Waiting with bated breath to see if I’ll make it to the antipodes, this week I continued my explorations closer to home, visiting the National Library of Scotland yesterday to investigate music committee meetings at the Advocates Library in 1831-2, and later in 1856. The Advocates Library (later to be absorbed into the National Library of Scotland) was one of the Scottish copyright libraries, so received the quarterly consignments of legal deposit materials, and indeed continued to receive them after the legislation had stripped most universities of legal deposit entitlements in 1836.
Who should I immediately encounter but my old friend William Dauney? He was to author Ancient Scotish Melodies in 1838, before he emigrated to British Guyana (as it was then).
He was in good company – John Donaldson was also on the committee. Donaldson had started out as a music teacher in Glasgow, trained as a lawyer in Edinburgh, and eventually (on his fourth application) became fourth Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University in 1845. (You can find out much, much more on the excellent Edinburgh University Reid Concerts database, here.) But all this was well in the future, in 1831-2. It was good to know that the music’s future wellbeing was in safe hands.
Dauney and Donaldson were joined by a Mr Monro – too common a name in Edinburgh 
to be sure of his identity, though there certainly was a Mr Monro in the tenor section of the 1842 Reid Concert, and he might have been a partner in the music-sellers Monro and May, who traded for a time in London.
I discovered that – horror! – prior to the establishment of the music committee, the Advocates had apparently not been taking particularly good care of their copyright music. But before we gasp in righteous indignation, let’s remember that the legal deposit libraries had been receiving mountains of light popular music along with the more ‘worthy’ compositions – for example, on this very day in 1787, publishers Longman and Broderip made one of their very frequent trips to Stationers’ Hall to register Jonas Blewitt’s song, sung at Bermondsey’s Spa Gardens by Mr Burling – ‘Where are my Jolly Companions gone? A favourite drunken song.’ It is sadly understandable that many scholarly libraries couldn’t see the need for this material, whether or not they had a legal and moral obligation to take it. There are still copies catalogued online in two libraries in the UK, if you’re curious to see how awful – or otherwise – the song might have been!
John Winter Jones
As a librarian myself, I smiled to read that after a week of deliberations, this committee couldn’t agree whether to classify music by composers’ names, or by publisher. Small wonder they requested rules from the British Museum, which was somewhat ahead of them in terms of music librarianship! John Winter Jones, Assistant Librarian at the Museum, took the lead in creating a catalogue there, and later became Principal Librarian. I believe the “Ninety-one rules” originated during his time there. (Ninety one! If he had only seen AACR2, Marc cataloguing, RDA and all the other cataloguing protocols now available …)
There remains one further excitement. There are a couple of lists of music dating from February and March 1830. Was it sold or retained? It’s very tempting to transcribe the lists and see what remains elsewhere in the country!
On 19th September 1797: Singer and singing teacher Rauzzini registered no.7 of his Periodical Collection of Vocal Music. Few copies survive, and it’s a bit hard to tell which volume contains no.7, though I know an expert who could probably locate it!
Also OTD in 1797, Bland & Weller registered James Hook’s Vauxhall Gardens song, Maidens would you know?, along with Hook’s Welsh song, Jem of Aberdovey, and his When the sprightly fife and drum. It’s all pretty typical fare – a song by a popular Bath impresario, and some Vauxhall Gardens songs including a ‘national’ and a military song, by composers still (just) known today. As it happens, there were also imprints of another ‘Jem’ song by Hook under English, Irish and Scottish imprints – Jem of Aberdeen! – but that’s not part of the 19th September story. You can trace a few copies in Copac, but certainly not in all of the legal deposit libraries.
Meanwhile, exactly two hundred years ago yesterday, Bath musician John Charles White registered his piano rondo, The Fairy Queen on 19th September 1817. There are seemingly three surviving copies in the UK. However, there could be further copies of any of the aforementioned titles, because not all of the early legal deposit music has been catalogued online. That’s the intriguing part of this story!
Driving back through heavy showers, I was largely oblivious to the weather. I had a pageful of notes to think about and follow up, and the possibility of further future contact. The Aberdeen-Norfolk connection is indeed a good thing, and I’m delighted to have made contact again after a gap of several years.
your music. What do you do? Well, if you have a publisher, they might submit it to Stationers’ Hall, where it would be registered. They might not, though. (Some publishers thought they’d have the best of both worlds – they’d print a copyright statement to the effect that it had been entered at Stationers’ Hall, but they wouldn’t actually bother doing so.) In any event, it’s a bit hit or miss.
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 