Dr Karen McAulay explores the history of Scottish music collecting, publishing and national identity from the 18th to 20th centuries. Research Fellow at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, author of two Routledge monographs.
‘You can’t play THAT!’ I was told, as I headed out to practise. And although I can’t repeat the precise wording, the gist of the objection was that it was daft and inappropriate.
Well, my supportive congregation didn’t seem to think so, today. I played all the tunes from Wood’s original Fantasia on British Sea-Songs, along with some of those inserted into the Last Night of the Proms rendition last night, and ended with ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. The coffee ladies wanted me to know that they didn’t just like it – they loved it.
I did add the Irish ‘The Minstrel Boy’ after ‘Danny Boy’ (The Londonderry Air). But I haven’t yet had time to source the music for the Welsh tune – though I do know what it is.
If you can hear clattering in the background – that’s the sound of the keys and pedals and the tracker action linkage that eventually sends the sound to the pipes. I think it rather adds to the charm of the piece, to be honest!
It sounds like a coded message between members of a secret fraternity, doesn’t it? Nothing so scandalous, I’m afraid! Although, I’m told it doesn’t make sense. So, let me explain.
But first, I must clarify: the image above is Neilston Parish Church, where I’m organist. I can’t find a Creative Commons image of Groeswen Chapel, but you can see it at this link:-
(Sensible Alternative Title: Writing a Fancy Harmony for the Last Verse of a Hymn)
Groeswen is a magnificent Welsh hymn tune composed by John Ambrose Lloyd (1815-1874), often used for the hymn, ‘All my hope on God is founded’. It was one of the hymns chosen by the minister for today’s church service. Now then, organists like to play a more elaborate arrangement for the last verse of a conventional hymn, and there are books published that consist solely of such ‘last verse’ settings.
The Organist’s Playtime
However, my own two ‘last verse’ books don’t contain a last verse setting for Groeswen. I couldn’t do much about it on the spot, but I decided I’d have to write one later on today so that I’d have a setting for another time. I have added some minor inflections, along with chromaticism and some chordal suspensions. It is within the capabilities of a competent organist – no need to be a virtuoso.
And now I’m sorry that we’ve already sung it, so I’ll have to wait until we next use the hymn before I can play it! (It’s just a midi-file from Finale, I’m afraid – you’re not listening to a real organist playing it on a real pipe organ!) I’m putting my ‘last verse’ on ArrangeMe, in case anyone else would like to use it.
I’ve had my Finale Songwriter music engraving software for a very long time, and it has served me well. Apart from occasional glitches, that is. However, it’s no longer sold, no longer supported – and is installed on a very old laptop. (I only keep it for Finale.) This week, I took it into my head to arrange a hymn for my church choir. All went well until …
RIP Finale Songwriter
The Finale Songwriter sound crashed. And with it, the scrolling playback. I tried to fix it. I tried a system restore, which takes hours and hours, but has always fixed it in the past. However, the system didn’t restore. (It’s a very old laptop.) With much persistence, I retrieved some kind of sound, but not the sampled sound. Hooray – I could playback my efforts with a tinny MIDI sound, and it scrolled obediently along. But it’s not how it should be. It was time to get new software for the new laptop. Before that, however, I thought I’d prune my Finale files, so that I’d have less to transfer across.
I file most of my Finale documents by year, and I’ve only reached 2020 in the pruning exercise. This will take a while! I’m deleting tunes that were either transient, functional versions of hymns, or really not worth saving for even family posterity.
Invisible Organist
But I found a piece I’d written for organ, back in the Covid pandemic lockdown. Entitled, Invisible Organist’s Blues, I can no longer remember if I wrote it whilst literally locked down at home, or if it was written at some stage in the next strange months when we conducted services with no congregation, or no singing. I may have written the piece whilst I was not only invisible but also almost inaudible – with not much to play. It felt as though little notice was taken when I did play.
In other words, I was disgruntled. Invisible Organist’s Blues was born out of sadness and frustration. I think it was only played once. It is blues-y. It ends with ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’, and that was chosen intentionally. I suspected I might have written something that really didn’t sound very agreeable, but I wanted to hear it again before I deleted it. Finding this piece brought back a lot of unpleasant emotions. In my last months there before I left in 2021, I felt my mental health suffering. I cried behind my glasses and face-mask each Sunday – no-one would have noticed the tears streaming. And I cried as I drove home, which was certainly not ideal. I felt marginalised, and for long enough, I told myself to ‘man up’ and accept that it was all in my head – I was imagining it.
Reality
Until, finally, I came to the conclusion that the sadness was real. Was I imagining my shrinking role? It was shrinking. Churches are absolutely entitled to change ways of doing things, and the organist just has to understand that. Was I imagining that the choir and organ were unmentioned throughout an online Zoom group meeting that I attended? They weren’t mentioned. If I was suffering, then that, too was real. Yes, times were changing – and it was time for me to accept it. I did accept it. A few months after my resignation, I was fortunate to find another organist position, where the welcome was as embracing as a warm hug. This was more how things were meant to be!
Neilston Parish Church, West of Scotland, my new church.
Fast forward back to this present week. My finger hovered over Invisible Organist’s Blues. Should I just delete it, and its uncomfortable memories? I played it back with my tinny, defective Finale Songwriter playback, prepared to be disgusted.
But I wasn’t! The tinny playback certainly didn’t enhance it. It lost any semblance of a deep pedal bass-line, but it felt as though there was something worth keeping. I tried it on the piano at home (and any organist will tell you that playing organ music on the piano is weird, because you have somehow to accommodate music that’s intended for two hands and two feet, without having an organ pedal-board) – and I was quite gratified by the results.
Today, I headed for church and tried it there. Tweaked a couple of chords, and – yes, two movements will be played tomorrow. The third does need a bit of practice. I need to decide whether the rhythms are not only too difficult, but unnecessarily so. (Nobody will hear the trouble I’ve seen, either!)
It would be nice to think that by resurrecting the piece and playing it sensitively, I can put the ghosts to rest, and make use of something that I put a lot of work into.
I’ve installed new music-engraving software. I haven’t even tried it out yet, but I did bite the bullet, decide which one to go for, and pay for it! Maybe at some point I’ll convert Invisible Organist’s Blues into music XML and transfer it across. Alternatively, I could just save it as a pdf and accept that that’s it, finished and unchangeable!
I’m not going to share it here yet – not whilst it’s still technically a work-in-progress! However, here’s a Scottish folk song that I played as my warm-up when I was practising this morning – Flow Gently, Sweet Afton – clattering tracker action and all!
I sat down in my home office alcove this morning, and realised that my desk actually tells you everything about me!
ORGANIST
the Billy Graham All-Scotland Crusade 1955 song book, open at ‘The Solid Rock’
Ancient laptop – used only for Allegro Finale Songwriter (I was transposing the song, and reducing it to three rather than four vocal parts)
Under my desk, a box containing new choir anthems …
MUSICOLOGY
CDs of an organ that had been inaugurated by the Athenaeum’s second Principal, Edward Emanuel Allan
Picture of a Victorian 11th Hussars trumpeter
ANYTHING FABRIC-RELATED
Samples of fabric, most of which I won’t be ordering!
(I could add context, and explain that I’m a semi-retired researcher and a church organist!)
Right, the song book and old laptop are closed. I fix my eyes firmly on the Leng Silver Medal on my pinboard. That’s this morning’s focus! But I just can’t put away the 11th Hussars trumpeter – it’s the closest I’ll get to Trumpet-Major James Smith today!
… But you can’t please all of the people all of the time. So (apparently) said John Lydgate in the fifteenth century. (Thereby proving the veracity of another old adage: ‘There’s nothing new under the sun’.)
I play a wide range of organ music. I throw in a generous pinch of Scottish songs – although not to excess, I think – and cover a range from Baroque to modern. Not wildly modern – Messiaen is beyond me! And I realise that what I consider ‘middle of the road’ may not be the middle of everyone else’s. However, my conscience is pretty clear – because I do try to please everyone at some point or other! So, it is a little hurtful to hear adverse comments. I do rather wish this hadn’t been relayed to me. (I mean, why? Was it well-intentioned? Was it a direct quotation or paraphrased?)
She always plays such miserable stuff!
I genuinely feel that’s a harsh and rather unjustified criticism. I disagree with it!
However, I got some new organ music last week, and eagerly took it to church to try out yesterday (Saturday) morning. I’d found Robert Gower’s organ arrangement of Amy Beach’s Scottish Legend, op.54, which by any stretch of the imagination should have been perfect. I like to play music by women composers; I like Scottish-influenced music; and I like turn-of-the century harmonies. The American Amy Beach, currently enjoying a deserved new fame, lived from 1867-1944. I haven’t yet looked into why or when she wrote this particular Celtic-inspired piece, but I do know that it was originally one of the Two Piano Pieces, op.54:-
From my perspective, it looked like a perfectly good, gentle and tuneful piece, and I was looking forward to working on it. However, when I tried it at the organ, I felt only disappointment. It sounds like a ‘Coronach’ – a Gaelic funeral song, or dirge. So how will that go down? No-one can say it’s a happy, upbeat tune!
It’s reminiscent of, but slightly more cheerful than the contemporary Coronach by pianist, organist and composer Edgar Barratt (1877-1928). This, too originated as a piano piece:-
Edgar Barratt, Coronach (piano)
Here’s the organ transcription of Barratt’s piece:-
Barratt- Coronach (organ)
Edgar Barratt was the son of English organist John Barratt (b.1848), who by 1881 at latest had moved to Paisley to be the Abbey organist. I haven’t yet discovered where Edgar Barratt trained, although I know his brother William Augustus studied composition at the Royal College of Music. Perhaps I don’t need to know. Anyway, I’m surmising they may have spent most of their childhood in Paisley. Edgar had clearly absorbed the Scottish idiom when he wrote his Coronach. Stylistically, his piece, and Amy Beach’s, sit alongside pieces like Hamish MacCunn’s Land of the Mountain and the Flood, even if they’re on a smaller scale. There has long been a fondness for Scottish-sounding music!
But, to get back to Beach’s piece – that ‘miserable stuff’ comment echoed in my ears – months after it was relayed to me. I put the music back in my briefcase and headed home without giving it a second try.
Repair, Design
I found myself driving behind a van belonging to a whirlpool spa bath firm, with a slogan on the back: ‘Repair, Design’, and a couple of other skills. I misread it as, ‘Despair, Resign’, and reflected that it felt like a summary of my mood. Now, this is evidently plain lunacy. Why should I despair, for fear a little organ piece strikes a sombre note?
Anyway, I’m starting to like it. I’ve played the piano recording a couple of times. I’ll have another go at the organ arrangement on the piano at home, before I go back for my next practice session.
I think I should stop caring so much what other people think!
I was playing through some of the songs in Song Gems (Scots) last night. My attention was taken by a song here entitled ‘Mary in Heaven’, set to a tune called ‘Mary’s Dream’. This is a Scottish song – nothing whatsoever to do with the Annunciation in the Biblical New Testament. Rather, it’s a song written by John Lowe in the late 18th century, in which a bereaved Scottish girl has a visitation from her dead fiance’s ghost; it was written for a real person whose fiance had died. You can look it up – there are numerous instances of it in old Scottish song books. Antiquarian John Glen’s collection, now in the National Library of Scotland – and digitised – holds plenty of copies. As well as collecting and writing about Scottish songs, Glen was a friend of the compilers of Song Gems (Scots).
Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum ,Vol.1
It was in James Johnson’ Scots Musical Museum, and George Farquhar Graham included it in his Songs of Scotland, published by John Wood (latterly by Bayley & Ferguson as The Popular Songs and Melodies of Scotland).
Suffice to say, I fell in love with this tune! It begins in the minor, goes into the relative major and back, and dallies with the submediant in the second half – it’s beautifully constructed. But how could I use it? I worked out the meter, and after a bit of digging, found the words of an old hymn in the same meter, which were eminently suitable for an introit. I’ve added sparing choral harmonies, and obviously it won’t have soloistic ornamention. But I’m still quite pleased with the results.
And so it shall come about that ‘Mary in Heaven’ will most acceptably be sung in a Presbyterian church …
Here’s Anita Rosati’s gorgeous April 2026 recording of ‘Mary’s Dream’:-
Yesterday being Sunday – and Scotland isn’t out of the World Cup yet – I dug deep to find some more thematically appropriate music to play on the organ. I’m pleased to report that it IS possible to play, ‘Yes, Sir, I can Boogie’ in a sedate, dignified manner. Challenging, but possible. Likewise ‘Scotland The Brave’. After those, a calmer ‘The Rowan Tree’ and an organ setting of ‘Amazing Grace’ completed the World Cup set.
But AFTER the service … although I nominally stuck with a Scottish titled march, absolutely no-one would have known or recognised it. It was an indulgence of my research interests, I’m afraid! I played a piece of music by Edward E Harper. So … it was
composed by an Englishman,
who briefly lived in Scotland.
His tune was called a Scots March (it doesn’t sound Scottish) –
and it was in a collection published by Bayley and Ferguson, a Scottish publisher.
The composer himself had emigrated to Canada by this stage. I don’t know when he composed it.
It gets more complicated.
The copy I own was sold in AUSTRALIA,
and taken to California by a talented scientist at the start of his career.
I repatriated it through eBay, so today the not-exactly ‘Scots March’ was played by an Englishwoman in Scotland, not that far from where the English composer was once organist …
I have a problem now. Just supposing Scotland beats Brazil? I can find any number of traditional tunes, but what would I play as an outgoing voluntary?!
Yesterday morning’s organ music just had to be topical. To our small but enthusiastic congregation’s approval, I included ‘Flower of Scotland’, ‘Loch Lomond’, ‘Caledonia’, ‘500 miles’, ‘Highland Cathedral’ (not really Scottish, but much-loved all the same), and I managed something along the lines of ‘Never Stopped Dreaming’, the new World Cup anthem by Skerryvore.
So, we’ve talked about the church organ which has been relocated from Kilbarchan (near Paisley in the west of Scotland) to Prenzlau in Germany. Well, the first organist to play the instrument in Kilbarchan, went on to travel a whole lot further than that.
Edward Emanuel Harper
I’ve collated a lengthy document about the Glasgow Athenaeum’s second Principal. He was only with us a couple of years, of course. After that, he was Kilbarchan’s organist a little bit longer.
The family went briefly back to Southport, before heading to Ottawa – for a year – and then settled in Vancouver.
My notes are full of clips from newspapers. I traced his first Canadian year as an organist in Ottawa – and some snippets of genealogical data in Vancouver. But nothing of his teaching, and no trace of a large compositional output. I’ve looked at library and archive catalogues. Even a promising entry to his ‘archive’ leads to one piece, contributed anonymously by post in 1971. I’ve seen a digital copy of it. It was self-published.
So What?
You might ask – I’ve already asked myself – why I need to know? (Apart from the fact that these little research questions tend to take on a life of their own!) And I think it’s because Harper was plainly a gifted individual – a PhD from Dublin, an LRAM, a brilliant proponent of Chopin, sought after as an organist and recitalist, and a prolific composer.
So where is his Canadian output, in manuscript or published?
And what led him to resign from the Athenaeum, seen by many as a ‘plum’ job? Our records are missing for that era. Did we let a genius slip away? Or were there difficulties that history has graciously concealed?!
Image: St Andrew’s Church, Ottawa (Copyright: Jamie McCaffrey, Flickr)
It was 2018 when the BBC posted the story of a magnificent three-manual organ built by Hill and Son, which was being taken out of Kilbarchan West Church – no longer needed after a merger – and transported to Prenzlau:-
The Hill organ at Kilbarchan West Parish Church (photo from Kilbarchan West website). *
It has taken a while – Covid got in the way – but in May 2026, there’s going to be an organ festival to celebrate the inauguration of the organ in its new home.
Former Athenaeum Principal Inaugurated Kilbarchan Organ
Well, I’m excited, even though I don’t think I can justify going all that way. (Or can I?) You see, I’ve been researching the second Principal of the Glasgow Athenaeum – Dr Edward Emanuel Harper, who was only with us for two years, 1902-1904. After that, he left. There are no records extant to say why he left. But within a few months, by September 1904, he had been appointed organist of …
Kilbarchan Church.
He played the inaugural recital for the new Hill & Son organ.
British Newspaper Archive: Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette – Saturday 22 October 1904
I won’t tell you his whole story here – I already mentioned him, only a few weeks ago. By 1909 he had gone back to Stockport, accepted a job offer in Canada, been widowed before they had even moved to Canada, but still moved his young family to Canada as planned, and started a new life. And then another new life on the opposite side of Canada a year later.
Part of his fascination for me is his elusiveness, I must admit. Why did he leave the Athenaeum? What persuaded him to return to his home-town, or to cross the Atlantic? I do know a little about what happened when he got there. And I’ve traced his publications in the UK, but can only find only one published in Canada. Why? It’s hard to imagine he didn’t publish any more.
But most pressingly – do I want to go and hear the rebuilt organ which was, originally, only a few miles away from Neilston, where I am currently organist? After all, I’m not researching organ-building, or organ music. And Harper wasn’t a Scot, or published in Scotland – but he WAS briefly our Principal. I’m drawn to the story and the connections …
* The original Kilbarchan church was more recently known as Kilbarchan West Parish Church, before it combined with Kilbarchan East. At that point, the united congregation elected to use the East Church.
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 