Good News! Article now Published in RMA Research Chronicle, and an [unrelated] Book Chapter Pending

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Silver Victorian pen and ink stand

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that my RMA Research Chronicle article was now available online as open access. Today, it’s actually in the published issue. Receiving this email is a great start to the day:-

“your article, ‘Women Pursuing Musical Careers: Finding Opportunities in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Scottish Music Publishing Circles’, has now been published in Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle! You can view your article at https://doi.org/10.1017/rrc.2025.10009 “

Citation Details

Writing about Tourism

What’s this?, I hear you ask. Why would a musicologist write about tourism? Well, it’s like this: one of the song book titles that I explored in last year’s monograph, The Glories of Scotland, really deserved more space than I could give it in a monograph devoted to a nation’s music publishing. However, the opportunity came up to contribute a chapter to a Peter Lang Publication, Print and Tourism: Travel-Related Publications from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, edited by Catherine Armstrong and Elaine Jackson.

Today, I received the final proofs, which means that the book itself can’t be very far away. I really enjoyed writing this chapter – you could say that it’s decidedly more about publishing history, and tourism, than conventional musicology – and I really look forward to it actually being published.

My chapter (19 pages):-

‘The Glories of Scotland in Picture and Song’: Jumping on the Festival of Britain Bandwagon?’

The Glories of Scotland in Picture and Song - a song book published by Mozart Allan of Glasgow. The cover shows various Scottish tartans.
The Glories of Scotland – Mozart Allan’s souvenir songbook
Back cover of The Glories of Scotland song book
Back cover of The Glories of Scotland

Proud Addition to my Published Output: Women Pursuing Musical Careers: Finding Opportunities in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Scottish Music Publishing Circles

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Edwardian lady and two little girls. Picture has a floral border.

Published online today, 12 January 2026, in the RMA (Royal Musical Association) Research Chronicle, by Cambridge University Press, on Open Access:- click here.

Writing this article was enormously fulfilling. I had encountered these ladies whilst researching my latest monograph, and I became convinced that they deserved profiling in their own right, and not merely as bit-parts in the larger picture occupied by their husbands, fathers and brothers.

The kernel of the abstract states that, ‘This article focuses on a group of Scottish women who did not make their names solely as art music composers or stellar performers, and for whom piano teaching was only part of their musical work. Four were related to the Scottish music publishers Mozart Allan, James Kerr, and the Logan brothers; the fifth published with Allan and Kerr, and also self-published.’

And all had fulfilling portfolio musical careers. Read on, and I’m sure you’ll agree!

Now, About a Fifth Book of Scottish Songs?

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Nelson's Scots Song Book, Book Four. The last in the series.

Yesterday, I highlighted the 85th anniversary of the Blitz that destroyed Paternoster Row on Sunday 29th December 1940 – and with it, Thomas Nelson’s London premises.

Today, 30th December, we leap forward to 1954. The Second World War had ended nine years earlier. The country was picking itself up again, and James Easson and Herbert Wiseman had published four books of Scottish songs in the series, ‘Nelson’s Scots Song Book, primarily for school use. I’ve done a lot of research into this series, during my Heritage Collections visiting Fellowship at IASH in the University of Edinburgh, so I’m sure you’ll understand that I won’t be saying much about it today – all will be revealed in due course! However, I can reveal that Easson seems to have written a letter to his editor on 30th December 1954, with the expectation of compiling a fifth book. The letter is no longer extant, but the carbon copy of their reply survives.

There was no fifth book.

The Blitz – 85 Years ago, Tonight

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

This week in Scottish publishing history:-

There ain’t no Paternoster Row

Those were the words of a London Bobby (policeman) the following day, when someone asked about the bombing damage.

Luckily, Thomas Nelson had moved quite a few staff up to their Edinburgh offices at the start of the Second World War,  but some remained in London. But the London offices at 35-36 Paternoster Row were destroyed in the Blitz, on Sunday 29 Dec 1940. 

I find myself wondering how strange – indeed, traumatic – it must have been, to head into work the next morning and find first of all, that public transport was disrupted, and then later, by whatever means, to learn that the firm’s premises were flattened.

Temporary premises were found with another publisher, Duckworth at 3 Henrietta Street.  Not until 1954 were larger premises found for Nelson’s at 36 Park Street, in Mayfair.

Publishing in flames on Paternoster Row

Listen to the first episode of this series on Radio 3, 5th May 2025 (14 mins). Series: Books for Brighter Blackouts:- ‘As the BBC marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day, Professor Emma Smith uncovers five unexpected stories about how World War Two changed books, publishing and reading forever.’ The essay is about that very night of destruction. I was thrilled to find that Professor Smith interviews Professor Andrew Pettegree, an eminent authority in the University of St Andrews; and Liam Sims from the University of Cambridge; amongst other experts.

Q. Name a Scottish Song Collector who Features in Both my Books!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
The Songs of Scotland edited by George Farquhar Graham et al. Title page
Songs of Scotland

I couldn’t find a nice anniversary for yesterday, but I certainly have one for today, 28th December.

Journo, music critic, and Scottish song compiler George Farquhar Graham (1789-1867) was the editor of John Muir Wood’s long-lived song collection, Songs of Scotland, first published in 1848.  As such, he featured heavily in my Our Ancient National Airs.  But the book enjoyed an afterlife as one of Bayley and Ferguson’s handsome reprints – The Popular Songs and Melodies of Scotland  – thus getting a mention in A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity, too.

Where’s all this going? Well, today is Graham’s 236th birthday – ‘Many happy returns,  Sir!’

The Popular Songs and Melodies of Scotland

The Editor’s Boxing Day

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Old-fashioned wooden wheelchair

Followers of this blog will already know my penchant for anniversaries. This festive season, I’ve decided to indulge myself – and you, dear reader – with the kind of trivia that doesn’t make it into my research writing.

90 years ago today, Thomas Nelson editor Richard Wilson was languishing in hospital. (On Boxing Day – how miserable!) His daughter had been handling his correspondence whilst he was ill, so he could keep in contact with his boss.  But by Boxing Day, he’d been able to check the page proofs of the Music Guide (a teaching manual) from his hospital bed.

Now, I know he was a dedicated soul – but I also know that the series editor (not his boss) of the teaching series, ‘Music Practice’, was agitating to get these books published as soon as possible. Sooner, if at all feasible!

Let’s hope Wilson’s efforts didn’t delay his recovery …

Mystifying Timewarp Challenge

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

It’s not as though I’m unaccustomed to what I’ve been doing in odd moments for the past few days.  Over the years, I’ve opened dozens, indeed hundreds of old song books and other music publications, trying to read their prefaces, annotations and harmonic arrangements as though I were a contemporary musician rather than a 21st century musicologist.  Looking at music educational materials is likewise not new to me.

Enter Dr Walford Davies and his The Pursuit of Music

He was the first music professor at the University of Aberystwyth, but he was also hugely popular in the 1920s-30s through his broadcasting work – fully exploiting the new technology of wireless and gramophone for educational purposes, and to share his love of music with the ordinary layman wishing to know more about all they could now listen to. This book was written after he’d mostly, but not entirely retired.

It wasn’t exactly what I expected! If I thought he would write about what made the Pastoral Symphony pastoral, or Die Moldau describe a river’s journey, I rapidly had to change my expectations. 

His audience was apparently not just the average layperson, but also young people in their late teens, not long out of school. If the reader didn’t play the piano, they were urged to get a friend to play the examples for them.  (Considering the book is over 400 pages, you can imagine how long they’d be – erm – captive!)

Dedication

Examples for your friendly pianist to play!

And this was aesthetics, 90 years ago. I struggled to get into the mindset of a layperson wanting to know what music (classical, in the main) was ‘about’, without knowing what a chord was, or realising that music occupies time more than space. Would I have benefited from that knowledge? Would being told in general terms what the harmonic series was, have helped me appreciate the movements of a string quartet? Or Holst’s The Planets?

It wasn’t about musical styles over the years. I didn’t read it cover to cover, but neither did it appear to explain musical form and structure as I would have expected.

Davies’ biographer, H. C. Colles, did comment that it was a mystifying book, and suffered from the fact that the author’s strengths were in friendly and persuasive spoken, not written communication.

I’ve only heard snatches of his spoken commentary, so I can’t really say.  Apart from which, Colles made an observation about Davies’ written style. Colles was a contemporary authority who knew Davies personally – and he may have been picking his own words carefully, so as not to cause offence. My own disquiet is more a matter of content:  was it what his avowed audience needed, to start ‘understanding music’?

I think I have been mystified enough.

I wonder what the Nelson editors made of this book by one of the great names of their age? They published it, and I think regarded him as a catch, but what did they actually think?!

And did the layperson, assuming they got through the 400+ pages, lay it down with a contented sigh, feeling that now they understood music?

Archival Truths: the Reality of Archival Research

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
White puzzle with black gap where the missing piece should be.

I can say this very succinctly!

That which you seek may not be there.

Indeed,

That which you seek may not exist.

You can look as hard as you like, for as long as you like, with as much concentration and determination as you can muster from every inch, every fibre of your body … but not everything you want to find, will have survived to the present day, whether in archives or attics, boxes or basements.

Thus, the Thomas Nelson archive may have a handlist, but even the handlist (a second or third version of a handlist made by unknown hands at some point in the past) may document items that no longer exist. I struck lucky with my searches for correspondence about the four Nelson Scots Song Books (1948-1954). Of course, I still don’t know if there was further correspondence between the song book editors (by which I mean the compilers), as well as that between the compilers and Nelson’s in-house editors. But I found enough to be interesting, and to document the general story of their coming to fruition. It is possibly significant that they were published post-war, by the educational department editors, who had all been in Edinburgh for years by now.

However, for the past few weeks, I’ve been looking for correspondence between the author of a 1935 (ie, pre-war) book aimed at the general reader, and Nelson’s in-house editors. There was correspondence as early as 1932 – I know that much, but I can’t find it. Not only have I completely failed to find it, but we’ve discovered at least half-a-dozen boxes are missing. I bet you anything the missing correspondence is (was) in one or more of those missing boxes! Now, Nelson had offices in Edinburgh and London. The editorial staff for educational materials seemed to have been based in Edinburgh before the Second World War, whilst some – but not all – of the other editorial staff joined them from London’s Pater Noster Row at the start of the war. Thus, my 1935 book – not a school textbook – may have been edited from the London office, not in Edinburgh. Hold onto that knowledge.

Missing in Enemy Action?

When the London offices were bombed, the remaining London editorial staff, including the juvenile literature department, were found temporary office accomodation with another publisher. If my missing correspondence was lost either during a move to Edinburgh, or during the London raids, or in the general upheaval that followed, then they will never be found.

Ironically, when I was researching in the British Museum for my Masters degree, there was a particular Augustinian plainsong manuscript that I desperately needed to see – I’d travelled from Exeter to see it. But I filled in the paper slip (this was 1980 – that’s how you did it) – and got the slip back, marked ‘Missing in Enemy Action’. I rather think I have come up against the same problem again!

And the handlist? The original copy could even have been made by Nelson’s own staff, maybe in Edinburgh, but incorporating letters that had come up from London.

There remain four ‘temporary boxes’ at the end of the sequence, which may contain my prey. And a handful of other boxes that I can’t look at until the next time I’m in Edinburgh. But I’m preparing myself to accept the almost inevitable. In this particular instance,

That for which I search may not exist at all.

Imperial War Museum image (copyright © The Family Estate (Art.IWM ART 16123) – I can only share the link).

Identifying ‘The Large Book on Music’: How Large Must a Book be, to be Considered, ‘Large’?

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

The Music Man

In the late 1920s, Thomas Nelson’s were just starting to work with the music specialist who would turn out to be very helpful to them over the next couple of decades. As I mentioned, I’ve been trying to find the very first letter that passed between them.  Moreover, the Nelson’s editor had told his line-manager at the outset (in the mid-1920s) that he hoped this individual would be helping with ‘the large music book’. Now, this is delightfully vague, isn’t it? Nelson’s wouldn’t be publishing anything that I’d call ‘large’ in the way of printed music for several years.

And Another Music Man!

On Friday, I stumbled across editorial correspondence from 1929 about revising an earlier book about music – one useful to individual students, possibly beyond school age – but not a school classroom text-book. When I get my hands on it, I expect to find that it’s a fairly standard Nelson printed book size. If this was ‘the large book’ (Possibility A), then it was only ‘large’ by comparison with slimmer materials intended for the classroom. Moreover, our music man was NOT the person who ended up revising it. His first contribution was something slimmer, and more classroom-based. But this book does perhaps better fit the timescale of a publication being projected in the late 20s.

It’s so easy to imagine up a sequence of events, with what is really insufficient evidence.  After all, there could be another projected ‘large book’ (Possibility B) that never actually happened!

My working theory for Possibility A, is currently that even if they approached the first guy to revise a book, then for whatever reason, he wasn’t ultimately offered or didn’t fancy the commission. The chap who did do it was certainly a good choice, in any event – a knowledgeable scholar rather than a gifted practitioner and pedagogue.

There’s nothing for it – I must continue leafing through early correspondence in search of that initial letter!  But I’ve also ordered a copy of the book that the scholar revised.  After all, it’s another Nelson music publication.   I need to know about it, too, whether it’s the ‘large’ book or otherwise.

The Man who Turned up Everywhere!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Yesterday was my first day back in the archives. My phone was crawling with messages (an ongoing family situation). Then came a phone-call, which I couldn’t answer without running out to where I could talk. That led to another, and another. And another. Back and forth I went.  I can’t tell you what a day it was!

However, I did get through several folders of Thomas Nelson papers.  I’m in search of the first mention of a particular individual who was very influential in Nelson’s educational music output.  I found him mentioned a couple of times in yesterday’s papers, once quite unexpectedly. I need to see how this sits in my timeline.  Honestly, I didn’t expect to find him urging an organist’s wife to submit a book proposal on … elocution!  It didn’t look like choral speaking (yes, that was a thing, which was quite in vogue a little later on). Indeed, a Nelson editor specifically advised his boss that it was about elocution, so I don’t need to wonder.

Nelson’s rejected the lady’s proposal. She found another publisher.  I briefly wondered how the Englishman who basically ended up acting as music advisor to the Nelson editors, came to know a Scottish organist and his wife, quite early on in his professional career? But I think they probably met at a course or conference.