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.
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…
Its forerunner, Our Ancient National Airs, is also in the sale.
There! Your Christmas reading is sorted.
(Do I live in the 1950s these days?!) I’ve been tracing a woman who briefly worked for publisher Thomas Nelson in Edinburgh in the mid-1950s. Yesterday, I found a memo from her to one of the managing directors. Instructed to throw a book away if she couldn’t find a use for it, she promptly did find a use for it, giving it to the library of the Glasgow training college where she had previously worked.
I admired her honesty in telling him, because there was probably no need to report back on what happened to a book that was clearly regarded as inconsequential. It came from the Toronto branch of Nelson’s, and was about important Canadian educationalists; I can see why it might not have been much use in the Edinburgh office. (She had, in fact, travelled back from Montreal at the age of 16 – I have no idea how long she’d been there – so maybe he knew this, and thought she’d be interested in this combination of a country she’d visited, as well as a topic she knew well.)
Nonetheless, she did tell him, and reported that not only did the college librarian thank her, but her former boss at the college had commented that it was a title she’d actually been looking for. My interest was piqued, and I checked Jisc Library Hub Discover. Sure enough, the college has since been absorbed into a university, but the university library still has that book – the only copy in the UK. It has survived 72 years and at least one library relocation. I wondered if it had subsequently been borrowed by that senior training college lecturer – the one who had been looking for it?
Apparently not! The book has no trace of ever having been borrowed. Let’s hope she at least sat and read it in the library!
Image by Bianca Van Dijk from Pixabay
In the late 1920s, Thomas Nelson’s were just starting to work with the music specialist who would turn out to be very helpful to them over the next couple of decades. As I mentioned, I’ve been trying to find the very first letter that passed between them. Moreover, the Nelson’s editor had told his line-manager at the outset (in the mid-1920s) that he hoped this individual would be helping with ‘the large music book’. Now, this is delightfully vague, isn’t it? Nelson’s wouldn’t be publishing anything that I’d call ‘large’ in the way of printed music for several years.
On Friday, I stumbled across editorial correspondence from 1929 about revising an earlier book about music – one useful to individual students, possibly beyond school age – but not a school classroom text-book. When I get my hands on it, I expect to find that it’s a fairly standard Nelson printed book size. If this was ‘the large book’ (Possibility A), then it was only ‘large’ by comparison with slimmer materials intended for the classroom. Moreover, our music man was NOT the person who ended up revising it. His first contribution was something slimmer, and more classroom-based. But this book does perhaps better fit the timescale of a publication being projected in the late 20s.
It’s so easy to imagine up a sequence of events, with what is really insufficient evidence. After all, there could be another projected ‘large book’ (Possibility B) that never actually happened!
My working theory for Possibility A, is currently that even if they approached the first guy to revise a book, then for whatever reason, he wasn’t ultimately offered or didn’t fancy the commission. The chap who did do it was certainly a good choice, in any event – a knowledgeable scholar rather than a gifted practitioner and pedagogue.
There’s nothing for it – I must continue leafing through early correspondence in search of that initial letter! But I’ve also ordered a copy of the book that the scholar revised. After all, it’s another Nelson music publication. I need to know about it, too, whether it’s the ‘large’ book or otherwise.
This afternoon, I gave a talk about my archival research, to the Friends of Edinburgh University Library – where I received the strongest indication that people love talking about their memories of school music lessons!
I had great fun introducing the long-forgotten editors at Thomas Nelson – including a lady who went on to work at the University Library after finishing her PhD – and, of course, the people who compiled the Scots Song Books. (They wanted to compile a fifth – I bet you didn’t know that! But Nelson’s didn’t …)
Main picture – tulips outside the University Library
On Friday afternoon, a tiny germ of a thought struck me. It was about a book to which I had previously given no thought whatsoever. It is unrelated to Scottish song, or even Scottish culture. It was published by a Scottish publisher.
(Forgive the little library codes! I haven’t forgotten where I came from.)
But I can’t see a title without wondering about the author, so I idly looked them up on my journey home from Edinburgh.
Well!
Here we have someone who …
Did I trace their birth and death dates, where they grew up, and where their parents married? Yes, I’m afraid I did!
(Another clue for my former colleagues!)
All this falls into the scholarly equivalent of ‘pretty but pointless’, on the face of it, since it has nothing to do with a Scottish song book series for schools. But the book itself might have a tangential link to my present research – more anon – and gives me food for thought in another direction.
I have just talked myself into another eBay purchase …
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
From the 56 or so files I’ve examined up to now, the Thomas Nelson archives generally save copies of the letters that went out from the offices – but not the incoming replies. They reveal one side of a conversation.
So today, I was able to read letters to James Easson and Herbert Wiseman about the third and fourth Scots Song Books, but I couldn’t see how they reacted or responded. I need to look at the finished books again, but I may not necessarily be able to determine if they took on board the impeccably polite and respectful points raised about the texts they had used. I haven’t got the annotated proofs that were sent to Easson, or his reply.
As you will see from the enclosed, there are certain discrepancies, mostly small ones, between your text and the text as given in the various authorities.Â
I wonder if he had anticipated the lengths to which his new editor would go – visiting libraries and consulting authoritative editions – to ensure the texts were accurate?! Lengths, I might add, which are entirely consistent with what I’ve learned about the editor!
What is clear, though, is that these books were very carefully compiled, and just as painstakingly edited.
I am very anxious to get these points settled now before the MS goes for setting.
I still have a number of files to examine – and until I see them, I won’t know which departments they are from. I wonder when I’ll catch up with the meticulous editor again?!
Thomas Nelson’s four-book set was for classroom use. Offering a mixture of history and theory (music-reading and tune-building), it even suggested pupils might plan a folk music concert.
In this exciting, modern world, children were reminded that their parents’ music lessons consisted only of singing, whereas now they might also learn instruments like the recorder, and perhaps collect interesting clippings from the Radio Times. (It sounds like another world, doesn’t it?)
Meanwhile, diving straight into the history, children were immediately introduced to the concept of folk music.
This is an English book, but I only recognised two of the three songs from my own school days. ‘The Carrion Crow’ wasn’t one I knew.
I’m delighted to find that kids were also introduced to the role of a song collector. Although I have to say that the child in the foreground on the right looks bored and unimpressed by the proceedings, in the illustration! Still, Nelson’s editors presumably commissioned the illustration rather than use a stock image, so they’re due some credit.
They’re still holding onto the idea that folk music came from country folk. I wonder if pupils ever asked what city folk sang?!
Of course, it wasn’t all folk music. Kids were also introduced to the likes of Brahms, Handel and Purcell. Today, I imagine only examination classes would have textbooks introducing the classical greats. On the other hand, more time is probably spent on world music, and efforts are made to consider music by women and people of underrepresented communities. Times have moved on!
Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see how much knowledge children would have acquired in general classroom music lessons, and to compare it with modern times.
Even the books are brighter and more appealing today, I must admit!
Well, after all my Stationers’ Hall research a few years ago, you won’t be surprised to see me say that!
The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020 (Edinburgh University Press, 2024)
But I had reason to be grateful again today, when I needed to consult an expensive new book of essays from Edinburgh University Press. Only a few universities have it in electronic format (not accessible to external readers, for licensing reasons), but there was ONE printed copy in Scotland – presumably the legal deposit copy. A trip to the National Library of Scotland was called for. (I am so used to going upstairs to the rare books reading room, with all the book cushions and stands, weighted ‘book snakes’ and fragile volumes, that it was quite a novel experience to be heading to the general reading room to see a shiny new book in all its glory!)
From a drizzly start in Glasgow, it turned into a glorious warm and sunny autumn day, showing Edinburgh at its best. (Which is more than can be said for Glasgow, sulking in the rain upon my return!)
And the book was fascinating, despite seemingly not referencing anything related to music. It was wide-ranging in subject-matter and chronological coverage. (120 years is a long time in book-publishing.) I read a couple of chapters, making a mental note that I might have reason to come back to it again next year.
Sometimes, you need to look at a book, just to make sure you haven’t missed anything! I can finish my article now, reassured that I haven’t overlooked any unexpected new commentary. It was a long shot!
Yesterday, I set out to track down some music. It’s light music, not great music – almost ephemeral, you could say – but together, it tells a story.
I also wanted to find out more about the life of one of these fin-de-siecle Glasgow woman music publishers.
It’s not that easy. The music is scattered round our legal deposit libraries; the cataloguing isn’t completely consistent; and fin-de-siecle ladies, whether single, married, childless or proud mothers, didn’t leave much record of their daily lives. They’re hidden in the shadows of family members, and, whilst I imagine they knew one another, let me stress that this is NOT a tale of a female publishing cooperative!
I had a nice chat with a local history librarian, making an acquaintance who is now equally keen to find out more; then I headed home – as yet, none the wiser – to devise a complex spreadsheet of music titles. I’m visualising a pinboard with strings criss-crossing between ladies, libraries and work-lists.
So complex, indeed, that I still haven’t planned how best to get to SEE the music.
A weekend task?
Perhaps it’s not surprising to find more librarians and former librarians than usual at a research conference about book and print history and the book trade – but I was certainly in my element amongst the researchers at this week’s Print Networks conference in Newcastle. Indeed, I even found two more musicologists and a music practitioner amongst the kindred spirits, so I didn’t really need to try very hard to make my point that printed music history is indeed a branch of book history. Glasgow printers also got a look-in, so my talk about Glasgow music publishers wasn’t out on a limb geographically, either.
Then there were trade catalogues, book pirates, Stationers’ Hall, slave narratives, radical newspapers in Birmingham … just so many interesting papers!
Having spent the first part of the week in Newcastle, the last couple of days were ‘mine’, an agreeable blend of sociability, along with mundane catching-up at home, and (ahem!) more research.
An old copy of a classical piece in a Mozart Allan edition raised some interesting questions – could I resist following them up? Indeed I could not. I’ve found another lost work – or as I prefer to call it, a ‘ghost’ publication. It would have been so very nice to have tracked this down. The advertisement absolutely reinforced a point I make in my forthcoming book. But it’s in neither Jisc Library Hub Discover, WorldCat, the British Newspaper Archive, Abe, Alibris, eBay, the Sheet Music Warehouse, Google Books nor Archive.org. There’s no mention of an editor or compiler for this collection, just a title. Oh, bother!
It gets worse – another advert at the back of the same classical piano piece appears to suggest that a light-music composer who published almost exclusively with Ascherberg, Hopwood and Crew, also published a few early works with Mozart Allan – but using a different first name. Two of the works published by Mozart Allan also appear later with the first name he was mainly known by. This is interesting. I’ve spent several hours yesterday and today trawling eBay (and treating myself), whilst on the trail of this gent. Yes, I know the book is already in preparation. Anything I find won’t go in the book, but research doesn’t stop when a book is published, does it?!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 