Back to Work Now

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Busy Lizzie plant on garden table, with cup of coffee

I’m back at work after a month’s vacation (I confess that I was rather lazy), and now I must get back both to my Dundee Leng Medal research, AND to writing a paper for a conference at London’s Royal Academy of Music: Women and Musical Histories, 1789-1914.

Recent Summers

'Don', one of the IAML Cambridge Congress mascots, clad in academic robes

I’m reminded by this, my own blog, that I was attending the International Association of Music Libraries’ Congress in Cambridge, this time in 2023. I particularly enjoyed hearing the talks about early film music. 

I wasn’t speaking on that occasion.  No, my input was merely in various social media aspects: I was running the social media campaign for and during the event, and I’d created a trio of conference mascots – Cam, Bridge and Don – whom I employed in social media posts. (I don’t know what happened to the first two, but Don was given to a wee girl at church, and has enjoyed a comfortable retirement in a family setting.)

IAML Cambridge 2023 programme logo

I’d also come up with the IDEA behind the conference logo – a chap on a punt, incorporating the IAML abbreviation. Well, it was Cambridge! I hasten to add – I wasn’t the artist. The IAML Cambridge Congress feels like a long time and another lifetime ago!  I was already aspiring to a new part-time research existence, but envied another delegate who already had theirs’ lined up, being a tiny bit closer to retirement age than I!

And by this time in 2024? I’d retired from librarianship, but I was rather busy on final tweaks to my second monograph. And 2025 saw a rather unsettled summer, which we’ll gloss over.

Miss Marple – my Alter Ego?

Anyway, this year, I decided it would be a proper vacation, even if I didn’t spend it travelling or sunbathing. I achieved this moderately successfully. However, last weekend I decided I’d ease myself back by having another go at some detective work which had failed on all earlier attempts. My earlier research had focused on this individual’s daughter. Now it was the parent who intrigued me. But again, I drew a blank, after I don’t know how many hours. I cannot trace documented evidence of youthful musical activity by this individual, although I know that she was her daughter’s first singing teacher – and I have my own hunches about some of the books they might have used!

This is not to say that I found nothing. I know where the mother was born – no more than a couple of miles away from where I’m sitting today, in a large house that is no longer there.* It would be fair to say that the neighbourhood has gone down significantly since then! I know where she subsequently grew up (an even larger house in a very nice neighbourhood, again a couple of miles from where I’m sitting today, but on the other side of the M8 motorway). I know where her parents came from, too. And I traced her mother’s retiral from the family business. I even found a blogpost about a family grave in the Glasgow Necropolis.

However, the sad fact is that if a wealthy young woman was musical, but there’s no newspaper documentation of her ever performing publicly, then there really isn’t very much to go on. Try as I will, I can find no mention of her at school, or singing, being a soprano or a contralto, ‘contributing’ (a common word in Victorian reportage of musical events), or even venturing into playing the piano/pianoforte. Her older brother and sister took part in a fund-raising bazaar hosted by the local church, but there’s no mention of ‘my’ subject there either.

I have visions of myself standing dolefully outside the large house that’s still standing, or on the corner of the street where the other house stood, or even in Glasgow Necropolis, literally trying to communicate with ghosts past, in my efforts to intuit how much music occupied her childhood and adolescent years. It would make not a scrap of difference, though!

Ah, well. Back to more pressing topics. Perhaps I have to give up on my Miss Marple endeavours.

*By this evening, I had realised that my bus route to work actually passes the junction where Flora’s mother was born. It’s a curious coincidence, to add to the vacant site a bit further along the route, where James S Kerr’s first music shop was located.  Who knew the no.23 bus had such  historical links?!

Eagerly Anticipating this Conference: ‘Women and Musical Histories 1789-1914’

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

It’s a stroke of good luck that my recent research just fits into the scope of this conference, which is taking place at the Royal Academy of Music in London from 2-4 September this year. I’d agreed with my line-manager that I should attend, but I confess I needed a little nudge to actually complete my registration, since my head has been whirling with oral history interviews and the trip down south last weekend.

Women and Musical Histories, 1789–1914

I’m going to give a paper at the conference, comparing the careers of two of my musical ‘heroines’. One featured in my recent RMA Chronicle article on ladies connected with the Scottish music publishing trade; the other has been mentioned by me elsewhere, but moved in completely different circles, in a different stratum of society. Anyway, the conference cut-off date of 1914 enables me to bring them together in my paper, so I’m looking forward to this opportunity to think about them again as I settle down to write it!

Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay

A Week with a Difference – and only Halfway Through

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Programme and delegate tag for Tradition in Motion conference at RCS

I started my Leng Medal Memories interviews this week. What a pleasurable experience this is turning out to be! Two of my interviewees still have their silver medals, fifty-odd years later. I subsequently asked the Facebook group, Dundee Pals, and found that lots more people there still have their medals, too. It just goes to show how significant winning the medals actually was to the school pupils who took part.

Anyway, I thought I’d re-share the link to my questionnaire about Dundee Leng Medal memories, in case anyone finds this post and would like to participate in my research project:- https://tinyurl.com/LengMemories

Tradition in Motion

The stage is set: Stevenson Hall for Co-founder Dr Jo Miller’s keynote; doctoral students Connor Civatte and Neil Wood; and Dr Jo Miller in conversation with Head of Dept Prof Josh Dickson,

On a different note, yesterday (Tuesday) saw me as a delegate attending the first day of an Royal Conservatoire of Scotland conference, which was celebrating thirty years of traditional music at RCS. The keynote speaker was Dr Jo Miller, one of the co-founders of the Scottish Music degree. As she spoke, her slides showing the chronology of those early years, I realised that when I arrived at what was then RSAMD in 1988, this was just as trad music teaching was getting off the ground.

In 1988, I had no idea that I’d end up recommencing my doctoral studies fifteen years later – little did I know! – forsaking mediaeval polyphony to focus on Scottish songs. My choice of subject was very much influenced by the thought that I’d at least be studying something that might be useful and relevant to students on that course. It took me a little bit longer before I realised that what I was researching counted as ancient history – certainly relevant background, but a very different kind of Scottish song to what today’s contemporary musicians really want to focus on! The songs – their tunes and authors – are still important. But the harpsichord, and subsequently the piano arrangements that I was looking at, represented the soundscape of another world entirely. By contrast, yesterday I heard a paper about sounding Scottish in modern harp-playing; another about the use of traditional Scottish music in videogames; and a third talking about Robert Burns and Hamish Henderson. So many different aspects of Scottish traditional music!

No more interviews or meetings for me this week, but next week I’ll resume my researches. Meanwhile, I need to create another ‘Microsoft Forms’ online form. To think that when I was first a doctoral researcher, I took typing lessons so that I wouldn’t be dependent on paying a typist – as I had done for my Masters dissertation.

By the time I finished my second attempt at a PhD, we had email and PCs. Social media and all the extra Microsoft offerings were still in the future.

And now – I couldn’t even do this present research without Teams, Bookings and Forms. Times change!

A Touch of Tartan

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Red McKinnon, MacKinnon tartan sash with The Scottish Clans Association of London badge

Do you want any more Flora Woodman,  or have I said enough?! I published an article earlier this year – same subject matter as my paper today, but certainly not the same piece of writing:-

‘The ‘Scottish Soprano’ and the ‘Voice of Scotland’: the Importance of Nationality to Flora Woodman and Robert Wilson’, History Scotland Vol.25 no.1 (Spring 2025), 74-81

Public library e-magazine apps may still provide access to the issue, though History Scotland is no longer published. I believe you can access it via the former publisher, too. Let me share the message I received from History Scotland a few weeks ago:-

“As you may know, the Spring 2025 issue of History Scotland will be the last issue of the magazine. Thank you so much for your support over the years.The good news is, we’ll still be exploring Scotland’s past in our expert webinars and our monthly history newsletter, and there is still a huge range of back issues of the magazine for you to enjoy…

“Visit the pocketmags.com website and you can download back issues going back to 2010. How to buy back issues:

“Log in to your pocketmags.com account or register for an account. Visit the History Scotland page and browse the many back issues of the magazine.

“The ‘Complete Collection’ offer gives you all the History Scotland digital back issues you don’t own yet for a special discounted price. How to complete your collection:- Log in to your pocketmags.com account or register for an account. Visit the History Scotland page and click on COMPLETE COLLECTION“

I made a McKinnon tartan sash as a ‘prop’ for my talk. That was Flora’s mum’s family tartan, going back a few generations. Flora said it – I haven’t verified this!  It also bears the Scottish Clans Association of London badge – oh, I take these things seriously!  (If you are reading this after the event but missed it – I only wore the tartan sash for 15 seconds to show how it would be worn.  Minimal cultural appropriation was committed.)

As we answered questions after the first three talks, something occurred to me. Flora had something significant in common with her Scottish Clans Association of London audiences. The vast majority of them were of Scottish descent, and – like Flora – quite a few of them would have been born outwith Scotland. To them, she was quite simply, Scottish, the same as they themselves were. No-one was going to accuse her of not really being Scottish, because that would negate their own sense of Scottishness too. If Scottish blood flows in your veins – you’re Scottish, wherever you are.

(Me? No, no, I’m only as Scottish as my surname!)

Conference Programme: Actors, Singers and Celebrity Cultures across the Centuries

Abstract

Being a Fellow at IASH

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

As I’ve already mentioned, I am currently a Heritage Collections Fellow at IASH – the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, at the University of Edinburgh. I’m halfway through my Fellowship, and (hopefully) halfway through my trawl of the Thomas Nelson publishers’ archives in search of correspondence about their music publications in the 1940s to 1950s.  The book I’m primarily interested in has presented me with a few surprises and thoughts of new directions to pursue, but I shall plough on through the archives until I am sure I’ve captured every whisper about these four little school books.

View from the Scholar Hotel

This week, we had the Institute’s 55th Anniversary celebrations, with a focus on Decoloniality. The Institute has just concluded a two-year project on this theme. There was also a session on motherhood and reproductive justice.

Now, you’d think, perhaps correctly, that my Scottish song book and music education focus has little connection with either decoloniality or motherhood. But I did put a lot of effort into broadening the scope of the music collection to include more music by women and composers of colour, whilst I was a Performing Arts librarian at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, so I was keen to find out what other scholars in more directly related disciplines have been doing.

I think it’s fair to say I felt a bit overawed! IASH is very interdisciplinary, so there were contributions from all corners of the humanities, and by scholars with far more extensive experience in their fields than I have in mine. But there were contributions from the performing arts, and from heritage collections and archives – I felt more comfortable in these areas, and a bit less out of my depth.

I stayed in Edinburgh overnight to make it less of a rush from Glasgow for the second morning.

In the final session, with contributions from past and present directors, I was impressed by the sheer reach and achievements of this amazing institution, and both proud and humbled to be a Fellow here.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us,

To see oursels as ithers see us!

In the context of Robert Burns’s poem, those lines are exhorting us not to get above ourselves, but taken in a different context, they perhaps offer reassurance that others see something in us that we can’t necessarily see ourselves.

‘They thought I was worthy to be a Fellow – in a very competitive application process?’, I mused. But yes, they did indeed select me, which is a vote of confidence in itself.  Sometimes, you need validation by others – it’s hard to be objective about oneself!

Another view from the Scholar Hotel

Image at top of post: The Edinburgh Futures Institute

ECRN Alt-Ac Showcase: Keynote Speaker

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

A first for me, today: I was the keynote speaker for an Early Career Research Network event jointly organised with CALt-Ac at the University of Birmingham.  That’s the College of Arts and Law’s network for people with ‘alternative academic’ roles, rather like mine when I was in the library 3.5 days a week, and seconded to research for 1.5.  Not a full-time academic,  in other words.

Yes, yes, you’re correct in pointing out that I’m not exactly ‘early-career’ myself!  I was invited to share my own ‘Alt-Ac’ story, since it transpires that I have actually been an Alt-Ac since before the term was devised.

Everyone was very kind and appreciative; it’s been a lovely day.  I heard interesting and informative contributions, and chatted to a number of people. There was a mix of subject-related presentations, and others which, as I did, shared their own way of making the alt-ac existence work for them.

The ‘Queen of Alt-Ac’ (not my words) declares herself happy (if abashed by the epithet), and is now being conveyed back to Glasgow in her carriage, Avanti West Coast.

My next post will share a summary of my talk. Are you ready …?!

Fellow Amongst Kindred Spirits

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Print Networks conference programme cover

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.

A Lost Work, aka, a Ghost Publication

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!

London suburbs

And a London Gent supplying Mozart Allan with Light Music?

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?!

Fellow on her Travels. Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I’m off to Tyneside for a conference. I went to university in Durham, had my first permanent job in South Shields, and my husband was born and brought up in Newcastle, so the north-east isn’t entirely unknown to me. I’m curious to see what the quayside in Newcastle looks like now – it must be a couple of decades since I was last there for more than a few hours.

‘Music for All’: the Rise and Fall of Scottish Music Publishing, 1880-1964

I’m looking forward to giving my paper at the Print Networks conference. 

  • Paper? Check!
  • PowerPoint? Check!
  • Power-dressing jacket?
  • Power-dressing jacket???
  • Power-dressing jacket left on dining room chair …. ????

Not to worry, I found a viable alternative on my way to Queen Street Station.  I’m really not into tailored dressing, anyway!

‘Holiday’?

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
'Don', one of the IAML Cambridge Congress mascots, clad in academic robes

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!