A Week with a Difference – and only Halfway Through

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Programme and delegate tag for Tradition in Motion conference at RCS

I started my Leng Medal Memories interviews this week. What a pleasurable experience this is turning out to be! Two of my interviewees still have their silver medals, fifty-odd years later. I subsequently asked the Facebook group, Dundee Pals, and found that lots more people there still have their medals, too. It just goes to show how significant winning the medals actually was to the school pupils who took part.

Anyway, I thought I’d re-share the link to my questionnaire about Dundee Leng Medal memories, in case anyone finds this post and would like to participate in my research project:- https://tinyurl.com/LengMemories

Tradition in Motion

The stage is set: Stevenson Hall for Co-founder Dr Jo Miller’s keynote; doctoral students Connor Civatte and Neil Wood; and Dr Jo Miller in conversation with Head of Dept Prof Josh Dickson,

On a different note, yesterday (Tuesday) saw me as a delegate attending the first day of an Royal Conservatoire of Scotland conference, which was celebrating thirty years of traditional music at RCS. The keynote speaker was Dr Jo Miller, one of the co-founders of the Scottish Music degree. As she spoke, her slides showing the chronology of those early years, I realised that when I arrived at what was then RSAMD in 1988, this was just as trad music teaching was getting off the ground.

In 1988, I had no idea that I’d end up recommencing my doctoral studies fifteen years later – little did I know! – forsaking mediaeval polyphony to focus on Scottish songs. My choice of subject was very much influenced by the thought that I’d at least be studying something that might be useful and relevant to students on that course. It took me a little bit longer before I realised that what I was researching counted as ancient history – certainly relevant background, but a very different kind of Scottish song to what today’s contemporary musicians really want to focus on! The songs – their tunes and authors – are still important. But the harpsichord, and subsequently the piano arrangements that I was looking at, represented the soundscape of another world entirely. By contrast, yesterday I heard a paper about sounding Scottish in modern harp-playing; another about the use of traditional Scottish music in videogames; and a third talking about Robert Burns and Hamish Henderson. So many different aspects of Scottish traditional music!

No more interviews or meetings for me this week, but next week I’ll resume my researches. Meanwhile, I need to create another ‘Microsoft Forms’ online form. To think that when I was first a doctoral researcher, I took typing lessons so that I wouldn’t be dependent on paying a typist – as I had done for my Masters dissertation.

By the time I finished my second attempt at a PhD, we had email and PCs. Social media and all the extra Microsoft offerings were still in the future.

And now – I couldn’t even do this present research without Teams, Bookings and Forms. Times change!

Silver & Gold Leng Medal Memories, Update no.1

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
A classroom in Wandsworth, London, 1906 - the year that John Leng died

I’ve heard from many kind people who remember their involvement with the Leng Medal song competitions in Dundee, and now I’m starting to organise myself to speak to (or chat online, or email) everyone who has been in touch and expressed a willingness to share their memories with me.  If you’re one of those people, and you’ve expressed a preference to share your memories via one form of communication or another, I have noted this for future reference. You’ll be hearing from me soon! But if this blog post is the first you’ve heard of my research project, then you can find out more about it here, and you can get in touch with me here. It’s not too late!)

I hoped to hear from a lot of folk, and I certainly did!  So I’m contacting a few people at a time, to make it easier to organise my time.  If I can, I plan to focus on a decade or so at a time – though this idea may end up being rather loosely interpreted!

I’ve just started emailing people who indicated that they could chat online, inviting them to select a day and time.  I’ve allocated half an hour, so that we don’t feel rushed.  But if anyone fears their memories won’t take that long to share – there’s no need to worry – any anecdotes, however wee, will help fill out the story!

Microsoft Bookings

I very carefully set up my Microsoft Bookings page, and so far as I could tell, I did everything correctly. However, when I shared the link, I suspect I ticked a box that should not have been ticked. Anyway, I’ve unticked the box and shared the link again. I only confess this in case anyone received an email from me but couldn’t make the link work! I’ve re-sent the email and hopefully all is now well. Every day’s a school day, as they say.

‘Two notes’

One person has revealed that they sang two notes before the teacher told them to sit back down!

I think I may have mentioned before – I work part-time, so progress will be slow but steady! I’m very much looking forward to hearing more about this remarkably long-lived and successful competition!

Karen McAulay

Faded old sepia photo of solemn children (Edwardian?) in a classroom
The ghosts of children long, long past – provenance unknown

Confession: these photos are from my own ephemera collection. They have absolutely no connection with Dundee, but just serve as a reminder of the days when Sir John Leng’s competition was initiated. The photo at the top of this blog was taken in Wandsworth in 1906, the year of Leng’s death. These little tots probably weren’t being taught Scots songs by their elegant teacher. On the other hand, the children at the foot of this blog post look exactly the age that early Leng Prize competitors must have been! This postcard comes with no caption whatsoever.

Links

Athenaeum Award Research Project: Silver and Gold Leng Medal Memories

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Microsoft Forms icon. Cartoon person sitting holding a notebook or tablet.

And I’ve started. I’m inching towards the part of the project where I start interviewing people, to see what they remember about this long-running Dundee schools singing competition. I’ve created a Microsoft mini-questionnaire so that people can contact me, and a poster for displaying or sharing. I’ve shared news of my oral history research project via Facebook, Bluesky and Linked in. And folk are getting in touch! I am really excited to say that in less than a week, I’ve already been contacted by quite a lot of people. Best of all, they’re already sharing memories of the Leng Scots Song competition that are exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to hear about – which goes to show that I’ve plainly come up with a really good topic to investigate (if I might be so bold as to say!)

Here’s the link to the questionnaire:- https://tinyurl.com/LengMemories

This research is being funded by an Athenaeum Award from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

She Started Something! Bamboo Pipes – then the Pipers’ Guild

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Front of The Pipers' Guild Handbook

Folks, I got distracted again tonight – beguiled by bamboo pipes, in fact. Let me explain!

Have you heard of Margaret James (1891-1978)? I wouldn’t be surprised if not, but believe me, she really started something in the 1920s. Someone gave the Gloucestershire school teacher a bamboo pipe from Sicily, and she realised this was something that kids could make at school.  They weren’t expensive to make, either.  (I read an observation that they were made from materials readily available in many homes.)**  It apparently took off! Kids liked actually making an instrument then learning to play it.  It was certainly another means of practical music-making. Crafting bamboo pipes briefly became the latest thing in classroom music, or so the literature would have us believe.  Although unmentioned in the Board of Education’s Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers in 1927, either in the music or the handcrafts sections, by 1933 the idea was being recommended in Board of Education literature and by HMIs (His Majesty’s Inspectors).  I do tend to wonder how many pipes were actually being made across the country – did the numbers match the rhetoric? Anyway, Margaret organised courses, wrote books and made at least one recording.  Judging by the number of publications, there surely must have been sufficient interest. This is a quick, but not exhaustive, list of works Margaret had a hand in:-

  • The adjusted treble pipe : the rhyme & reason of it, how to make it (Pipers’ Guild, 1933)
  • Directions for making the bass pipe, with diagrams by N. Gibbs (1936)
  • Directions for making the extended treble and alto pipes (Cramer, 1942)
  • Exercises and airs for pipes (Curwen, 1941)
  • Folk dance tunes : for bamboo pipes / transposed by Margaret James (Novello, 1934)
  • How to make a bamboo pipe [Diagram] (Published for the Pipers’ Guild, ca.1933)
  • The Pipers’ Guild handbook / Margaret James; with drawings and a chapter on decoration / by Nora Gibbs. Cramer, [1932]
  • Supplement 1 to the above, [1932-5]

Indeed, Vaughan Williams even wrote a Suite for Pipes (Oxford University Press, 1947), a quartet which was certainly more difficult than the average school pupil could attempt. Here it is, albeit played by a recorder quartet:-

The bamboo pipes do sound sweet, pastoral, traditional – very ‘English’. (I say that in inverted commas, because the question of what sounds ‘English’ is a whole dissertation in itself. I’m not going there.) Which makes it all the more ironic that her original gifted pipe was Sicilian! Anyway, we can agree that their folksy sound is part of their appeal.

Margaret herself started the Pipers’ Guild, which lasts to this day.  I did wonder if her bamboo pipe-making movement made it as far as Scotland  – was it something Scottish teachers were also doing? Judging by newspaper evidence, the Guild did have a small presence up here, but perhaps not quite as enthusiastically as in England. I won’t hunt further. 

Since my research interests are currently in a Scottish publisher producing educational music materials for a widespread market, then I thought maybe I should see if, or how often pipe-making got a passing mention – because their music editor/advisor was nothing if not on the ball. However, by 1939/40, it appears the humble (and ready-made!) recorder had gained supremacy. See this observation by one of Thomas Nelson’s authors:-

[…], who has done a lot of work on pipe playing in schools, composed pieces for them, and might be asked to write a first book on recorder playing, since they’re attracting more interest than pipes now. […] My own opinion is that there is already sufficient pipe music but not sufficient first stage recorder music.’

Similarly, Thomas Nelson’s four classroom books of My Music Guide (1953) mention recorders, but are silent on the question of pipes or pipe-making. Bamboo pipes evidently remained a minority interest, albeit for a long time.

** Glancing at my own garden canes, I doubt they’re wide enough to do anything with.  I don’t know if our toolbox is equipped for such a project, anyway.

Picture of Pipers’ Guild Handbook sourced from eBay. (I didn’t buy it.)

Aha! New Arrival all the Way from Arran

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Once used in an Edinburgh school, a wee Scots song book (pupil’s edition) found its way to a shop on the Isle of Arran, then back to the mainland to me in Glasgow.

1, 2 … still looking!

If you ever find any of these in the back of a school cupboard, or bookshop,  or car boot sale, or Granny’s attic …

… please do let me know!  I’m trying to get complete set! There were four books for the kids, and four for teachers.