By Way of a Change

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

The library received a donation a couple of weeks ago. Commercially-produced Scottish songs and dance tunes, and a few pop ballads or songs from shows, all from the 1940s-70s. We’ll keep the majority of them. I’m conscious that these will be ‘history’ one day – indeed, they already are, since they were all produced long before today’s students were born.

(After all, the collections that I myself write about were current once – well over a century ago. This is just continuing forward in time!)

ON TO DUNDEE

So it will come as no surprise when I say that I was in Dundee’s Wighton Centre yesterday, working on a different collection in a voluntary capacity: listing the music that the accordionist Jimmy Shand owned. I’ve already listed the historic material that the Friends of Wighton acquired at auction, but this secondary material is Shand’s working collection, the sourcebooks for his own repertoire. As such, it needs to be documented, so that’s what I was doing yesterday. I haven’t nearly finished the task! I can’t begin to categorise it until I have a complete list. I don’t think I shall be indexing each volume – it’s a big enough challenge listing the collection at book level. These images show just two items that caught my eye!

By doing what I’m doing, I like to think I’m helping preserve a little bit of 20th century musical history, for later generations. I think Dundee’s Andrew Wighton, and the late Jimmy Shand, would both approve!  There’s a good chance I’ll write about these collections at greater length in due course, but first I must get the bibliographical details sorted out & respectably listed, so it won’t happen for a while ….

AND ANOTHER THOUGHT

I would urge music and rare books librarians to make efforts to conserve twentieth century national music editions.  What to us might just seem to be rather dated repertoire, may have greater significance in the future.  Don’t ditch them! Put them in a stack, make sure they’re catalogued and indexed appropriately, and maybe one day someone will bless you for your forethought!  Similarly, if you know someone that was in a significant trad music ensemble – maybe now in retirement – ask them to give some thought to what they might do to ensure the survival of any archival documentation!

Rant over. I’m off to see if we have any more mid-twentieth century trad scores lying around!

Making Sense of it All

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

After last week’s gallivanting, today was the first opportunity to go through my research notes and try to make sense of it all.  I’ve by no means finished the challenge yet!

  • Last Monday: normal day at work;
  • Tuesday-Wednesday: visits to King’s Inns and Trinity College Dublin libraries to check the old guardbook catalogues at the former, and archival documentation at the latter, also fitting in an informative meeting with the music librarian there
  • Thursday: another normal day at work, then taking a choir-practice, and finally the overnight Caledonian Sleeper to London
  • Friday: a visit to Stationers’ Hall archives to see the registers in which new publications were registered in the Georgian era; then a meeting with one of the music librarians at the British Library to discuss future plans
  • Saturday: speaking at a conference at Cecil Sharp House, the English Folk Dance & Song Society’s headquarters
255px-The_Honourable_Society_of_Kings_Inns_(455776430)
King’s Inns Courtyard, Henrietta Street (via Wikipedia)

Today, I tackled my notes from the visit to King’s Inns.  You wouldn’t expect a legal library to hold much music, would you?  But they do have a few books of national songs from the Georgian era – not many, but a few.  They also have quite a bit of poetry – I found Burns, Thomas Moore and Byron, for a start, not to mention works by Sir Walter Scott, and William Motherwell’s Minstrelsy.  Surprisingly, there are quite a few libretti (the word-books) for late 18th century ballad operas by Dibdin – many predating the legal deposit era, so however they got there, it wasn’t from Stationers’ Hall!  Someone had a passion for the theatre, that’s for sure.  And although I didn’t find folio-sized sheet music (in other words, roughly the size of sheet music today, perhaps slightly larger), I did find smaller publications – books- about the history of music, and a couple of pedagogical tomes which are also in some of the legal deposit libraries in England and Scotland.  One was a likely legal deposit arrival – the other was older, so could have arrived by any route, perhaps a donation from an old lawyer or his descendants.  I only saw the catalogue records, so I may need to follow up with a few queries about some of these items, to see if there’s a standard binding style or any stamps indicating where they came from.  As a librarian myself, I do very much appreciate help received from host libraries – I know how long it can take!

Tomorrow, I’ve got a day’s leave – whether I push on with my notes from Trinity College rather depends on what else I need to do at home, of course!  So … watch this space. I’ll be back as soon as I can!

Caught Up With Mr Greenhill At Last!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

St Pauls Silhouette

It’s about a year since I visited Lambeth Palace and the British Library, making a minor detour via St Paul’s and Stationers’ Hall (virtually in the shadow of St Paul’s) on the off-chance of making an impromptu visit to the Hall. I wasn’t surprised to be disappointed on that occasion; I hadn’t expected to have time to drop by, which is why I hadn’t made an appointment.

Today, I had booked an appointment in advance, and had the pleasure of poring over one of Mr Greenhill’s registers – I’d chosen the one that began at the end of June 1817, and I just had time to look at the records for one year. For all the complaints about Mr Greenhill and his inefficiency or inability to collect all the legal deposit copies for the receiving libraries, I now have one thoroughly good thing to say about him: his handwriting is beautifully legible! Everything nicely spaced out, not sprawling or squidged into the end of a line or bottom of a page. Indeed, there were some days when he must have done little else than sit or stand and carefully inscribe book details into his ledgers – there were so many detailed entries, even two hundred years ago!

If you’ve used Kassler’s index of Stationers’ Hall music, you’ll know that the last few years are less detailed, because they came from a different source – William Hawes’ abbreviated copy from the registers for 1811-1818. This is why I wanted to see a register from this era, because I guessed there would be more to see. There was!

I was also curious to know how long it might take to transcribe the music entries from 1819-1836. I didn’t try timing myself, though, because I got interested in other aspects of the registration process. It’s lucky I had taken my own copy of Kassler with me – the pages for late June 1817-1818 are now carefully annotated in pencil, and I have work to do when I get back to Glasgow. I’ve had an idea! More of this very soon. I might have found the data-slice that the network has been looking for – it fits in rather nicely with some other threads I’ve been pursuing.

This afternoon, I also paid a visit to my opposite number in the British Library to mull over possible future directions for the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall research network. Whilst “Big Data” is appealing, there are also other ideas worth considering – which might indeed help acquire the big data that we need. We’ll see!

Illustration
Tomorrow, I’m spending the day at the EFDSS (English Folk Dance and Song Society) conference, and giving a paper about national airs in Georgian British Libraries. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to have the opportunity to combine my doctoral interests in national song collecting, with my postdoctoral interest in repertoires and library collections on a national scale. Here’s my Powerpoint: National Airs in Georgian British Libraries.  (You’ll also find it listed on the Calendar page of this website.)

No archival pictures today, I’m afraid. I was far too busy annotating my copy of Kassler’s Hawes appendix! But, since a posting is dull without a picture, I’ve shared a familiar outline – and the image from the conference website – with you …. !

Trinity College Dublin & the Wastepaper Merchant (in 1917!)

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

2018-11-07 14.13.33

Trinity College was the legal deposit library that did, initially keep legal deposit music (in the attic), but then by 1817, they had instructed their London agent not to collect sheet music, school books or novels.  It seems virtually no music was retained before the 1850s, when they started keeping it again.

A full century later, in 1917, it’s minuted that “All the unsorted music which was filed in the West Attic … was sorted by the librarian.”  Well, if the word “filed” slightly gladdened your heart, you’re about to be rudely disappointed!  The minutes go on to record that,

“Several sacks filled with separate band parts and music-hall rubbish were sent to the wastepaper merchant.”

It went away in bin-bags!  Nowadays, I suppose it would have gone in the shredder.  (Let’s face it, loose band parts can be a bit of a pain, and who knows what state the music-hall material might have been in.  Maybe the librarian saw no use for it, back in 1917.)   The good news is that “Full scores were put in Dr Todd’s cabinet in the Librarian’s Room.” Ah, so it didn’t all get chucked out!

Notwithstanding the disappointment about the sacks of rubbish, I enjoyed a fruitful conversation with my “opposite number” at Trinity, had an atmospheric stroll through the galleries of the old library, perused the old minute books, and looked at a handful of surviving music textbooks and minstrelsy verses – not musical scores, certainly, but I was looking for ownership marks and library property stamps, and I did find those!  Trinity has a whole run of The Harmonicon, a music magazine which was extremely popular at St Andrews – and I’m happy to say that Motherwell’s Minstrelsy is there in the 1827 edition, which has a bunch of tunes at the end.

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Motherwell – Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern

 

Expedition to Eire

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

2018-11-06 16.36.40I’m writing this from Dublin! I’ve spent a fascinating day delving through absolutely enormous guard-books at King’s Inns Library – a historic legal library – and tomorrow I head to Trinity College Dublin.

I won’t write about what I found today, because I need to assimilate it and ask a few more questions about some of the volumes.  But to whet your whistle, I thought I’d share just a few striking pictures.

Guardbooks, A to Z

 

 

 

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Long ago, a librarian used whatever tape came to hand …!

Golden Triangles? In Legal Deposit Libraries? Well, after a fashion!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Collage map golden triangles legal deposit

This isn’t about mathematical golden triangles!

The other day, I decided to make a map of the UK’s Georgian legal deposit library locations. Yes, I know – it’s a strange way to interpret a serious research project, but I wanted an illustration that would have impact for an audience,  not all of whom may know as much about legal deposit as I now do!  So, first I thought about making a patchwork map, but after experimenting with lines on a map, I concluded that it would be such a weird piece of patchwork that maybe I needed to come up with a Plan B.

A collage map seemed more feasible, and I thought I’d mark out where the legal deposit libraries were by linking them together and then appliqueing the shape that resulted. And there they were – a triangle in England (London-Oxford-Cambridge) and a triangle in Scotland (Glasgow-Aberdeen-Edinburgh, with St Andrews sitting on the line between Aberdeen and Edinburgh).  Finally, there were the new arrivals of two legal deposit libraries in Dublin from 1801 onwards (Trinity College and Kings’ Inns) – I couldn’t force them into a triangle, but I gave them one anyway.  So there it was – the three triangles formed another triangle, and I had my graphic illustration.

But why the big gap in the middle with no legal deposit libraries? Ah, that’s probably because there weren’t any university libraries old enough to be considered when legal deposit was established at the beginning of the 18th century!  As a graduate of Durham myself, I thought it was a shame that we missed out on this privilege, but the fact is that although Durham Hall became Durham College back in 1286, it was actually founded by the University of Oxford, eventually becoming Trinity College, Oxford in 1555.  The University of Durham and University College weren’t founded until 1832, and  the Royal Charter was granted to the University by King William IV in 1837. (All dates from the University website.)  By the time Durham had its university, widespread legal deposit was about to be curtailed, and the Library Deposit Act had already been enacted a year before its Royal Charter was granted.  “Too late”, as a Scottish friend put it succinctly!  (Similarly, the Victoria University of Manchester was formed as a medical school in 1824, but did not become a university until even later, in 1851.)

So, the harsh facts are that there weren’t any old-established universities between the southern golden triangle and the Scottish one, at the time the legislation was enacted! And that’s why the legal deposit libraries were scattered around the UK and Ireland as they were.

Nathan’s Hebrew Melodies, to words by Byron

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Lord Byron-c.-1826-1828-by-Thomas-Sully-696x529
Image of Lord Byron, from Wikipedia. Artist: Thomas Sully

As I’ll be talking about “national songs” in my conference paper at Cecil Sharp House next weekend, I’ll be making the most fleeting of references to the poet Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, set to music by Isaac Nathan.  Fleeting, because despite Nathan’s claims, very few of the melodies (and it’s a very fat vocal score!) have the remotest connection with Jewish music.  There’s a long and well-referenced article about them on the Newstead Abbey Byron Society website, so there’s no need for me to summarise it all here.  The most pertinent sentences from my point of view are those giving lie to all Nathan’s claims of authenticity.  As I know only too well from my Scottish song-collections doctoral research, authenticity was frequently claimed but seldom genuine.*

I don’t know the name of the author who wrote the Society’s essay, but I’m happy to quote the link here, along with the extracts that I’ve selected to share:-

“There was nothing new in the project. Nathan, and to an extent Byron, were cashing in on a vogue for nationalist airs from minority cultures or oppressed peoples in all corners of the globe. The market was flooded with Scottish, Welsh, Indian, and of course, from Thomas Moore, Irish Melodies. The ethnic authenticity of none of such scores could be relied on.” (p.2)

““Wildness and pathos” are a long way off. Only seven of them have been identified as
having Jewish music in them. They are: She Walks in Beauty, Oh! Snatched Away in Beauty’s Bloom, The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept, My Soul is Dark, Jephtha’s Daughter, On Jordan’s Banks, Thy Days are Done.” (p.4)

Source (49 pages, published later than 2002, accessed 1 November 2018):-

http://www.newsteadabbeybyronsociety.org/works/downloads/hebrew_melodies.pdf 

I have also found a pdf of Nathan’s Hebrew Melodies, in a rather poor reproduction, but it’s better than nothing! There are 262 pages – I don’t think I’ll be printing them out!

http://ks.imslp.net/files/imglnks/usimg/0/08/IMSLP221262-PMLP365149-Nathan-HebrewMelodiesBW.pdf

If you’d like to read my own writing about authenticity in the Scottish song context, you can find my doctoral thesis online at the University of Glasgow, or read the augmented and improved book that followed a few years later!  (It’s available in paperback, hardback and as an e-book.)

  • Our Ancient National Airs: Scottish Song-Collecting from 1760-1888 (Thesis, 2009)
  • Our Ancient National Airs: Scottish Song-Collecting from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Era (Routledge, 2013)

National Songs and Georgian Legal Deposit Locations

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

This week I’ve been focusing on my paper for the EFDSS conference, Traditional Folk Song: Past, Present & Future, on Saturday 10 November, 9:30am – 5:00pm at Cecil Sharp House, London. I’ll be talking about ‘National Airs in Georgian British Libraries’, and particularly focusing on the collections in St Andrews and Edinburgh.  I’ll also be alluding to that old nineteenth century irritation – the allegation that England had no national music!

As it happened, I needed to take a day’s annual leave for a non-work related reason yesterday, but I hoped that for most of the day I would be free to concentrate on my presentation.  Well, it didn’t work out quite that way, but I did start writing in the evening.  Today, I spent the first couple of hours teaching library research skills, then it was back to the laptop in the research room for the rest of the day.

  By the end of the working day, I had written just over 4,000 words and felt I deserved a treat: I left my papers on the desk and came home to spend the evening sewing!  (Better still, another little indulgence had arrived in the post for me: a silver sixpence dating1821 George IV sixpence holed from 1821, the year of George IV’s coronation, and with a hole pierced in it by a previous owner so that it could be worn on a ribbon.  As of course I already am!)

The conference will actually be the culmination of a particularly busy week for me: I’ll be visiting the two Irish Georgian legal deposit libraries in Dublin earlier in the week, and Stationers’ Hall and the British Library on the day before the conference. One of my choir-members looked somewhat surprised when I remarked that I’d be fitting in choir practice between Dublin and the overnight sleeper between Glasgow and London!
I’m particularly looking forward to this conference because it will be a completely different audience to those at the conferences I’ve already been to this year. I’m intending to give a fairly wide-ranging paper. If I unearth any surprises in Dublin, then there will be last-minute tweaking to add them into the mix!

NB  If you liked this, you might like a post I wrote on a related topic, earlier this year – essentially a continuation of the story after the period that I’ll be describing in my latest conference paper:- England has no National Music? Chappell Set Out to Refute This

Enthusiasm in Edinburgh

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Edinburgh Alison House Nicholson Square Historic Environment Scotland image
http://portal.historicenvironment.scot/designation/LB29414

 

 

My research lecture at Edinburgh University went well last week (though I say it myself!) – I was delighted to have received such a warm reception.  Here’s my powerpoint, also uploaded to the Calendar tab of this blog.  It was good to have the opportunity to give a talk focusing on a collection (well, what’s left of the legal deposit music!) that hasn’t had a great deal of exposure before, and I was absolutely delighted to make the acquaintance of a former Edinburgh academic who is probably the only person to have investigated Edinburgh’s legal deposit music in a systematic way.  Apart, of course, from Hans Gal’s bibliographic efforts, which noted some but not all of the Reid Music Library’s contents dating pre-1850.  I’m about to start reading some notes that I was generously given after my lecture – it’s a great privilege to be given them.

Whilst St Andrews has its magnificent collection and all the related documentation and archival material, I’m keen to stress that Edinburgh has different strengths: not nearly as much legal deposit music, but an entire historical musical instrument collection, and the wonderful St Cecilia’s Hall which not only exhibits them, but also offers unique performance spaces.  Nothing would make me happier than to learn that students were inspired to explore the music on the historical instruments!  Early printed music is fascinating in musicological terms, but bringing it back to life in terms of sound is something special – as the Sound Heritage network has been keen to demonstrate in many wonderful ways.

Next stop, meetings in Dublin and London – and then the EFDSS conference.  Better get writing again!