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
You might ask what any of this has to do with Georgian legal deposit music? On the face of it, not a lot. This is partly because although the web announcement named UWS and the titles of the talks, it didn’t name the department or that a couple of the presentations were based on Masters students projects. The department has a contemporary and recent contemporary, rather than a centuries-old historical focus, so there was a divergence of approaches between theirs and mine. Also, partly because I saw the words “reframing heritage” and “art practice”, and I read what I wanted to read. And that’s my fault – but don’t we often do this?! Obviously, “heritage” does not have to mean Georgian. “Reframing” can also include responding musically to something other than music, whilst my own research places heritage music as the primary focus and looks for ways to reframe that, to make it relevant and appealing to people today. But my research response is not to write music (although I’ve been known to write the odd self-indulgent tune!), and – until today – it wouldn’t have occurred to me to produce a documentary film about it.
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 