Burns’ Songs – for his Centenary

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

You can imagine the enthusiasm with which publishers rushed to produce centenary editions of Robert Burns’s songs in 1896. We have a Bayley & Ferguson ‘new and revised’ centenary edition in the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland library: well-used over the years, bearing the scars of untold tussles, its paper almost skin-soft through repeated borrowing. This one was published in Glasgow and London. I wasn’t at all surprised to see vendor Frank Simpson’s stamp on it – the Sauchiehall Street shop was there for many years, where the now defunct BHS store later stood. I can’t imagine how many of our old scores came from there!

Today, I needed to compare it with a more lavish bound presentation copy, which we acquired as a donation. The imprint likewise had Bayley and Ferguson’s name, but in larger print above it, it had Hedderwick, of Citizen Buildings in St Vincent Street. Both firms gave Glasgow addresses, and no mention of London. I suspect it was the earlier of the two, since I found 1896 newspaper adverts for this one. Hedderwick was a long established firm. And Bayley and Ferguson did publish music on behalf of other firms, groups or individuals.

It’ll have to go into the special collection – it’s so heavy that I can’t imagine anyone wanting to borrow it.

Plain or fancy, I imagine this title was a bestseller for several decades. I’ll finish cataloguing it tomorrow.

Now – have we got the Mozart Allan centenary Burns edition … ? Of course we have!

You can’t have too much of a Good Thing

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Saturday frivolity, not research. But it does give a bit of insight into the fin-de-siecle publishing trade.

This came in a donation; we have the low voice version, but it was also available for high voice – that’s perfectly normal. Inside, there’s ukulele tab as well as the piano accompaniment, and instruction as to which notes you should tune the strings to. The publisher clearly thought he was onto a winner, and issued it in as many formats as he could think of. Just look! Oh, and he published it both sides of the Atlantic, for maximum exposure.

Just a trivial song, but it must have been a hit – in my family there are still memories of it being sung!

A Fellow Back in 1901

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

This is the third week of my Ketelbey Fellowship, and I arrived at St Andrews in pouring rain yesterday morning. Fortunately, it had subsided to a drizzle by the time I made my way to Martyrs Kirk, where materials from the Library special collections can be consulted. I didn’t get wet enough to risk dripping onto rare Victorian pamphlets! (I only know they were Victorian by the fact that the earlier numbers included God Save the Queen rather than the King – so they were published before January 1901.)

I had a ball! They each began with an editorial introduction – I love these. They’re so informative about the thinking behind whatever is in the book. Intriguingly, the editor seemed not to be the prime contributor, but all was revealed when I did some Googling later. Good old Baptie (Musical Scotland) informed me that the editor had two middle names, and used them as a nom de plume. No mystery after all! Moreover, one particular collaborator, more involved than most, was …

His daughter.

I didn’t quite get through the pile I’d called up, but I’m making good progress. And I encountered some interesting glimpses into social and political history. What’s more, if ever I needed proof that little girls’ education had a subtle difference to that of little boys, I found it today. It shouldn’t come as a surprise – I know it happened. But I wasn’t expecting to find this in a Sol-Fa song book!

It is such a luxury to have a desk in an office just a couple of minutes from a big university library. This morning, I snatched a quick coffee before I went back for another session with more of these instruction books. What’s more, I feel more a dedicated researcher here, compared to being ‘the librarian that also does research’ in Glasgow. It’s easier to focus, somehow. And tonight, I’m going to a research seminar, so I’ll get to meet some more historians then. Good times.

Find me at KarenMcAMusic.threads.net

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

What’s all this about? Everyone perhaps having to pay to be on Twitter? No, Sir! I’m not actively leaving just yet, but if failure to pay results in accounts disappearing, then I’m afraid I will disappear from Twitter.

I’m on Threads: KarenMcAMusic.threads.net – maybe I should be asking my Twitter followers to follow me there?

And of course, I’m here on my blog.

I know – a blog is not the same as the casual, friendly conversations we used to have on Twitter. It’ll be interesting to see what we’re all doing in a year’s time!

Multi-tasking, or, How to Balance a Pendulum Clock

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I’ll spend my 15 minute tea-break writing this – it won’t be a long read! Thinking about all the things I’ve got to do, the metaphor came into my mind of a pendulum. It’s supposed to swing in two dimensions – an arc, not an ellipse. But my mind is full of so many different ideas that it swings all over the place.

I’ve got a book to finish – but that’s when I have my Researcher hat on. I try not to think about it when I’m busy being a librarian.

I’m also promoting an international congress for my professional association – something else I do in my ‘spare’ time. So this morning, before I got started with the day-job, I took a photo of the mascot and dashed off a tweet.

Back to the day-job. I know what I intend to do this morning, and I open the websites and spreadsheets that I need to use. But incoming emails are inevitably a distraction – aren’t they always? Especially when we’re offered a book that relates to the topic of my book. It’s being offered to the library, not me personally, but as a researcher, oh how I’m bursting to see that book. Quick – check the catalogue, dash off an email …. Phew! The book will be ours. Then there’s mention of another conference … relevant? Or a distraction? No, I haven’t got time at the moment. I haven’t got time to attend, not whilst I have a book to finish!

But I’d better get back to the task in hand.

So I look on my list, look in the catalogue, look in commercial catalogues and at composers’ own websites, and check to see if they’re on Twitter.

The task in hand involves looking up works by the women composers who I’ve got on a long list, and seeing if they’ve composed anything for under-represented instruments. So, music for tuba, bagpipes, accordion, bassoon, double bass … because my goal at the moment is to provide plenty of good music by women composers, for our students to explore and incorporate into their repertoire. But if there’s not much for their instrument, that will be problematical. It’s my job to find it! (Well, not for every individual student, I hasten to add, but I do want to ensure there’s material in the library for them to find – and, more crucially, perform.)

(Oh, Twitter! says my overactive mind. Has anyone responded to the library recently? to the professional association’s conference site? Have our sponsors posted anything interesting?)

I metaphorically slap my own wrist and go back to the list of women composers. The woman composer I was looking up doesn’t seem to have a Twitter account anyway, so there won’t be anything informative about her there. The trouble is, it’s all very well finding out what they’ve composed. From my point of view as a music librarian, it’s whether we can buy the performance materials! Yes, some of it could be hired for a performance, but that’s not within my remit. What I want is scores on library shelves, accurately catalogued.

I Googled, “Balancing a pendulum”. I was being metaphorical, but of course Google took me literally, and told me how to balance a clock. Which doesn’t really help much! However, I do know that removing distractions is a good way to aid concentration. I’ll post this, close a few windows, and do some cataloguing to give my eyes a rest from spreadsheets.

Countdowns!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

You know the story of the shoemaker and the elves? He goes to bed, exhausted, and wakes to find the little elves have done all his outstanding work? Oh, I wish!

Technically, my book is meant to be finished by the end of July. I’ve written quite a bit of the last chapter, but it goes without saying that that’s not the end of the process!

  • Writing the conclusion;
  • Tidying the introduction;
  • Checking the whole thing – for content, and also against the style guide;
  • Converting footnotes to endnotes;
  • Sorting the bibliography…

I’m also handling the comms for an international congress – it begins on 31 July.

Of course, there’s also the day-job to be done! And domesticated things don’t just stop. Garden hedges grow regardless of everything. Aargh!

And I have a whole magazine issue to proofread ASAP. (This task was accepted on my behalf – literally nothing to do with me!)

Daily Countdown

Now, the book deadline has been engraved on my brain for a long time. I’ve also known the congress date quite a long time. But believe it or not, it’s only just dawned on me that both dates coincide, and that therefore 38 days’ countdown for one thing would be 38 days for the other. Strange how the realisation suddenly makes it all the more stressful! All I can do is keep doing what I can. A colleague asked me the other day, what were my plans for this summer … ?

‘Finish a book’, I whispered. One way or another!

Alas, I don’t feel indomitable today. More like, a bit hopeless, faced with the mountain in front of me.

35 years in one post

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I omitted to note that this week is my 35 year anniversary of being in the same library post at RCS. Having said that, I have …

  • Had 3 children (minimum maternity leave each time) and seen them grow up.
  • Done a self-funded PhD in my spare time; also gained Fellowship of CILIP and Advance HE. Nearly forgot – I did a PGCert too. My commitment to CPD is, I suggest, exemplary!
  • Published a book;
  • Written a number of articles and papers etc;
  • Nearly finished the second book;
  • Am looking forward to a part-time visiting fellowship in my part-time research secondment.

I just haven’t managed a promotion 😕. Still, apart from that big fail (a single, male former colleague once said that anyone who didn’t move on and up was not a success), at least I have some other successes to my name!

Has anyone said that to you? How did you respond?

GLAM – that’s me

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Just an aside. I didn’t finish my first attempt at a PhD. Opting for a career in librarianship (yes, I know, maybe I should have been braver in my scholarly aspirations), I got taken over by professional training, and couldn’t fit in the completion of a thesis simultaneously. As anyone who knows me will already know, I returned to doctoral studies more than two decades later, but continued working in music librarianship. Part of my time has been seconded to postdoctoral research since 2012.

However, librarianship isn’t the trendiest metier in which to work. We get sick of comments about ‘enjoying a quiet life’, or ‘all that time reading books’, or disparaging remarks about library rules and regulations.

Enter “GLAM”. It stands for the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums sector. Suddenly I feel much better about combining librarianship and musicology, because I can officially call myself, the GLAM musicologist.

Saturday dawned, and a research question was bothering me …

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Old music card catalogue at Mitchell Library, Glasgow

So I decided to spend the afternoon at the Mitchell Library. Glasgow is so fortunate to have this wonderful collection!

I saw the two publications I had in mind. I took notes. I even had time to look at the card catalogue. (Catalogues are great research tools, even though I am personally sick of actually cataloguing.)

And then I went home. It was only when I went over my notes that I realised I had missed at least one item in the bibliography of one book, which I thought I had been looking out for. I spent the next 24 hours kicking myself, determined to go back to find that elusive reference if it killed me.

And then my librarian self remembered the advice I often give students. If you have copied out a useful snippet, put it into Google Books, in speech marks. Like this:-

“Reader, I married him”

(Try for yourself – it’s a quote from Charlotte Bronte.)

Often enough, Google Books will retrieve 2-3 lines including the words you copied, telling you the book where it found the text – and the page number.

I searched on the book abbreviation for the missing reference, and found I’d missed three! However, I have now traced them, and all is well. All for research into a publisher who only caught my interest two weeks ago.

Audio at a Future Date

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
A lot of vinyl records (image from Pixabay)

I’ve taken a couple of days’ leave whilst we’re having work done at home. I’m far too distracted by the banging and crashing around me to be able to sit and write scholarly thoughts. I just can’t!

‘Satan finds work for idle hands to do’ (Proverbs 16:27-29)

However, it appears I can quite easily go shopping on eBay. For some weeks, I’ve covetously watched a handful of old 78-rpm recordings, the sensible voice in one ear drowning out the sentimental voice in the other. The latter is whispering,

‘Look! He conducted that. You can listen to him actually conducting something he arranged! How cool would that be?’

Inner voice

That’s not the voice of a sensible, frugal scholar! Reader, I resisted the sentimental voice. I was being firm, resolute, and admirably sensible until a glorious thought occurred to me: when I’ve finished my book, publication will also entail a book-launch of some kind. And I’m sure to want to give talks about some aspect of the book topic. These records aren’t just artefacts – they’re multimedia soundfiles! Oh yes, indeed. How dreadful it would be, for my future self to remember the records that slipped through my fingers through misguided sensibility?

You also have to understand that my previous research was into an era when there were no sound recordings of any kind. So my present investigations into music between 1880 and 1950 mean stepping into the era when one could listen to recordings (gasp!), view projected slides and even access broadcast media. All very, very exciting at the time.

Broken Record

I did do a bit of bargaining, having resolved that I couldn’t have them unless I negotiated the price below a certain figure. The last shellac record I bought arrived in bits, so I hope that if these are travelling as a threesome, they might be a bit more robust – safety in numbers.

And I’m afraid I succumbed to a small music publication, too. (What am I going to do with all these scores when the book is written and they revert to being cheap, forgotten old titles again?!)