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.
Being a Fellow has been a sheer delight. I’ve met a lot of interesting people; heard interesting research papers; given a public paper (in the Laidlaw Music Centre) and a research paper for the Institute of Scottish Historical Research (ISHR); and availed myself of the invaluable resources of the University Library. As a result, I’ve been able to explore a couple of specific aspects of my research topic – resulting in facts and findings that I’ve incorporated into my book revisions.
Desk cleared …
I said I would get on with monograph revisions, and I have done so – I’ve written a new Preface, and revised the Introduction and first four chapters. There are three more to go, but I’ve broken the back of it, because Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are the longest ones.
Those are tangible outputs. But for me personally, the Fellowship has also been an opportunity to embrace my research scholar identity a bit more, before I retire from the Whittaker Library in July 2024 and become solely a (part-time) researcher. The experience has in that sense given me a powerful sense of endorsement: that another insitution has embraced me as a scholar, and given me a chance to enjoy that status. For that I am very grateful indeed.
Farewell to St Katharine’s Lodge
Here for the final day, I’ve nipped into the Martyr’s Kirk Research Library to look at a couple more old classroom music texts. (I had a little argument with myself about the dates of a few titles advertised on the back of one particular text, but finally concluded that the date of a preface inside a book doesn’t mean that everything advertised on the back outside cover was available at that date. The copy in my hand could, after all, have been printed several years after the text itself came out, and the adverts might well have reflected the later date when the copy was printed, not the date when the text was published.)
I was looking for Scottish song texts, whether ‘folk songs’ or fin-de-siecle songs written for educational purposes. I must confess, I expected to find more than there actually were in these two sources. Still, with glee, I pounced upon ‘My heart’s in the Highlands’.
Too soon. The compiler had set it to … a tune by Mozart! (Very curious, considering the patriotic attitudes of that particular compiler! Why ever did they think that was a good idea?)
I met a colleague and one of their friends for lunch, to discuss a research idea.
And (besides taking my library books back), I started a preliminary check of Chapter 4 of my book, which has grown a little during its revisions.
Soon, very soon, all will be revealed! It’s been quite a quiet year, as far as publications go. Very quiet. But I have had one article and two chapters waiting at their publishers, and this weekend will at least see the article published in History Scotland. Featured on the cover, too.
Logically, it should make no difference where we sit to work on our research. A laptop, a table and chair – that’s it, isn’t it?
However, my concentration is undeniably better in St Andrews, and I’m convinced it’s because of the circumstances. For a start, it’s a seven hour round trip by bus. If I spend that much time just getting there, I’m certainly going to make the most of every hour whilst I’m there.
Secondly, I sit in quiet, comfortable surroundings with no distractions, whether it’s the office-with-a-view, or Martyrs’ Kirk reading room. That’s a privilege.
Time is neither carved up into obligatory breaks at specific times, nor do I need to stop one thing to do something else unrelated but unavoidable. Another luxury!
But most of all, there’s the feeling that being a guest fellow is an honour, so I want to squeeze as much as I can into the time available.
This week, I’ve written half of one of the two talks I’ve agreed to do, and spent a couple of hours at Martyrs’ Kirk. Sadly, one of the books I wanted to see, turned out not to be the sort of book I’d expected. Knowing the author’s prime focus, I thought that it would be a Victorian school book, but this one wasn’t. (At least I hadn’t bought it on eBay!) Maybe it means I’ll think of him as a more rounded individual, though, so perhaps it was worth having a look for that alone.
Hullah in staff notation mode!
But that’s another good thing about visiting St Andrews. It’s five minutes from my desk to a library. To look at the same thing in Glasgow would take up a whole chunk of a day, by the time I’d got from home to town. (And when I’m at my own library, I’m just a worker bee – neither a researcher, nor do we have the same resources.)
Mind you, having ruled out Hullah’s national songbook, there’s nothing for it – the next book on my list IS in Glasgow. You win some, lose some, I guess!
This week in Fellowship research, I continued looking at late Victorian sources. I identified a cataloguing glitch – as a librarian/researcher, I’m consistently and annoyingly good at this – and borrowed another armload of library books. But did I make any outstanding discoveries? Not really.
It’s probably a bit like being an archaeologist – you have to sift through a lot of ‘stuff’ to find a precious relic, and sometimes there is nothing to find. But you keep on sifting! Actually, I think I have it better than an archaeologist, because I know I’m looking at the right kind of material, and the more I examine, the more chances of seeing patterns.
In any case, it would be inaccurate to say I discovered nothing. Looking at more publications by one individual enabled me to confirm how enlightened his approach was, compared to another author. This is the latter one:-
Those poor mid-Victorian kids! Can you imagine working-class children in industrial Glasgow enjoying something like this?!
It also gave me another idea which I need to pursue, both in my historical research and in thinking about library acquisitions ‘at home’.
And additionally, researching in St Andrews gives me access to mainstream materials that we just don’t have in our specialist Conservatoire library. That’s invaluable!
But back to my original heading:-
When you think you’re getting nowhere, but you know you’re on the right track – keep going.
If you’re detecting patterns – keep looking.
If you have the tiniest idea about a new research question, write it down.
Did anyone ever make a breakthrough discovery in less than a month of looking? Probably. Maybe they were a genius, or maybe they were lucky with what they found. Maybe they knew exactly where to look. But there’s a lot to recommend the hard slog, too. After all, it would be tragic to be so close to a result, and not to achieve it. And I should know. I’ve mentioned before that I didn’t finish my first doctoral studies. This definitely proved to be a life lesson – I had realised how important it was to persevere, and how unsatisfactory it was to feel that you had left unfinished work and had nothing to show for it! My second thesis did get submitted – on time, to the day. So, more recently, did my second book. I like to think that persistence is one of my better characteristics!
Week 2. My second visit to St Andrews this autumn literally flew by. I borrowed AND returned a book from the library; continued my literature search; finished reading a fascinating series of letters in a journal; had myself a library induction (setting a good example, since I’m always urging newcomers to attend their library induction!); and met some members of the Institute of Scottish Historical Research for lunch.
If in doubt, ask!
This last was the challenging bit. How do you identify a historian? They don’t have obvious ‘tools of the trade’ like musicians or artists. I hovered outside the hostelry, peeped in and couldn’t decide who was a historian, and finally solved the problem by asking at the bar! The bartender seemed to find this an entirely reasonable question, thankfully.
Pursuing one particular aspect of my recent research that fascinated me, I’ve turned up a number of useful references that I now need to sift through. I’ll still be working on this task in St Andrews this week.
History AND Music AND Education AND Scottish
The literature search has certainly had its challenges. Searching on History AND Music AND Education AND Scottish, just won’t cut it in this situation!
In one chapter of the book I’ve just finished writing, I’ve written about Scottish music publishers and some of the materials they produced for Scottish music education. Now, I need to move on beyond my book: I want to know how much their resources were used or disseminated beyond Scotland, and I want to catch the pedagogues talking about them! The tricky part of this search is in ensuring I get a historical perspective – I’m not looking at how the history of music is taught today, but a particular aspect of the history of teaching music.
One journal in particular wasn’t an obvious resource when my main focus was on Scottish music publishers. However, now I’m thinking even more deeply about their educational materials, I’ve just found a journal that looks distinctly promising:-
You only have to read the Journal description to see why this particular title is going to be such a useful one.
And I’m also going to be combing some resources on English music education, in the hope that some Scottish resources or pedagogues get at least a passing mention. If they’ve been mentioned, then I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. If not, then I have a blank canvas, and that in itself is exciting.
I’ve activated my email and library account. I’ve made contact with the library, and I’ve called up a book to be fetched for next week. I’ve also started a literature search for the topic I’m hoping to explore. Half of me considers it unlikely that the general topic hasn’t been covered, and the other half thinks it’s highly unlikely that my specific niche has been written about! If I can research and write an article during this Fellowship, I’ll have a significant output that will have drawn on St Andrews’ admirable library resources.
And of course, I don’t yet know what/how much will need revising in my book! That could be another major task for this autumn.
So far, so good. I have also achieved another personal goal. I wanted to see the sea at lunchtime. I did that, too!
Lunchtime Wandering En route from the Castle Outdoor Coffee BreakA rare sight! (New email account)
I’m currently reading a new book in the Routledge Insider Guides to Success in Academia series:
Be Visible or Vanish: Engage, Influence and Ensure your Research has Impact (Routledge, 2023)
The authors are Inger Mewburn and Simon Clews; since I’ve followed Inger’s work for a number of years, I knew it would be good, and I got it for RCS Library recently.
It’s an approachable guide, and the kind of book you can tuck into a bag or pocket to read at free moments during the day. This morning as I drank my pre-work latte, I was reading the chapter on making academic small-talk, and being ready with an answer to the inevitable question:-
So, what is your research about?
(A reasonable question in any situation!)
It particularly resonated for me this morning, because I take up my honorary Ketelbey Fellowship at St Andrews tomorrow. Not only that, but a family member had been asking me the same question last night! What are you studying there? Why there? How are you going to benefit from the experience? It wasn’t intended as preparation for the sort of questions I should be anticipating, but I nonetheless took it as a prompt to think carefully about how I shall be introducing myself when I meet new colleagues!
I’ve also heard this described as an ‘elevator pitch’ – though in my case, I would need the elevator to travel more than one floor! As I’ve said before, the title of my recently-submitted book doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. However, it outlines what my research has been about in recent years so I have to be able to trot it out.
A social history (yes, that describes it well)
of amateur music-making (make no mistake, that’s what we’re talking about – it’s not generally about serious, cutting-edge classical music)
and Scottish national identity (this is such a big deal, that it’s inextricably interwoven throughout the whole book)
[And then there’s the subtitle!] : Scotland’s printed music, 1880-1951 (I’ve been looking at the output of Scottish publishers during this era, which proved much more interesting than even I had ever imagined. When I got to 1951, I got to fever-pitch excitement. You’ll have to wait for the book to find out why!)
But, back to the questions of last night. I’ll be revising the book when it returns from the reviewer(s). I’ll also be investigating a particular aspect of my research that still merits even deeper investigation. I’ll be exploring a bigger, richer library collection than I usually have access to, and I look forward to engaging with a lot of different research scholars, hopefully gaining fresh ideas and maybe ideas for new directions or collaborations.
Most of all, I’ll be settling into my academic role – yes, I know, I’m a seconded researcher back in my home institution, but it’s new for me to be a Fellow for a few months – and I’ll be thinking about my future ‘second career’ as a researcher once I retire from music librarianship next summer.
When my line-manager suggested I could give colleagues an update on my current projects and plans, I must confess I freaked out a little bit. Everyone else was talking about things happening in our library. I worried that ‘What Karen gets up to when she’s not being a librarian’ might come across as a boast-fest. It wasn’t about library news and developments, or services, or anything like that. I don’t research librarianship – I research music. My ‘research family’ are interested, but there’s no reason why anyone else should be! I tried to be absolutely factual, and to demonstrate how I chose my research subject because I wanted to study something relevant to students on one of the degree courses at the Conservatoire. I wanted it to be useful.
I was once told people’s attention begins to wander after 20 minutes – so I allowed myself about five minutes – three quarters of a Pecha Kucha presentation. Hopefully, that wouldn’t be too long?
First I had to explain my interest in research. I shared that, back in 2004, I decided to fund myself to study for a PhD, in my spare time. (I had never finished the one I had once studied for in Exeter before I even trained to be a librarian. Believe me, it wouldn’t have been useful in the workplace. Cantus firmus treatment in fifteenth century English polyphony? Definitely only for mediaeval enthusiasts! I had started writing that first thesis, but think I lost interest partly for that very reason.) To keep myself interested, the new PhD topic had to be relevant to RCS, and my circumstances (a full-time working mum with three primary-school aged sons) meant the university had to be local. That’s how I ended up researching Scottish music at Glasgow Uni. I hoped the knowledge gained would be useful.
Next, I described how the Scottish song-collectors that I researched for my PhD, lived a long time ago, and even my subsequent research projects stopped when Queen Victoria was young. This meant that whenever I was asked to talk to our trad music students, I found that I had less to say about the 20th century Scottish song-books in our collection. However, I didn’t want to leave the impression that nothing much happened between 1920 and the second half of the 20th century. (The teaching staff cover the recent history, so that didn’t concern me much!)
I explained that, having done the PhD and a couple of research projects, I decided I wanted to write another book, to fill in the gap I’d identified. I approached my publisher again.
A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland’s Printed Music, 1880-1951
Naturally enough, I suggested a title at that point. But in the end, my publisher chose a better title for me – this one – when I signed the contract. It says exactly what it ought to say, but it’s a bit long! However, the book is about amateur music-making, because that’s what Scottish music publishers published – and it is about national identity, because they published so many Scottish songbooks! A long, accurate title can only be a good thing. Without a word of a lie, if anyone asks why the library has so many Scottish song-books, the answer is that it’s because they reflect different interpretations of national identity over a couple of hundred years. And my book will hopefully back this up!
My narrative began in 1880, because that’s where my first book stopped. I decided the book would finish in 1951. As well as some significant events that year, it marked when television came to Scotland. That was one topic too many; and my music publishers were dying out anyway!
I described what the book is about. It begins by focusing on two Glasgow publishers (I may have mentioned the occasional woman publisher or RCS woman piano teacher … )
Then I wrote about dance music – I may also have mentioned racism in Victorian music – and I wrote about books of songs for children. I wrote about Scottish songbooks costing a lot – and very little.
I wrote about educational music published by the Scottish music publishers, and I wrote about the publishers’ efforts to get Scottish music to expats who had emigrated.
Although I never intended to write about recording music or broadcasting it on the radio, the publishing and recording and broadcasting all seemed to be connected in different ways, so … I covered that too.
And then when I’d done all that, I decided to write about why Scottish music publishers didn’t publish classical music.
My book has been sent to the publisher; there will be reviewing and editing and indexing before it’s ready to actually be published. I’m waiting to hear if the reviewer liked it, right now. Nail-biting times!
Hoping that my audience weren’t getting tired of the sound of my voice, I also mentioned that I’m about to take up a temporary honorary research fellowship at the University of St Andrews, in the School of History, from September to December. It’s the first Ketelbey Fellowship, named after the first woman history lecturer in St Andrews. Doris’s brother was an English composer – we have some of his music. I’ll be in St Andrews on Wednesdays and Thursdays, but still working back in RCS Whittaker Library the rest of the week. I anticipate editing the book, doing some more research, getting to know other scholars in the department, and I’ve been invited to give a couple of lectures – one in History and one in the Music department.
Next summer, I’ll be retiring from the library, but I hope I’ll still be a part-time researcher at RCS. If anyone else needs a part-time researcher, do get in touch – I couldn’t stand a retirement filled with daytime TV! I freely admit – I’m the librarian that is utterly sick of cataloguing, but loves doing research. An embarrassing oddity? Can’t be helped. Ideally, I’d like my book to have been published by the time I retire from librarianship, but who knows? Meanwhile, the fellowship gives me the opportunity to build up the research side of my profile.
I didn’t want to be boastful – I hope it didn’t come across that way! But at the same time, I didn’t want to sell myself short, and I didn’t want to be apologetic for being who I am. I hope I succeeded!
I had never 100% identified an editor of a particular songbook, despite extensive efforts. I had his name and an address, not much more. I decided to have a final attempt at tracing him, and planned a wee trip to the archives. SURELY I’d find him there!
And I did. But still nothing to pin him down. It was a very common name.
I did rule out someone else’s theory. Their chap died when mine was clearly alive and active.
Anyway, I came home from the archives to have another go at tracking him down.
I may now also have ruled out one of my alternative theories, sadly. There was a likely tenor soloist, with the right name, consistently linked with a Fifeshire village. For a year or more, it has been my best guess. A singer might well involve himself in collecting songs.
Last night brought success in tracing the singer, but not success in proving him to be my editor! A common name and the right kind of occupation are insufficient to go on, especially when singing might not have been his day-job. I found a daughter’s wedding. Right village, right name, deceased father.
I found her parents. Wedding, census, Dad’s funeral all at the same village address. Parents both apparently sang in the same concert in the right town, as youngadults, some years before they married. Looking good, I’d say. I even found the singer performingwith the man who collaborated with the editor on an earlier publication.
But there are two problems.
Does a Fife fisherman – in 1910, 1911, 1921 and a retired fisherman when he died – edit a songbook jointly with a famous composer? That may be a somewhat subjective question.
But the bottom line is that I can’t connect the village fisherman, with the man at the Edinburgh address.
Hmm!
Not to worry. I have another line of enquiry, as it happens … another place, another guy with the same common name…
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 