Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, Tower architect – image from RIBA/ArtUK
Here’s a fantastic webpage devoted to the exhibition that Cambridge University Library mounted last year. It’s an excellent read, and I’ve got the link saved for addition to the next update of our network music legal deposit bibliography. But I can’t wait to share it with you, so here it is – for your mindful enjoyment:-
(I confess, I have just sauntered via the Amazon page to buy Stephen Fry’s novel, The Liar(2004) for my Kindle. It’s set in the University Library. But that’s for leisure reading, so I must leave it aside for a while!)
The other day, I decided to make a map of the UK’s Georgian legal deposit library locations. Yes, I know – it’s a strange way to interpret a serious research project, but I wanted an illustration that would have impact for an audience, not all of whom may know as much about legal deposit as I now do! So, first I thought about making a patchwork map, but after experimenting with lines on a map, I concluded that it would be such a weird piece of patchwork that maybe I needed to come up with a Plan B.
A collage map seemed more feasible, and I thought I’d mark out where the legal deposit libraries were by linking them together and then appliqueing the shape that resulted. And there they were – a triangle in England (London-Oxford-Cambridge) and a triangle in Scotland (Glasgow-Aberdeen-Edinburgh, with St Andrews sitting on the line between Aberdeen and Edinburgh). Finally, there were the new arrivals of two legal deposit libraries in Dublin from 1801 onwards (Trinity College and Kings’ Inns) – I couldn’t force them into a triangle, but I gave them one anyway. So there it was – the three triangles formed another triangle, and I had my graphic illustration.
But why the big gap in the middle with no legal deposit libraries? Ah, that’s probably because there weren’t any university libraries old enough to be considered when legal deposit was established at the beginning of the 18th century! As a graduate of Durham myself, I thought it was a shame that we missed out on this privilege, but the fact is that although Durham Hall became Durham College back in 1286, it was actually founded by the University of Oxford, eventually becoming Trinity College, Oxford in 1555. The University of Durham and University College weren’t founded until 1832, and the Royal Charter was granted to the University by King William IV in 1837. (All dates from the University website.) By the time Durham had its university, widespread legal deposit was about to be curtailed, and the Library Deposit Act had already been enacted a year before its Royal Charter was granted. “Too late”, as a Scottish friend put it succinctly! (Similarly, the Victoria University of Manchester was formed as a medical school in 1824, but did not become a university until even later, in 1851.)
So, the harsh facts are that there weren’t any old-established universities between the southern golden triangle and the Scottish one, at the time the legislation was enacted! And that’s why the legal deposit libraries were scattered around the UK and Ireland as they were.
My research lecture at Edinburgh University went well last week (though I say it myself!) – I was delighted to have received such a warm reception. Here’s my powerpoint, also uploaded to the Calendar tab of this blog. It was good to have the opportunity to give a talk focusing on a collection (well, what’s left of the legal deposit music!) that hasn’t had a great deal of exposure before, and I was absolutely delighted to make the acquaintance of a former Edinburgh academic who is probably the only person to have investigated Edinburgh’s legal deposit music in a systematic way. Apart, of course, from Hans Gal’s bibliographic efforts, which noted some but not all of the Reid Music Library’s contents dating pre-1850. I’m about to start reading some notes that I was generously given after my lecture – it’s a great privilege to be given them.
Whilst St Andrews has its magnificent collection and all the related documentation and archival material, I’m keen to stress that Edinburgh has different strengths: not nearly as much legal deposit music, but an entire historical musical instrument collection, and the wonderful St Cecilia’s Hall which not only exhibits them, but also offers unique performance spaces. Nothing would make me happier than to learn that students were inspired to explore the music on the historical instruments! Early printed music is fascinating in musicological terms, but bringing it back to life in terms of sound is something special – as the Sound Heritagenetwork has been keen to demonstrate in many wonderful ways.
Next stop, meetings in Dublin and London – and then the EFDSS conference. Better get writing again!
I’m looking forward to giving a talk to students at the University of Edinburgh this week. The University Library was one of the recipients of legal deposit materials during the Georgian era, before the law changed in 1836. Amongst all the learned tomes and textbooks, they received sheet-music too. The interesting question, of course, is what they did with it!
Now, as you know, I’m a bit of an enthusiast when it comes to bibliographies, but this time I’ve prepared a very minimal bibliography in a novel format. Should you wish to share it, here’s an easy URL to the same animated bibliography:-
Just thought I’d remind you that we have an extensive bibliography pertaining to the history of music legal deposit and copyright in the UK (and further afield, in a few instances). Do take a look – if you have written on the subject but I haven’t picked up the citation, please do forward it! Similarly, if you have colleagues whose work ought to be included in this listing, it would be great if you could let me know. I’d hate for anyone to be missed out! Very many thanks.
I was at Edinburgh University Library yesterday – I’m trying to work out which bound volumes might contain music that arrived through the legal deposit route. I was looking at one particular volume, and came to a batch of pieces all by the same Edinburgh-based composer. I looked him up – and found he spent some time in Italy in his youth, under the direction of a particular teacher.
Then I remembered that I’d encountered some music BY that teacher, in a different volume. And then – exploring the University Library catalogue – I found more by the Edinburgh composer AND more by the Italian musician. Is it remotely possible that the individual who arranged for that legal deposit volume to be bound, also knew the Edinburgh musician? It was some decades before music would have an official, recognised place in the University curriculum, but obviously some music was being collected.
Equally, might the music by the Italian – in another volume, not necessarily legal deposit, and in other volumes definitely not so – have come to Edinburgh in some way connected with his British pupil?
You might argue that this doesn’t have much to do with legal deposit. In one sense, that’s true. But if we’re thinking about what the University decided to keep, out of the legal deposit material that they received, then this is – if nothing else – quite interesting, surely?
As to the identity of these guys – well, let me enjoy the mystery a bit longer, once I’ve worked out if there’s any more to be discovered!
I’m currently taking annual leave, and although I’m covertly pushing ahead with a couple of queries I’ve set myself, strictly speaking there should be a silence whilst I’m on holiday!
Polite Request
However, if any followers of this blog were to feel inspired to author a blogpost in some way connected with historical Georgian legal deposit music, or indeed, on any aspect of music legal deposit, then please do email me at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I’m glancing at my emails intermittently, and I won’t be able to resist an intriguing subject heading!
Today, we share with you something completely different. Dr Eva Moreda Rodriguez, Music Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, writes for us about Spanish legal deposit and its value in terms of historical sound recordings. It underlines the importance of legal deposit in a much wider variety of contexts than one would at first imagine.
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Shortly after Claimed from Stationers’ Hall was set up, I had the opportunity to experience first-hand how the requirement to submit copies of every printed work to a library can, if satisfied, change our understanding of music and musical cultures of the past in radical ways. Indeed, when I started to research the arrival of recording technologies in Spain from 1878 onwards and the responses of Spaniards to them, I was faced with the issue of a lack of sources. I did indeed have newspaper and magazine articles – but these were often brief announcements or texts intended for scientific dissemination which did shed little light on how the average Spaniard would have reacted upon hearing a phonograph for the first time. References to the phonograph in Spanish literature were surprisingly scarce, and memoirs and journals did not shed much light on the issue either. Discovering, at the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica (BDH), a zarzuela by successful composer Ruperto Chapí named El fonógrafo ambulante (The travelling phonograph) and dated 1899 prompted the question: did any other theatrical and musical plays of the time feature phonographs and gramophones, and if so, can they shed any light on cultural attitudes towards recording technologies at the time?A search at the BDH website, as well as at The Internet Archive and at the premises of the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) revealed that at least fifteen plays were premiered in Spain between 1885 and 1914 which featured a phonograph or gramophone in a significant role. Most of those works (libretti and, on some occasions the music) arrived at the BNE through the legal deposit mechanism. This, in itself, tells us a lot about both legal deposit in Spain and the significance of theatrical genres in the late 19th and early 20th century. Indeed, some sort of legal deposit requirement (privilegio real) had existed in Spain from 1716, but a full, comprehensive legal deposit norm was not introduced until 1957. In practice, this meant that, through the 19th century and early 20th century, legal deposit requirements were often met haphazardly, and not all authors deposited copies of their works at the BNE, then the only legal deposit library in Spain.
Source: Biblioteca Valenciana
Theatrical authors, though, had an incentive to do so. Theatre-going was, at the time, one of the preferred pastimes of Spaniards of all social classes, particularly in urban areas. A number of popular theatre genres, combining music with the spoken word to different extents (sainete, zarzuela, revista, invento, pasillo), flourished in an ever-growing number of theatres. Intended for consumption and entertainment, many of these plays were replaced after a few runs, forcing the authors to constantly come up with new ideas: there was, indeed, money to be made, but the environment was competitive. In this climate, one of the few weapons authors had in order to protect themselves from unscrupulous impresarios who might stage their works without compensating them financially was to deposit copies of their works at the BNE so that authorship could be conclusively proven in case of legal disputes.
A happy consequence of this practice is that works that might not have survived otherwise – because they were generally ephemeral, inconsequential and often of limited artistic merit – have made it to our days, providing us with a fascinating corpus to study both theatrical culture in Restoration Spain and broader social and cultural issues during this period. These plays were written primarily to entertain, and as such they satirized certain aspects of contemporary politics and society – but they never decisively challenged the status quo and ultimately celebrated the Spanish pueblo as a community of individuals happy to live by traditional, conservative values: for example, a number of these plays may feature fiery, memorable female characters, but at the same time the genre mocked the nascent first-wave feminist movement relentlessly.
In my research, I have been working under the hypothesis that these plays would have presented ideas and discourses around recording technologies that would have resonated with their audiences – always within the generally conservative, paternalistic framework I have described above. For example, several of the plays develop the idea of the phonograph being able to reproduce reality with the utmost fidelity – by recording in private, by accident, statements that individuals would not have dared making in public – and then playing them back. Wives are found out not to love their husbands, and vice-versa, and politicians are found out to lie to their electorate in pursuit of votes. Such episodes, however, were developed purely for comic effect, and one never finds even the slightest suggestion that technological modernity – which was generally seen as critical to the advancement of Spain – should be coupled up with social or political modernity. This is too the case with El fonógrafo ambulante, to which I have referred earlier: the travelling phonograph that arrives in a remote Andalusian village at first threatens to destabilize the social order by making the heroine, Araceli, consider breaking her engagement to the town’s mayor and instead marrying Antero, the phonograph operator, instead. However, once it is established that both Araceli and Antero are true representatives of the Spanish pueblo, young and resourceful but ultimately attached to traditional values, the phonograph, which has brought them together, becomes a guarantee for social order, and the play ends with all villagers gathered around the device and listening in fascination.
Followers of this blog will know that you can look at historical piano teaching materials in the libraries that hold legal deposit collections. Nowadays, there are a handful of big national and university libraries in the UK that still receive one copy of everything published, under statutory legislation. But there are other libraries – especially in Scotland – that also received this material, until the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign.
Theodore Latour was pianist to King George IV – Victoria’s uncle. He taught privately and at girls’ schools, played and composed, and also wrote some piano tutor books. As it happens, Emily Bronte had music by Latour in her collection, including one of his books of progressive exercises, although I haven’t examined that particular publication. (Robert K. Wallace mentions it, in his Emily Bronte and Beethoven: Romantic Equilibrium in Fiction and Music.)
It’s possible to find copies of some of Latour’s works online via Google Books, IMSLP or Archive.org, so if you’re interested, we could point you in the right direction.
I have been experimenting with other ways of talking/writing about the Stationers’ Hall Georgian legal deposit music corpus. Here are my Saturday afternoon efforts. Have you tried any such audiovisual presentations in your own research? Do you find them helpful?
Hans Gal (1890-1987) catalogued Edinburgh University’s Reid Music Library during the summer and autumn of 1938, at the instigation of Sir Donald Tovey. The latter was keen to find work for the gifted composer and musicologist, who had emigrated from Vienna when Hitler annexed Austria. (Here’s a recording of his earlier Promenadenmusik for wind band, which he wrote in 1926. ) A grant from the Carnegie Trust enabled Gal’s catalogue to be published in 1941. When the Second World War ended, Gal joined the University music staff, and remained there beyond retirement age.
The reader is referred to the Hans Gal website for further biographical information (I am checking this weblink, which occasionally falters):- http://www.hansgal.org/
Gál, Hans, Catalogue of manuscripts, printed music and books on music up to 1850 : in the Library of the Music Department at the University of Edinburgh (Reid Library) (London, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1941)
(Partially) catalogued by Gal
The catalogue is in three parts, listing manuscripts, printed music, and books on music. Gal did not list every individual piece of music in the library, but prioritised more serious classical music, whether vocal or instrumental. One might suggest that there were various reasons for Gal’s decision.
In his preface, he explains that, ‘for practical reasons I confined this catalogue to the old part of the library, namely the manuscripts, printed music and books on music up to 1850, which is the latest limit of issues that might be looked upon as of historical importance’. [Gal, vii]
However, this was not the only limitation placed on the listing. Gal omitted many of the pieces of sheet music that must have arrived as legal deposit copies during the Georgian era, until copyright legislation changed in 1836. The Reid music cupboards contained a number of Sammelbänder, or ‘binder’s volumes’, ie, bound volumes of assorted pieces of music. Occasionally Gal made oblique reference to these, eg, to cover the 44 items in volume D 96:-
“Songs, Arias, etc., by various composers (Th. Smith, D. Corri, Bland, R. A. Smith, Rauzzini, Davy, Kelly, Urbani; partly anon.) Single Editions by Longman & Broderip, Urbani, Polyhymnian Comp., etc., London (ca. 1780-1790). Fol. D 96″ [Gal, 44]
Longman & Broderip were prolific music publishers, amongst the most assiduous of firms making trips to Stationers’ Hall to register new works. They published a lot of theatrical songs and arrangements, and much dance music, as well as the more serious, ‘classical’ music repertoire. The catalogue entry cited above details some more commonly known composers of decidedly middle-of-the road, if not downmarket material. One does not need to speculate as to whether Gal considered such material less respectable, for he made no secret of his disdain for much of the music published in this era! In the preface, he asserts that,
“The gradual declining from Thomas Arne to Samuel Arnold, Charles Dibdin, William Shield, John Davy, Michael Kelly, is unmistakeable, although there is still plenty of humour and tunefulness in musical comedies such as Dr Arnold’s “Gretna Green”, Dibdin’s “The Padlock”, Shield’s numerous comic operas and pasticcios.
“After 1800 the degeneration was definitive, in the sacred music as well as in songs and musical comedy. […] It is hardly disputable that the first third of the nineteenth century, the time of the Napoleonic Wars and after, was an age of the worst general taste in music ever recorded in history, in spite of the great geniuses with which we are accustomed to identify that period.” [Gal, x]
Faced with several hundred of such pieces in a number of bound volumes, and quite possibly a limited number of months in which to complete the initial cataloguing, it is hardly surprising if Gal was content to make a few generic entries hinting at this proliferation of ‘bad taste’. (One might add as an aside, that Gal’s wife at one point observed that Gal ‘hated swallowing the dust in archives’, in connection with an earlier extended project in the late 1920s – clearly, he was able to overcome his distaste when the need arose! (See http://www.hansgal.org/hansgal/42, citing private correspondence of 10.10.1989)
Interestingly, it is evident that Edinburgh, like several other of the legal deposit libraries, must have been selective in what was retained, but it’s significant that national song books were certainly considered worth keeping. Gal, in turn, included some of the prominent titles in his listing.
Thus, Gal’s catalogue is another reminder to us that the history of music claimed from Stationers’ Hall under legal deposit in the Georgian era, actually and actively continues beyond the Georgian era, for the material has already been curated by musicologists and bibliographers prior to our own generation. In St Andrews, Cedric Thorpe Davie took an active interest, whilst Henry George Farmer was involved in curating the University of Glasgow collection.
Meanwhile, in connection with the current Claimed From Stationers’ Hall network research, the priority is to establish which volumes – formerly in the Reid School of Music cupboards, but now in the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections – were received under legal deposit. Two spread-sheet listings enable us to examine the contents of different volumes, by volume:-
Where publication dates are not given in the spread-sheet, they can be looked up in Copac, and even if there are no decisive dates, then their presence in other legal deposit collections will suggest that these copies arrived by the same route. If music predates 1818, then works can be looked up in Michael Kassler’s Music Entries at Stationers’ Hall, 1710-1818, from Lists prepared for William Hawes, D. W. Krummel and Alan Tyson. (Click here for Copac entry.)
Essentially, the first task is to ascertain which volumes contain legal deposit music, and then to look not only at what survives, but whether there are any patterns to be discerned. In terms of musicological, book, library or cultural history, the question today is not whether the music was ‘degenerate’ or in ‘bad taste’, but to ask ourselves what it tells us about music reception and curation in its own and subsequent eras.
Postscript: as an interesting twist in the world of library and book history, my own copy of Gal’s catalogue was purchased secondhand – a withdrawn copy from a university library where the music department closed a few years ago. What goes around, comes around, as they say!
Dear friends and fellow network members,
I’m currently taking annual leave, and although I’m covertly pushing ahead with a couple of queries I’ve set myself, strictly speaking there should be a silence whilst I’m on holiday!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 