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.
Today, I shared three of my own blogposts (on this site) via the Whittaker Library blog. We need to know what Chat GPT can do; where its limitations are; and what the ethical problems are around using it.
If something doesn’t feel right, we need to ask ourselves why. I never want to pass something off as my own work if it doesn’t represent my intellectual effort.
I had never 100% identified an editor of a particular songbook, despite extensive efforts. I had his name and an address, not much more. I decided to have a final attempt at tracing him, and planned a wee trip to the archives. SURELY I’d find him there!
And I did. But still nothing to pin him down. It was a very common name.
I did rule out someone else’s theory. Their chap died when mine was clearly alive and active.
Anyway, I came home from the archives to have another go at tracking him down.
I may now also have ruled out one of my alternative theories, sadly. There was a likely tenor soloist, with the right name, consistently linked with a Fifeshire village. For a year or more, it has been my best guess. A singer might well involve himself in collecting songs.
Last night brought success in tracing the singer, but not success in  proving him to be my editor! A common name and the right kind of occupation are insufficient to go on, especially when singing might not have been his day-job. I found a daughter’s wedding. Right village, right name, deceased father.
I found her parents. Wedding, census, Dad’s funeral all at the same village address. Parents both apparently sang in the same concert in the right town, as young adults, some years before they married. Looking good, I’d say. I even found the singer performing with the man who collaborated with the editor on an earlier publication.
But there are two problems.
Does a Fife fisherman – in 1910, 1911, 1921 and a retired fisherman when he died – edit a songbook jointly with a famous composer? That may be a somewhat subjective question.
But the bottom line is that I can’t connect the village fisherman, with the man at the Edinburgh address.
Hmm!
Not to worry. I have another line of enquiry, as it happens … another place, another guy with the same common name…
I submitted the book on time at the end of July. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the only thing I was supposed to complete by the end of the month. There was also my social media input before the Congress, which had a very fixed deadline indeed.
And that meant I absolutely could not complete the third thing on time. However, today I submitted the peer-review that I should also have submitted at the end of July. HOORAY!!
Anyway, when I’m not tied up being a librarian, I can now concentrate on a chapter I’ve promised to write, and two new lectures in my capacity as Ketelbey Fellow. After the hard slog with the book and the anxiety that the peer-review caused me (It was not only challenging, but I hate missing deadlines) – having these three things to do feels positively invigorating.
One of my favourite Mozart Allan songbooks has an intriguing history. I have contributed a chapter discussing it, in a print and tourism collection, and I’ve dealt with it in slightly less depth in my own monograph. (Neither is published yet, but hopefully the essay collection will appear later this year.)
The songbook has a photo of a Glasgow entertainer, and the words (so I thought) of his recent song – but not the music. That, it says, is available from Mozart Allan. I have been itching to see this entertainer’s song, but it entailed a trip to the National Library of Scotland.
Today – at last! – I saw it. Two sides of music, that’s all. The words in the song-sheet are more extensive than what appeared in the songbook. It’s just a typical music-hall waltz, but I’ll tell you something …
They encapsulate much of what I’ve been writing about, so I’m ecstatic to have seen it. I’m not able to share the images (though I think this snippet is probably ok!) – but I’ll certainly be talking about it when I give one of my guest lectures at St Andrews!
Again and again, I sit down to write about music, and end up going into hyperfocus about words. It must just be the way my mind works!
Do you generally have a positive outlook on things? How do you bring yourself back to a state of equanimity if you catch yourself being negative?
Actually, I suspect that sometimes what other people construe as negative, I see as merely an abundance of caution. I know that my responses of, ‘But what if ….?’ tend to be met with a sigh and cries of, ‘Oh, don’t be so NEGATIVE!’ My tendency to circle round an issue, looking for inconsistencies or identifying what could go wrong, is so often interpreted as pouring cold water on things, whereas actually, I’m intending to be constructively helpful!
But I inflict these criticisms on myself as well – when I focus on what I have not done, or not been, rather than on what I have actually achieved.
I have not been a full-time academic in the normal interpretation of things – I’ve been an academic librarian who did a mid-career PhD part-time, in her own time, at her own expense (and subsequently qualified with a PGCert teaching certificate). I’ve engaged in plenty of research activity since then, and I’ve been seconded as a 0.3 researcher for over a decade now. But I’m not a full-time academic, and it follows that my output of publications and presentations – impressive enough for a 0.3 scholar – will never equate to what I might have done if I had been a full-time one for my entire career. Often enough, I catch myself beating myself up about what I’m NOT.
Daft, really, considering I’m qualified as a librarian, a musicologist, AND have the teaching certificate. Which isn’t a bad profile to have.
Now, I know that it’s a good idea to challenge negative thinking, if it’s bringing you down. However, I don’t keep a happiness diary or anything similar.
But for a number of years, I’ve devised a simple trick – I have an email folder in which I keep messages recognising contributions that other people acknowledge I’ve made. Vanity? Maybe, but at least when I’m on a downward spiral, there’s somewhere I can go to give myself a kick into a more positive attitude! I got the loveliest and most unexpected email yesterday, which completely transformed my evening. Into the folder it goes. Unsolicited appreciation is such a tonic!
I also make sure my list of publications (on another page of this blog), and my institutional repository are kept up-to-date. That way, any personal mutterings about ‘I haven’t done enough’ can be challenged straight away!
However, I’d like to say to anyone not quite as far along in their career as I am (I haven’t scaled any lofty heights, but I am undeniably growing older!) – we do need to find a way of bolstering our self-belief. For some of us, it’s not easy to ‘look on the bright side’ all the time. Being brutally honest about oneself might seem like false modesty to the outsider, but from the inside, it feels like being realistic. My own upbringing has memories of being compared with others whenever a school report or exam result came out; and the importance of not being boastful or blowing one’s own trumpet. Indeed, the very letters after my name have been considered ostentatious – and that was recently!
In light of all that, I don’t think it’s remotely unreasonable to devise strategies for looking on the bright side when an attack of insecurity strikes!
What do you do?
It’s only four weeks until Induction Week at the University of St Andrews! From knowing I’m going to be the inaugural Ketelbey Fellow ‘in the autumn’ – a vague point in the future – it is suddenly an actual thing happening in a month’s time.
So, on my first research day back after the vacation then the IAML Congress (leaving aside the fact that I wrote my way through almost my entire vacation), I took a deep breath and started a new To Do list.
And suddenly it wasn’t so much a question of, What am I going to do now I’ve submitted the book?, as, Where do I start on all I’ve got to do now I’ve submitted the book? It feels like there’s quite a bit to do – but I do now know the bus times, and I’ve reached out to a couple of libraries about things I need to know, so I’ve made a start.
I’ve got two guest lectures lined up, and interestingly – but perhaps not surprisingly – the monograph throws up several possible topics. It’s easier to see them, now the whole thing is written.
Indeed, although one lecture title is provisionally settled, I can see several other possibilities to choose from for the other one, which is gratifying. (Although I managed to get Dorothy Ketelbey into my book, I don’t know if I could get her into a lecture. It was only a passing mention. And yet ….)
But before that … one or two other things to catch up on. I’d better get started!
I blogged for the Whittaker Library this morning! It’s about William Moodie’s little book, Our Native Songs. Moodie features in the book that I’ve just finished writing, so I got a bit excited about this little songbook, even though it wasn’t the context in which I had been writing about him before. All the same, it has his words in the Preface, and it has a Glasgow connection, so it was lovely to handle it whilst I catalogued and blogged about it. (And now, I won’t be able to resist investigating the publisher, will I?!)
Read my library blogpost here:-
William Moodie and Glasgow’s ‘Normal School’
(I love the idea that one could whip this tiny book out of one’s pocket if one was in company and suddenly needed the words of a song!)
I found this in my drafts from a couple of years ago. Well, this clearly isn’t my holiday postcard. I had just sourced a picture of the boat on which one of ‘my’ Glasgow music publishers sailed home from New York. No idea how long he’d been there, nor what he had been doing! A holiday? Business? Whatever, it’s nice to imagine …
(The card is from eBay, not connected with the Glasgow publisher, I hasten to add.)
Talking of America, after attending the IAML Congress, I had something American I needed to check out. If I had FOUND something interesting in the two new databases I’d learned about, then it would have been galling to have found them after completing my book draft.
I needn’t have worried – I found not a thing. So if ‘my’ cinema pianist did write stock music for silent movies, it didn’t end up in those databases. (I have no evidence that he did – it just would’ve been so cool if he had!) Anyone know of a database of UK stock music for silent movies?!
Somehow I ended up designing the Congress logo! Well, not exactly designing it, but certainly coming up with the original idea. I hadn’t realised the story behind it would end up in the printed programme!
Today is officially the end of my annual leave. I drove to Cambridge so I can attend IAML Congress tomorrow. It feels as though I have been off work for ages, but a holiday it really was not.
I wake up thinking about unsatisfactory paragraphs. I dream of inconsequential details that will have to be changed. I had a couple of restful days in Norfolk, but even those were disturbed by nocturnal thoughts of untraceable bibliographical details and diurnal anxious thoughts about driving to Cambridge and finding my accommodation – because I have no sense of direction whatsoever!
So, here I am. I, my car and Don the Congress mascot, all safely in the right place, proof that motorway signs marked ‘to London’ can actually be correct in the right circumstances, so long as you get off when Google says so!
And tomorrow I can just be a delegate – no papers to give. I have avoided committing myself to writing anything else that would hinder The Book this year!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 