New Article about Sir John Macgregor Murray, in the Folk Music Journal

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Finally, an article from me after a long spell of apparent silence. ‘Sir John Macgregor Murray: Preserver of Highland Culture, Music and Song’. Folk Music Journal vol. 13 no.1, pp.50-63. 

The article started out as a conference paper, but I felt it deserved a wider audience. Let me share the abstract:-

Abstract

Sir John MacGregor Murray is known by Scottish music historians as the man who retrieved Joseph Macdonald’s Compleat Theory of the Scots Highland Bagpipe. This act of transmitting a work about Highland culture was just one instance of the Highland chieftain’s involvement in facilitating the artistic output of his native country. A founder member of the Highland Society of Scotland, he traversed the Highlands in pursuit of James Macpherson’s Ossian poetry, assisted song collector Alexander Campbell in planning his own itinerary in the Highlands and Western Isles, and helped establish a piping competition in Edinburgh. Sir John was one of a number of individuals who played a mediatory role in the collecting and publication of Scottish music.
This article outlines Sir John’s role in the codifying and promotion of Highland culture, embracing literary as much as musical endeavours. It also introduces some of the other individuals who played a similar role in Scotland during the Georgian and Victorian eras.

EFDSS (English Folk Dance and Song Society) website

Folk Music Journal

Lanrick Castle Gatehouse (Wikipedia)

Slavery and Empire: Exhibition at Kelvingrove Art Gallery

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Definitely on my To-See list! Details here

I’ve done quite a bit of work about diversity in library collections – whether diversity in terms of music composed by women, or music composed by people of colour. I’ve also devoted quite a bit of space in one chapter of my forthcoming book, to the influence of the craze for ‘minstrelsy’ music towards the end of the nineteenth century.

I was very much taken with the exhibition at the Hunterian Museum a couple of years ago, and I’m also very interested in Glasgow’s history as ‘Second City of the Empire’, and finding out more about some of our dubious merchant forebears. So – will I be going to see the Kelvingrove exhibition? You bet I will!

I’m conscious that I haven’t posted with my research hat on this week. Fear not, I’ll be back! But not in today’s posting. The exhibition very much deserves to be showcased in its own right.

Image by Michał from Pixabay

Torn between Copyright Music and the East India Company!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I’m back from vacation with a vengeance, here.  I’ve thought of not one, but two future projects worth pursuing, so I am getting in touch with people whom I think might be interested.  One project is closely linked to the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall network, whilst the other idea could be said to tie together several strands from all the research I’ve done in the past decade or so.  Obviously, grant-writing time is approaching again!  Watch this space.

An interesting news snippet is my recent discovery that a librarianship student from Robert Gordon’s University has been doing a placement at the University of Aberdeen’s Library Special Collections – and looking at their Copyright Music collection!  This really is very exciting – I love to hear of people getting engaged with these materials, and I’m really happy to think that Aberdeen’s collection is attracting attention.  Retired music librarian and rare books cataloguer Richard Turbet did much work on it a few years ago, but it’s definitely time to be woken from its slumbers with some more close study!

So much for copyright music.  I still have more writing to do for a substantial journal article about the UK’s repertoire, amongst other things.  And we have the Brio journal issue to work towards, later this year, too. All this will be done!

Perso-Indica workshop on “John MacGregor Murray (1745-1822): Persianate and Indic Cultures in British South Asia” – Paris, May 28th 2019.

However, right now, I’m focusing on writing a paper for a seminar at the Sorbonne, which takes place at the end of May.  Sir John Macgregor Murray took an almost obsessive interest in Scottish and clan culture, but it appears he was as interested in Indian culture, commissioning translations and texts in Persian, on matters relating to Indian religion, festivals and agriculture.  His career was spent in the private army of the East India Company, so maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised that he took an interest in the customs of the land that was his home for more than two decades.  He did have a base in Scotland too, having bought Lanrick Castle in his mid-twenties, though I haven’t investigated how often he came home, or whether his wife and son ever stayed there without him.  (Much as I’d like to know, I have to remind myself that I’m interested in his cultural activities, not his entire biography!)

800px-Portrait_of_East_India_Company_official from VAM.ac.uk via wikipedia
By Dip Chand (artist) – https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O16731/painting-portrait-of-east-india-company/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18728491 from Wikipedia

(The above image is dated 1760, a bit before Sir John joined the East India Company, but it was so lovely, I just had to include it!)

 

Dreams of Distant Places

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

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This week’s news is cautiously optimistic.  I have the opportunity to speak at a conference in New Zealand if I can secure the funding to get me there! I’ve applied for funding – so watch this spot.

What about the Colonies?

Meanwhile, however, it set me wondering about legal deposit in the colonies in the nineteenth century.  This is not something that I’d thought about before.  Obviously, early printed music in New Zealand or Australia would generally have come from Europe, whether as new imports, brought by emigrants or sent to them by their families.  (See the excellent work being done by Sydney Living Museums in Australia, or – as an example of an early immigrant musician’s life – Michael Kassler’s fascinating paper, ‘The remarkable story of Maria Hinckesman‘, in Musicology Australia (2007).  I really don’t know much about the nineteenth century music trade beyond Britain.  I seized my copy of Partridge’s The History of the Legal Deposit of Books (1938) for a quick overview, where I learned that New Zealand’s own legal deposit legislation came much later.  It would still be nice to know more about the publication of music actually composed there during the 19th century!   Has anyone studied this?

You can’t beat a good bibliography

Over the past couple of years, I’ve compiled quite an extensive bibliography covering legal deposit (both at the general and music-specific level), and the nineteenth-century histories of the British legal deposit libraries.  I’m sure I haven’t yet listed everything that’s out there, but progress is being made.  I’m currently tidying up this listing, then I’ll post it online.  What I need more of, are links to finding aids, published or online, outlining what archival information is available for the different libraries.  Once I’ve got it into a shape fit for public consumption, I’d love to receive any further suggestions for suitable additions.  A student at the University of Edinburgh made a great listing of catalogues, accounts, and borrower loan records (“receipt books” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century terminology) this summer, and I’ve currently got a copy of it on my desk to peruse closely.  Next week, I’m going to consult a couple of resources recommended to me by the National Library of Scotland’s Music Librarian – these will hopefully fill in my knowledge about what’s available there.  In this age of the internet, it pays to remember that not everything is online, and it’s invaluable to know about the existence of earlier finding aids that remain in their original print format.  I’m quite well clued-up about the resources in St Andrews, and I’ve got several useful links for Sion College’s holdings, now in Lambeth Palace Library.  Any further suggestions about other libraries, anyone?!

Official Commissions

At various times, official commissions looked into the legal deposit libraries’ handling and curation of the legal deposit materials, and library provision for universities in general. I really do need to capture details of all surviving documentation.  Partridge  mentions that after the 1814 Copyright Act, returns were requested from the legal deposit libraries (1st July 1817), which resulted in the Return of the Libraries, ordered to be printed by the House of Commons on 6 March and 9 April, 1818 [BM.515 l 20] (Partridge ibid, p.73].*  This contains a table of rejected items from Oxford or Cambridge – I have also found an amended return from Cambridge, which has of course been added to the bibliography!

Amended Return Cambridge - see mention of music

Similarly, from 1826 onwards, there was a Royal Commission investigating library provision to the University Libraries in Scotland. I’ve seen one of the huge tomes emanating from this exercise, regarding the Aberdeen responses, and transcribing interviews with individual professors.  Revd. William Paul remembered the sale of some legal deposit music, a couple of decades earlier.  Oh, really? This is interesting stuff!!

Great Britain. Commission for Visiting the Universities and Colleges of Scotland  W. Clowes and Sons, 1837

It’s fair to say that bibliographic control of this material is sometimes slightly inconsistent, but it would appear desirable to track down each Scottish university’s response, and to look at the other responses from St Andrews, Edinburgh and Glasgow!

Evidence Oral and Documentary Commissions 1837 top page

Evidence Oral and Documentary Commissions 1837 middle page

Evidence Oral and Documentary Commissions 1837 bottom page

 

Guest Blogposts Ahead!

We now have five offers of guest blogposts for this blog, two of them scheduled for the beginning of December.  Embracing technology, I’ve set up a Doodle poll for other interested guests.  The link has been sent to everyone signed up to the Jisc Music from Stationers’ Hall mailing list.  Completing a Doodle poll is simplicity itself, and I’ll get to see any responses to the poll. If you’re on the list, please check your email inbox!  (If you’re not on the list, here’s how to sign up!  Open Invitation to Join the Conversation)

And More Visits

When I only have one and a half days a week for research, even scheduling visits to all the former legal deposit libraries is just a touch more tricky, but I’m doing my best.  Every week, I try to think ahead and start planning another trip, so we’ll see where I end up visiting next! Which reminds me … time to tie up some arrangements …

  •  House of Commons, Extracts of so Much of the Returns Made by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, (pursuant to the Orders of the 1st July 1817 and 20th February Last) as State, Whether Any of the Books Claimed under the Late Copyright Act Have Been Omitted to Be Placed in their Respective Libraries, and how otherwise disposed of.  (1818) [Paper no.98. Available via database, UK Parliamentary Papers (ProQuest)]