between our, ‘this is how you reference’ advice, which I gladly and willingly do all the time – and, ‘can you sort my references?’ As a scholar, I don’t ghost-write articles for publication. Should I, as a librarian, ghost-format references? Would I be colluding in giving the impression that the author has done a superb job with all that technical detail?! Or do other librarians do this without a qualm? I just don’t know what’s the norm here.
This is Not a Question, But
There are also times when sharing is not so good, though. An interrupted talk where anecdotes are shared, uninvited, whilst you’re in mid-flow. Or ‘Questions’ afterwards, that are not questions so much as demonstrations of knowledge.
Worth a Try!
And best of all, requests for sharing that simply overstep the mark! Now you’re wondering what I mean, aren’t you?! Well, you won’t believe this one.
I was expecting a research question, in one particular email that I received a while ago. But that wasn’t what was being requested, on this occasion.
‘You have a sewing machine, don’t you? Can you show me how to sew curtains?’
[Meaning, ‘Can you sew them for me …?’]
Clker-Free-Vector Images from Pixabay
The Doctor doesn’t have time to sew other scholars’ curtains. Helpful, I am, but not a mug!
This is the very detailed and useful database compiled by Simon Fleming and Martin Perkins for their subscribers project. You can find out more about it on their extensive information pages.
I had early access to the database for my chapter on subscriptions to Scottish fiddle books. (Chapter 10: ‘Strathspeys, Reels, and Instrumental Airs: A National Product’, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. )
NB ‘The dataset is the intellectual copyright of Simon D. I. Fleming and Martin Perkins.’
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 