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.
My article is out today!
History Scotland Vol.24 No.1, January/February 2024, pp. 12-17
I am delighted to see my article about these remarkable women – and now I have a publication amongst my 2023 outputs!
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.
Hooray!
Image by Belinda Cave from Pixabay
‘I was talking’, said a colleague, ‘to someone who found a stash of an elderly relative’s music ….’
Now, you’ve possibly picked up on my mixed feelings about donations. Grateful, curious, but also sometimes experiencing a sinking feeling when I realise that a recently donated bagful of music really can’t be added to the library stock. We welcome music if it’s historically important, or a serviceable copy of core repertoire. However, the bottom line is that we want our musicians to use up-to-date or at least respectable standard editions, and a lot of old music is neither historically important nor serviceable core repertoire.
So today, I cautiously asked what kind of music it was?
Sol-Fa.
How often have I sighed at that word? Our students don’t use old Sol-Fa notation. It fell out of use by the mid-1960s, and ‘modern’ or avant-garde classical music never made it into Sol-Fa; the system doesn’t lend itself to harmonically and rhythmically more adventurous music. But today was different, because my own research has meant my spending quite a bit of time finding out more about the use of Sol-Fa in elementary music education. And to cut a long story short, I am very much looking forward to seeing this music. I now know what I should be looking out for, from the perspective of ‘my’ Scottish music publishers. A few tantalising snaps of this donation have really whetted my scholarly appetite. What will I find? How will it augment what I already know?
I can’t wait!
If you find Granny’s old Sol-Fa music in the attic, do give it more than a passing glance. See what the music is. See who published it, and where. (Scotland? England? Somewhere else?) Was it for children? Adults? A male-voice or ladies’ choir? Church? A municipal choir? A school or college? Is there a date on it? (You’ll be lucky! But you never know.) Is it part of a series?
What at first sight looks humdrum, mundane, and unusable can sometimes prove to be a fascinating piece of a musical history jigsaw-puzzle. And strangely enough, you don’t actually have to sing from it, to learn more of that history – a close inspection tells so much.
It was necessary! So I took to the library blog and wrote this …
I woke at 4 am again today. Could I get back to sleep? No. As I rode into town on the bus, I reflected that many of my wakeful thoughts had revolved around scholarly sharing. My mind seemed to bring out a series of issues, examining them one by one.
The breathless, ‘Tell me all you know’? Flattering, endearing, and with a piquant irony, considering one of our academic colleagues asked, more than two decades ago, ‘what does a librarian want with a PhD, anyway?’ Indeed, it was around that time that I overheard two graduate librarians opining that librarians don’t actually need degrees at all. Another academic told a colleague that they were ‘only a librarian.’ (Postscript. That librarian subsequently went on getting postgraduate qualifications too!)
So it’s nice that, as the postdoctoral librarian approaches retirement, she is acknowledged to be possessed of Useful Knowledge. Even if it’s scholarly knowledge, which now sits in books on the library shelves.
Then my thoughts turned to the individuals whom I would characterise as academic vacuum cleaners, noting your pearls of wisdom and later quoting them, unattributed. I know it’s good to share, but it leaves a bitter taste when your sharing is taken advantage of, whether it’s scholarly research or professional assistance. On the other hand, if we acknowledge help given, it reflects well on both the sharer and the sharee!
The problem is that I’m a librarian AND a scholar. And as librarians, we’re accustomed to sharing. I sometimes find it hard to decide where a line has been crossed.
Similarly, we librarians share our expertise about referencing, but there’s perhaps a subtle difference between our, ‘this is how you reference’ advice, which I gladly and willingly do all the time – and, ‘can you sort my references?’ As a scholar, I don’t ghost-write articles for publication. Should I, as a librarian, ghost-format references? Would I be colluding in giving the impression that the author has done a superb job with all that technical detail?! Or do other librarians do this without a qualm? I just don’t know what’s the norm here.
There are also times when sharing is not so good, though. An interrupted talk where anecdotes are shared, uninvited, whilst you’re in mid-flow. Or ‘Questions’ afterwards, that are not questions so much as demonstrations of knowledge.
And best of all, requests for sharing that simply overstep the mark! Now you’re wondering what I mean, aren’t you?! Well, you won’t believe this one.
I was expecting a research question, in one particular email that I received a while ago. But that wasn’t what was being requested, on this occasion.
‘You have a sewing machine, don’t you? Can you show me how to sew curtains?’
[Meaning, ‘Can you sew them for me …?’]
Clker-Free-Vector Images from Pixabay
The Doctor doesn’t have time to sew other scholars’ curtains. Helpful, I am, but not a mug!
https://musicsubscribers.co.uk/
This is the very detailed and useful database compiled by Simon Fleming and Martin Perkins for their subscribers project. You can find out more about it on their extensive information pages.
I had early access to the database for my chapter on subscriptions to Scottish fiddle books. (Chapter 10: ‘Strathspeys, Reels, and Instrumental Airs: A National Product’, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. )
NB ‘The dataset is the intellectual copyright of Simon D. I. Fleming and Martin Perkins.’
Simon D. I. Fleming and Martin Perkins (eds.) Music by Subscription: Composers and their Networks in the British Music-Publishing Trade, 1676–1820. Oxford, Routledge, 2022.
NB. There’s currently (26 November 2023) a Black Friday deal on the book!
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
This has been quite a week!
Wednesday. Glasgow to St Andrews, to do book revisions, and a lecture for the University’s Institute of Scottish Historical Research. (It was about the impact pedagogical and technological innovations had on Scottish music publishers.)
Thursday night. St Andrews to Dundee (expedient – it was the only way to get back in time for work on Friday!)
Friday morning. Dundee to Glasgow, for a day’s librarianship. One particular query took a couple of hours, but I was told that my reply would make the enquirer very happy … really, that’s all that matters.
Saturday. Glasgow to Dundee and back for the Friends of Wighton 20th Anniversary celebrations. I attended the speeches and morning concert …
I’m the Honorary Librarian, and my role was to show off Wighton’s books, in the afternoon. Although few visitors required my services, I had some very enjoyable conversations about the books, so it was a pleasant day.
It’s always fun to spot little comments made on the music by Wighton himself, and today I also found one of the books had belonged to an original subscriber. I wonder if she played the tunes when she got the book? In a chapter I wrote a couple of years ago, I found the number of women subscribers compared to men, went up as time went by. There’s a Miss Scrimgeour on the database compiled for that book, but Mrs Scrimgeour doesn’t appear there. Have I somehow found a new subscriber, or was she just mistranscribed at some point?!
Googlemaps will again be reporting record travel mileage this month! But I have awarded myself the rest of the weekend off. (Honestly, have I only walked 8466 steps today? I’m surprised!)
Well, the talk seems to have gone well, and again, I found a very responsive audience. After being taken out for a delicious dinner, I headed for Dundee, which was the only way I was going to be at work on time in the morning.
Another time, I need to clarify, for anyone not familiar with Tonic Sol-Fa, that it was devised for singers, not instrumentalists.
If you played an instrument, you learned off standard staff notation or by ear – with or without an instructor. In late Victorian times, after the 1870 and 1872 Education Acts, it stands to reason that more children would have learnt sight-singing by Sol-Fa, than learnt an instrument. Children whose parents could pay, might have had private instrumental lessons. Some might have had opportunities to join a band, learn from someone known to them, or pick up a fiddle (for example), but I still maintain that the majority of children were more likely to have encountered Sol-Fa.
As to social mobility … I’m not entirely sure whether it was easier or harder to fight your way up the ladder in those days. I’d need to ask a social historian of that era. I can only comment on the few instances that I’ve observed: ‘my’ music publishers certainly seemed to do well for themselves.
So, here I sit on a train back to Glasgow. Like Cinderella, my carriage will change back to a pumpkin, and my garb back to rags, if I’m not a librarian behind my desk by nine o’clock!
The bus got delayed in traffic today. (Significantly so. My journey was 4.75 hours from door to door!) This did reduce the time I had for book revisions, but I still managed a productive afternoon. I’ve revised the Introduction and created a Preface.
I had already done more work on my literature review, so I worked through the reviewer’s suggestions until I was pretty sure I’d addressed them all. I start with their suggestions and my responses. Once dealt with, each point is ticked off, and digitally ‘crossed out.’
So far, so good. Just a small matter of giving all the chapters the same treatment. I’ll get there eventually.
And because a mild, damp morning turned into a mild, dry afternoon, I even managed a walk by the sea. What could be nicer? (I didn’t quite get onto the sand, but next time, if I’m in trainers! …. )
the Scottish Music Publishers and Pedagogues inspiring Hearts and Minds through Song’
You just have to get to St Andrews!
Thursday at 5.30 pm
https://x.com/ISHRStAndrews/status/1726346251262722510?t=Pcj4iHBLW-ABj4-jzAECvw&s=09
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 