It has been a fortnight of revisions. I had a minor tweak to do to my book manuscript, but that was done pretty much in the twinkling of an eye. So far, so good. I zipped it all up in another zip-file, and off it went.
I’m also revising a paper that I’m giving to a professional organisation at the end of April. Most of it is fine, but I have an extra bit I need to add since I last gave the talk to a different group.
But then, yesterday I decided to do some revision to a lecture that I’m scheduled to give to our own students in a month’s time. I’ve given it annually for several years, and each time it gets a little brush-and-polish to reflect any additional thoughts I’ve had on the topic.
This time – and I don’t know why I thought of it – it underwent a slightly more detailed overhaul. Partly, this is because of the work done on my book since this time last year. In March last year, I was still completing the manuscript for the first draft. Now, it’s with the editors, so my thoughts have had time to settle. But actually, it’s quite interesting to stand back and look at this particular lecture, since it draws on my research over two decades, albeit in a pretty superficial way. (Well, how much can be said in an hour?!)
Writing Under Headings
As I read the lecture through for the umpteenth time today, I realised that there were bits of rearrangement to do. I remembered my PhD supervisor’s advice: write headings, then ensure you write to those headings. Today, I retrospectively added some headings and – miraculously – any passages that were slightly out of order pretty much jumped out and slapped me in the face. It definitely improves the clarity of one’s writing.
The controversies around Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’s achievements are clearer with some of the life history pruned out, and her friend Professor Blackie is introduced in a more organised way.
Ironically, my listeners won’t even know what’s changed (and they won’t see those new headings!), but I’ll know it’s more polished, and that’s the main thing.
I’ve written quite a bit about women in musical history, so I’m adding something to the top of this post every couple of days during Women’s History Month – mostly flashbacks to women musicians I’ve researched, but some other discoveries too. (I’ve been shifting things around to a more chronological order, but I’ve always added the new bit first!) You’ll find more musicians than composers in this posting, just because of my own recent research.
Sometimes I look at the history of women musicians from the point of view of good library provision for our readers, whilst at other times my own research interests are foremost. It just depends on the day of the week, because I currently occupy two roles in the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. For 3.5 days a week, I’m a librarian. For 1.5, a postdoctoral researcher.
15. The Ketelbey Fellowship
It’s a whole year since I learned that I had been awarded the first Ketelbey postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of St Andrews. Scholar Doris Ketelbey was a significant figure in the history of the department. I felt highly honoured to have been the first Ketelbey Fellow from September to December 2023.
14. Representation of Women Composers in the Library
I couldn’t resist adding the open access article I published about my EDI activity in our own Whittaker Library:-
It’s a privilege to shape a library collection, so I’m pleased to have just ordered and catalogued several relevant books this month.
Susan Tomes, Women and the Piano: a History in 50 Lives (Yale University Press, 2024) Read more about it on the publisher’s website, here. In actual fact, it’s the fourth title by this author that we now have in stock. So if readers like this, they might like the earlier three, too!
Margaret C. Watson, Women in Academia : Achieving our Potential. (Market Harborough : Troubadour, 2024). Not a book about women in history, but very much for women in the present day!
Gillian Dooley, She played and sang: Jane Austen and Music (Manchester University Press, 2024). Back to history again.
Women and Music in Ireland / ed. Jennifer O’Connor-Madsen; Laura Watson & Ita Beausang (Boydell Press, 2022)
Moreover, there’s a new Routledge book coming out this summer – I have ordered it for the Whittaker Library. Of course, I may have retired from the Library by the time it arrives. This just means I won’t need to catalogue it! I’ll still be a part-time researcher, so I’ll be able to read it:-
It’s some years now, since a single-minded schoolgirl decided action was necessary. In 2015, Jessy McCabe noticed that Edexel had no women composers in the A-Level Music syllabus, and successfully petitioned to rectify this, via Change.org. I found out about her impressive initiative when I was beginning to start serious work on building up our library collection to include more music – contemporary and historical – by women and people of colour.
Jessy is now a Special Needs teacher. I’m sure she’ll go far.
11. Forgotten Women Composers
Part of academia entails sharing research outcomes beyond the ‘ivory walls’. It’s called public engagement, and that’s the opportunity I seized when my old friend The People’s Friend magazine commissioned me to write a feature back in 2020.
The sound of forgotten music: Karen McAulay uncovers some of the great female composers who have been lost from history’, in The People’s Friend, Special Edition, 11 Sep 2020, 2 p. (Dundee : D C Thomson). I blogged about it at the time (here).
10. Late Victorian Women Musicians
Since my more recent research has focused on the late Victorian era and the first part of the twentieth century, you’ll not be surprised to find that I found some interesting Scottish women musicians of that era! They are forgotten today – but I’ve done my bit to raise their profiles!
Newsletter article, ‘‘Our Heroine is Dead’: Miss Margaret Wallace Thomson, Paisley Organist (1853-1896)’, The Glasgow Diapason, March 2023, 10-15. (You can find this article in full on this blog)
‘An Extensive Musical Library’: Mrs Clarinda Webster, LRAM, Brio vol.59 no.1 (2022), 29-42 (a late Victorian head teacher who founded a music school in Aberdeen, and later did a national survey of music in public libraries – which she presented to the Library Association!)
In October 2023, I pondered about Mr *and Mrs* J. Spencer Curwen (amongst others) in another blog post, when I remarked upon early twentieth century attitudes to folk song.
9. In Praise of Music Cataloguers! Introducing Miss Elizabeth Lambert
Before I started the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall music copyright network, I had spent some months researching the wonderful late 18th and early 19th century music copyright collection at the University of St Andrews. A key resource was the handwritten catalogue in two notebooks, largely compiled by Miss Elizabeth Lambert (later to become Mrs Williams, when she married and moved to London.)
I just love the fact that this earnest young woman (I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m pretty sure she must have been earnest!) created a useful resource which would help everyone get maximum use out of the music repertoire that other libraries were less than impressed by. So we had Elizabeth cataloguing the collection, and numerous men and women, friends of the professors, making use of it. I blogged about her, and eventually wrote an article for the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, mentioning her again.
‘A Music Library for St Andrews: use of the University’s Copyright Music Collections, 1801-1849’, in Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society no.15 (2020), 13-33.
The library’s copyright collection of music was a boon for middling class women like headmistress Mrs Bertram, her teacher daughters and their pupils. It does lead one to wonder if they had a harp at the school. I checked their borrowing records for more evidence. They certainly borrowed several volumes which included harp music.
7. Students but not at University? Educating Young Women
It’s time to turn to piano teacher Mr T. Latour. I’d like to refer you to my June 2018 blog post about women in St Andrews using pedagogical musical material in the early 19th century. Possibly the self-same young ladies attending, or having attended Mrs Bertram’s school?! The illustration features a young woman – probably just approaching or about marriagable age – at an upright piano. The abundant floral arrangement atop the piano (quite apart from sending shivers down the housekeeper’s spine every time the young pianist played too enthusiastically) suggests a well-to-do household. Following Latour’s instructions, the pianist has elegantly flat hands …..
T. Latour – Ladies’ Thorough Bass
Latour advises on the seating position, and how to hold ones hands elegantly
6. Not my work – but very timely for WHM 2024]
I’m not posting anything relating to my work today, but I saw mention of a great new article by Dominic Bridge the other day, so I thought I’d share details here. It’s a fascinating read. The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies is part of the Wiley Online Library:-
Back in 2018 when I was awarded the AHRC networking grant for the Claimed from Stationers Hall network, I drew up a list of women composers from the Georgian era. There were more than one might have expected – perhaps they only composed a handful of pieces, in many cases, but nonetheless – they composed. You can find the list on a separate page on this blog, here. And you can read more about it in the blogpost I wrote in July 2018,
This lady ran a girls’ school at St Leonard’s in St Andrews. This was NOT the famous and long-established private school that has long stood there, but an earlier enterprise. And Mrs Bertram and her daughters subsequently moved to Edinburgh, to the disappointment of parents of daughters in St Andrews!
The photo portrays a Mrs Bertram of Edinburgh. Chronologically, she could well be ‘our’ Mrs Bertram, and a scholarly bent is suggested by the pile of books at her hand.
2. The Accomplished Ladies of Torloisk
I almost forgot about the musical Maclean-Clephane ladies of Torloisk, which is a stately home on the island of Mull. But how could I forget about them, considering I published a lengthy article about them some years ago?! Luckily, a book of letters by Sir Walter Scott crossed my library desk, and even though it didn’t contain those particular letters, this did remind me of his musical friends in Torloisk!
Karen E. McAulay, ‘The Accomplished Ladies of Torloisk‘, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 44, No. 1 (June 2013), 57-78
Today, I’d like to introduce a woman composer who predates most of the individuals I’ve encountered. Professor James Porter applies his considerable intellect to produce this in-depth article:-
‘An English Composer and Her Opera: Harriet Wainewright’s Comàla (1792)’, Journal of Musicological Research Feb, 2021. Published online: 16 Feb 2021.
This is the third week of my Ketelbey Fellowship, and I arrived at St Andrews in pouring rain yesterday morning. Fortunately, it had subsided to a drizzle by the time I made my way to Martyrs Kirk, where materials from the Library special collections can be consulted. I didn’t get wet enough to risk dripping onto rare Victorian pamphlets! (I only know they were Victorian by the fact that the earlier numbers included God Save the Queen rather than the King – so they were published before January 1901.)
I had a ball! They each began with an editorial introduction – I love these. They’re so informative about the thinking behind whatever is in the book. Intriguingly, the editor seemed not to be the prime contributor, but all was revealed when I did some Googling later. Good old Baptie (Musical Scotland) informed me that the editor had two middle names, and used them as a nom de plume. No mystery after all! Moreover, one particular collaborator, more involved than most, was …
His daughter.
I didn’t quite get through the pile I’d called up, but I’m making good progress. And I encountered some interesting glimpses into social and political history. What’s more, if ever I needed proof that little girls’ education had a subtle difference to that of little boys, I found it today. It shouldn’t come as a surprise – I know it happened. But I wasn’t expecting to find this in a Sol-Fa song book!
It is such a luxury to have a desk in an office just a couple of minutes from a big university library. This morning, I snatched a quick coffee before I went back for another session with more of these instruction books. What’s more, I feel more a dedicated researcher here, compared to being ‘the librarian that also does research’ in Glasgow. It’s easier to focus, somehow. And tonight, I’m going to a research seminar, so I’ll get to meet some more historians then. Good times.
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?!)
My latest eBay purchase will teach me to look more closely at the photos. (Of which there were a lot, I might add.) But the words DESCRIBING the pair of books nowhere said that one was a staff edition, and the other Tonic Sol-Fa!
The cover title was correctly transcribed, although the seller hadn’t indicated that the one without the words “School edition – Staff” was, in fact, the School edition in Tonic Sol-Fa. Had I looked right through the photos, I would have got to the picture of the Sol-Fa title page and an example of the Sol-Fa itself. My mistake!
However, in this case it’s not too much of a problem – I’m more concerned with the contents of the books and their paratext, than actually playing or singing the music. And if I want to practise my sol-fa reading skills, well, I now have another book to practise with!
Pocket-size instructions, a dance-card, and a mouse – just for size comparison!
Mozart Allan’s dance instruction book, Allan’s Ball-Room Guide, early 1900s. Just the right size for a breast pocket, same as a dance card. And here you also see a dance card from the Caledonian Society of Aden, Yemen, produced for St Andrew’s Day 1959 (nothing to do with Mozart Allan) – so you can compare them for size.
Mind you, the Society had a very traditional programme of dances, didn’t it? Mozart Allan would’ve known at least half the dances listed!
(Featured top image: No spitting on the carpet, please, gents – it’s a sure sign of low breeding!)
Try as I will to avoid the temptation, my research interests overspill into my weekends. Saturday saw me inventorising the late Jimmy Shand’s less-antiquarian accordion music at the Wighton Collection in Dundee. I had much amusement looking at the accordion instruction books! There might be mileage in a wee general-interest article about these, so I can see I’ll have to look at them more closely when I return to finish my “honorary librarian” duties another time. (I’m obsessed with paratext for its value as cultural context, and music instruction books are a bit of a spin-off from this – even if they’re not from the Georgian era!)
Back at home on Sunday, I did a little more work on my Sir John Macgregor Murray paper.
When I was doing my PGCert, I surveyed a cohort of postgraduate distance-learners to see what they thought of some brief instructional self-help clips that I had designed. I asked for feedback, and I got it – short videos were very welcome, it seemed, but several students particularly asked for animations. I liked this idea – apart from wondering how I would achieve this!
When I found Biteable.com, I was quite excited – there are a number of templates and audio backgrounds to choose from, and you can just edit in your own text, changing colours and adding pictures as you choose. I’ve already done a couple for this research network, and a couple of months ago I made one as a library guide, too.
This week, I made two more. One is about setting up email alerts for our library discovery layer, and the video I’ve just curated today is about fake news – basically, not leaping to conclusions about things when you haven’t enough evidence to back your suppositions up. It stemmed from Wednesday’s field trip. It would have been great to have been able to say that I’d discovered a whole story about how certain music scores got into an old library collection. But – as you’ll see – in truth, I haven’t enough evidence to back up my guesses, and my initial ideas are probably pure fantasy! The scores are there, some of them in what might be a legal deposit volume. But to infer any connection between the scores by these two particular composers would, at present, be reckless in the extreme!
Anyway, do have a look. I had fun making them, and I hope both videoclips will be useful.
Spotting Fake News (Be a Good Scholar) – videoclip
Last night, I thought I’d try to devise a mind-map to demonstrate the many directions the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall research has taken me – and could, indeed, take us further as a network. After twenty minutes spent manipulating triangles in a Word document, I realised the error of my ways. Never mind the mind-map – I could just list the topics. So, here goes:-
The whole corpus of legal deposit music in the late 18th and early 19th centuries:-
Where it went
How it got there
What was retained
Who was involved in its immediate and subsequent curation
Whether it was used
What about the materials not retained?
The approach to this material in different institutions
Women composing music
Women performing music
Women teaching music
Music composed in response to war
Music in cultural history – what was popular, when, with whom?
Music for dance
Music pedagogy prior to the mid-19th century
Music for particular instruments (eg harp) or ensembles
Musical arrangements, music re-purposed in some way (and copyright issues)
National music – privileged in terms of retention?
Religious music – I haven’t separated out any strands here yet
Hymn books – published with and without music. Another strand I have yet to explore
Documentation, cataloguing
Big data (when more collections are catalogued online)
Comparison of retention patterns between different libraries
Digitisation
Performance possibilities
Finally, last and by no means least – The big picture. Even acknowledging the contribution of the European great masters to music of this era, have we underestimated the importance of contemporary British music? Some is good, admittedly some is bad, and some is indifferent – but much of it is significant in revealing cultural trends at the time. This, I believe, is the true importance of the Georgian legal deposit music corpus.
Although, as we’ve seen, some Georgian legal deposit libraries didn’t actually want to retain music – after all, it wasn’t yet a university subject – the pattern of retention was varied to say the least. The University of St Andrews kept quite a bit of music. Meanwhile, the University of Edinburgh retained some but certainly not all that was on offer. However, there’s one category of musical material that seems to have been deemed worth keeping, and that was pedagogical material. I had already noticed quite a bit of it at the University of St Andrews, and I did a bit of research into who borrowed what kind of material. Bear in mind that an ability to play the piano was quite desirable for the well-bred young Georgian miss. When I started looking at the Edinburgh collection more recently, I was interested to see that music teaching books were popular there, too. I wonder if the Edinburgh professors ever borrowed music for their daughters and friends in the same way the St Andrews chaps did?
I plan to see what I can identify on the Edinburgh spreadsheets, and see how it maps across with the St Andrews collections, just to see if there’s much overlap. It’ll be a bit hit-or-miss, but a quick survey will tell me if there is an interesting story to be uncovered. Coincidentally, I did once wonder if any students at my workplace might be interested in the history of piano pedagogy. Little did I realise that I might eventually be the one getting interested in much earlier material in a research capacity!
If I got interested in all of the pedagogical material published between 1780 and 1840, it would be a bit like Alice disappearing down a rabbit-hole, so I’m inclined to focus on one category in particular: the teaching of “thorough bass” (aka “figured bass”) and harmony – in other words, on theory, more than instrumental technique. And if I were to find a few observations about teaching music theory to girls and women, then that would be an added bonus, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t expect the approach to be different, but it would be interesting to notice any remarks made specifically to them.
Here’s a thought, to start with. After his opening preface, Latour’s thorough bass tutor is heavy on musical examples and light on text, which is a little disappointing given my predeliction for paratext. Nonetheless, in that opening preface, we learn that he aimed to teach “what a young Lady ought to know, viz: to be able to accompany the Voice with propriety, to play from a figured Bass, and to compose her own Preludes, Variations, &c.” From this, we can tell that the “young Lady” was not expected merely to be a performer, but to compose (or improvise?) as well. And the pages of examples that follow provide a good introduction to generating variations – perhaps on popular songs, such as the many sets of variations on national and operatic airs that abounded in the early nineteenth century.
If one instructional treatise tells us this much, how much more might the others reveal?! I have a new book that I need to start reading: David J Golby, Instrumental Teaching in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Routledge, 2016 ) – originally an Ashgate imprint, 2004.
I have a new book that I need to start reading: David J Golby, Instrumental Teaching in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Routledge, 2016 ) – originally an Ashgate imprint, 2004.
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 