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.
Returning visitors to these pages may find the content thinner than it used to be. Now that I’m working on my next book, I want my best content to be honed to perfection and triple-checked before I commit it to print. Rather than leave extended writings – which I posted as ‘work in progress’ – sitting on the internet, I’ve pruned what is here. In general, I continue to research the topics I posted here (Scottish music publishers James Kerr, Mozart Allan and many others, and interrogations of cultural issues), and any new details or dates which I didn’t know at the time of blogging, could potentially change what I originally wrote. And also, of course, I want readers of the book to be surprised and delighted by new insights that no-one knew before!
Collection of Merry Melodies
I shall continue to blog, of course. How could I not? I have so many ideas buzzing round my head that it’s hard keeping them all to myself!
I’m speaking at the second Pondering Paratext seminar next Wednesday afternoon between 2.30 and 4 pm. There will also be a talk by Dr Hazel Wilkinson.
My talk is entitled ‘Scottish Songs and Dances ‘Preserved in their Native Simplicity’ and ‘Humbly Dedicated’: Paratext in Improbable Places’. Amongst other delights, I’ll be sharing some of my recent findings about subscription lists to Scottish fiddle tunebooks.
(Musicologists of this kind of music – do take a closer look at the tune pictured above. The book it comes from is riddled with errors in the basslines – I know this for a fact. So, the first bar and the third bar here are actually very similar, and I’m tempted to play the first bar with the bassline that the third bar uses. I promise not to talk such heresy in my talk, of course, when I shall focus on the paratext rather than the notes themselves!)
I was one of the speakers doing a short talk for Glasgow University’s Hunterian museum on Tuesday 16 March evening – my talk was about Alexander Campbell, editor of Albyn’s Anthology (1816-18).
Someone on Twitter asked, ‘What have you achieved this year that you’re proud of?’
DISCLAIMER (also posted on my Teaching Artist blog). It troubles me slightly that earlier in the pandemic, reading other people’s updates about all their achievements just made me feel guilty. All I was doing was working from home and keeping everyone safely looked after. Nothing heroic, nothing remarkable. I’ll be honest, my kneejerk reaction to such postings was a combination of, “come on, guys, do you have to?” and “well, I can’t be seen to be slacking here!” But the truth of the matter is that no-one fully knows other peoples’ situations – how much they’re struggling, whether they have caring responsibilities, or indeed, what their work-life balance is – whether they’ve chosen it or found it forced upon them.
Comparisons are Futile
I suppose the moral is that it’s pointless to try to compare oneself with other people. I’ve been in Glasgow nearly 33 years, still on the same grade, despite having gained a doctorate, a teaching certificate, and two fellowships. Written a book, published a lot, given plenty of research papers. Still – in terms of time allocation – more of a librarian than a postdoc researcher.
“You’re a bloody librarian, woman!”
I was once told, “You’re a bloody librarian, woman!” In the west of Scotland, the “I kennt your faither” philosophy – not allowing someone to forget their place or where they came from – is still alive and well, and if I’m on the same grade, I’m forced to conclude that my value has not increased. It’s very depressing.
Failed in the Eyes of One who Climbs Ladders
A former colleague once said that if one wasn’t moving jobs and climbing the ladder, then one was a failure. This philosophy favours men and people without children. I do admire people with ambition. I also admire and envy people who are less ambitious, but who are content with where they’re at. As for me, I’m still struggling with thwarted ambition, three and a half years before retirement! I should very much like to have moved jobs and climbed the ladder – anyone who thinks I’m unambitious, really doesn’t know me. However, I’ve raised three sons (who have benefited enormously from the Scottish education system, which is why we didn’t want to leave Scotland!) and I got those extra qualifications whilst working full-time. (Apart from statutory maternity leaves, I’ve always worked full-time.) If I’m a failure for not getting promoted – guilty as charged – then I do have a few good excuses. And I did recently get a Special Note of Commendation from my CILIP researcher colleagues, which was heartening.
Coast Downhill? No Way!
During the Covid pandemic, I’ve pushed myself to achieve as much as I could, because I didn’t want to find myself sliding towards an unwanted, age-related slowing down. I am not yet of retirement age, and I can’t bear to think that inactivity might see me slipping out of the research scene before I’m ready. So this is posted in the spirit of demonstrating that I’m still here, still research-active, and not yet ready to be written off!
So here goes!
Not everything is a ‘research output’, obviously. I stitched my lockdown journal, for a start. (I even made a video about it.) I learned the concertina, and I wrote tunes for it.
I broke my foot, baked banana bread, put on weight, and once my foot was better, I put myself on a diet and exercise regime to lose some pounds. I’ve made gallons of soup, and done 95% of the housework. (Two of the three of us are over sixty – and two are oblivious to housework or the absence of our weekly cleaner!)
But in terms of research? Working from home since March, I’ve benefited from a mostly peaceful dining room (albeit a thoroughfare to the kitchen), and gained my commuting time along with the new responsibility of cooking most weekday meals. The allocation of my time to library (70%) and research (30%) is unchanged. I’ve done my user education and made several training videos in my library role, and I love this side of it. But I fight a compulsion to answer library emails at any time of the day or night (even the day after Boxing Day) for fear of being considered unhelpful if I don’t – whilst research would swallow me up whole, without any resistance from me, if I didn’t occasionally get dragged away from it! I freely admit that I have absolutely NOT limited my research activities to ten hours a week. It makes me excellent value, but I’m reaching the point where I feel I cannot try much harder, and it won’t really make any difference to my career trajectory. If one can have a flat trajectory in the first place!
Quite apart from wanting to achieve “outputs”, I have tried to take the attititude that it is easier to attend a Zoom conference than to arrange for everything to run smoothly in my absence attending a “real” live event in a diffferent city.
So, how have I done this very weird year? I am not dissatisfied.
‘A Music Library for St Andrews: use of the University’s Copyright Music Collections, 1801-1849’, in Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society no.15 (2020), pp.13-33.
Romantic National Song Network blogpost, 9 Sept 2020, ‘Revisiting the Achievements of Song-Collector Alexander Campbell’
‘The sound of forgotten music: Karen McAulay uncovers some of the great female composers who have been lost from history’. The People’s Friend, Special Edition, 11 Sep 2020, 2 p. Dundee : D C Thomson.
‘Performative Silence in the Library’, Icepops Annual 2020: International Copyright Literacy Event with Playful Opportunities for Practitioners and Scholars, ed. Chris Morrison and Jane Secker, p. 32-33
Guest co-editor (and contributor) of Brio vol.56 no.2 (Winter 2019), dedicated to Claimed From Stationers Hall network-related writings.
PRESENTATIONS (whatever would we have done without Zoom and Teams?!)
University of Glasgow Scottish and Celtic Studies Department, ‘Alexander Campbell’s song-collecting for Albyn’s Anthology’ (17 November)
Traditional Song Forum, ‘Scottish song-collector Alexander Campbell and his ethnomusicological exploits’
EFDSS Conference, London, ‘All the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order’: musical resemblances over the border.’
CILIP Metadata Group Conference, ‘The Cinderella of Stationers’ Hall: Music (and Metadata) in Georgian Legal Deposit Libraries’
I’ve also facilitated an event for the Friends of Wighton, made a mini video presentation about my research for a Scottish research event …
… and made the aforementioned video about my stitched lockdown journal. I’ve done quite a few training videos with my library hat on, too, but I’ll spare you the details of those!
Although I didn’t win the Researcher-Practitioner award from my professional body, I was honoured to receive a special note of commendation today. This is a very nice thing to receive from CILIP’s LIRG (Library and Information Research Group) – I’m basking in the glow this evening!
” … special note of commendation to Karen. The panel particularly wanted to recognise Karen’s breadth of research work and scholarship and her ability to blend music research with librarianship.”
Today, I took part in Explorathon20, where I showed a tiny videoclip discussing my research into late Victorian and early 20th century Sottish music. (It was actually called the Global Science Show, but it was an opportunity for researchers to showcase their research in whatever discipline. I was probably the token musicologist!)
This is another of my cross-posts from the Facebook Glasgow Music Publishers page. But I’ve updated the update!
Apologies for the silence here. In recent weeks, I’ve given two conference papers (one on Stationers’ Hall music, and one on old Scots songs and a Lowland pipe tune); I gave another talk (about Scottish song-collector Alexander Campbell) last Sunday late afternoon. Was I happy with my talk? Yes, until I had given it! This self-doubt is really quite a handicap.
I have just had the luxury of a long weekend, but – well, it hasn’t been luxurious. As well as the Sunday talk, there was the usual domesticity and the church organist duties. We expected the roofer to start work today, too, but it rained – and you don’t remove a VERY large skylight in the rain! Not to worry – I turned one of my conference papers into a journal article and submitted it this evening. I’ve just realised I’m a coward. I submitted an article to a journal I’ve not submitted to before, and now I’m struggling NOT to judge it too harshly, probably before the editor has even checked their email inbox!
I really do have to get back to work on a book chapter – although neither it nor the rest of this frenetic activity has been about Glasgow music publishers! (I just hope their ghosts aren’t feeling neglected, or heaven help me come Hallowe’en!)
Funded research clearly has to be documented, and in the UK that involves uploading outputs to a website called Researchfish. I’m glad I was just about up-to-date on my Researchfish entries, so it didn’t take excessively long to check a few entries and submit the whole thing.
It’s a good thing I checked, though. The bibliographyis on the blog – and the blog was logged literally ages ago. But today I decided that the bibliography was such a huge output that it deserved its own mention.  And although I logged our Brio special issue over a month ago, elsewhere in my earlier narrative I had noted that it was “pending”. I hastily updated that, too! (The Brio issue is all there on Pure, our institutional repository, along with my other research outputs.)
So as far as I’m concerned, the “fish” has been netted, weighed, documented and forwarded to the distributor! I’ve hit SEND, and now all that remains is to apply for the next research grant.
My research career, beginning with the start of my doctoral studies in 2004, has been entirely on a part-time basis. I studied part-time whilst I worked full-time, and have since then had several secondments to part-time research whilst spending the rest of my working week occupying my regular professional role.
During my doctoral studies, I grew accustomed to the niggling question, “am I doing enough research?” (It was accompanied by, “am I doing this parenting lark adequately?!”)
I felt reasonably confident that my professional role wasn’t suffering – after all, when I was at that desk, I was working the work! But, in my student capacity, I had the memory of what full-time research “felt like”, from a previous doctoral attempt, and it was hard persuading myself that no-one expected me to achieve as much, as fast, when I was doing it entirely in evenings, at weekends and on holiday. (Reading early nineteenth-century commentaries whilst at Eurocamp? Oh yes, been there!)
Fast-forward to my present 70:30 existence (70% librarian, 30% postdoc). Desperate to be taken seriously as a researcher, I struggle to achieve as much as the average academic, when I’m only a researcher for 10.5 hours a week. Reading, writing, researching, editing, attending conferences … I drive myself to produce “output” at a rate that makes me look like a force to be reckoned with, but honesty forces me to concede that some of it has to be done at home, in my own time.
So, I reached this summer. Since May, I’ve been a guest-speaker at a workshop in Paris, contributed a pecha kucha at a copyright literacy seminar closely followed by a paper at a week-long international history conference (both in Edinburgh), been an after-dinner speaker at an engagement in the Highlands, and then – oh, blessed relief, came a fortnight’s vacation.
The first holiday week, I struggled with the guilt that I had a journal issue to edit, and ought to be doing the book-reviews I’d allocated myself. I managed not to do any of it! This was due to a combination of excessive domesticity, a self-imposed fitness regime, and end-of-term exhaustion. By the second week, I had family obligations that took me away from home, and I read no more than the introduction to the first book-review book. I’m driving home tomorrow. It does feel as though I’ve had a mental break, but the guilt is now pressing on my shoulders like a heavy cloud, and I’m perplexed as to how I’ll catch up with my scholarly obligations. It can’t be done in 10.5 hours a week, that’s for sure!
I’ve seen headlines in social media about how even full-time academics don’t get enough time in which to do research. I can understand this, but I can’t make comparisons. If an academic is not teaching, marking or administrating, then presumably some research can be done. For me, by contrast, if it’s not a research day/morning, then I have the rest of my 9-to-5 taken up with a completely different role, and NO research can be done. Likewise, I may have similar holiday allocation to my academic colleagues, but there’s a difference between that, and the length of the average undergraduate vacation. During that time there are no undergraduate lecture or tutorial commitments. I don’t have that difference at my disposal.
I’m sure I am not the only part-time researcher to feel this guilt. I don’t think there’s an answer, either. I’m moderately pleased with myself that I have deliberately, consciously taken a fortnight off, and only very occasionally opened my work email inbox to check that nothing crucial had popped into it. I deleted a few irrelevant messages, and closed the inbox again. My out-of-office message would have explained my silence, to anyone expecting to hear from me. I haven’t come up with a strategy for catching up with my editing and writing obligations. It may entail ignoring emails for a couple more days until I’ve reviewed those books!
I’d like to write a blogpost about the ISECS eighteenth-century history conference, but I fear it would be a bit of an indulgence, in the face of all that I personally absolutely have to do.
I wonder how other part-time researchers manage? Any tips or tricks to share?
I have a magnificent idea for a research project, building upon my doctoral AND postdoc work, papers I’ve written, networks I’ve been involved with, and so on. I’ve written it all down as a discussion paper – I really think it could work. Watch this space!
So as far as I’m concerned, the “fish” has been netted, weighed, documented and forwarded to the distributor! I’ve hit SEND, and now all that remains is to apply for the next research grant.
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 