All quiet over here

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

The Fellow had a migraine yesterday.

Caffeine, carbs, codeine and a lunchtime walk restored me to near normality, so I did some reading in preparation for the book revisions, and continued the task today. But migraines are very draining, so I’m tired!

Sea view

I have taken annual leave in order to spend my Thursday afternoons researching, to maximise the time I have in St Andrews. So I settled down to do what needs doing, but STILL I received emailed queries. I spent as little time as I could, but readers shouldn’t be kept waiting. Anyway, back to the research ….

Having a finite amount of time certainly concentrates the mind. Is this relevant? Useful? How does it help the argument?

It pays to get an oversight of a book’s chapter structure, and to make use of the index. If something is in digital format, searching for keywords certainly gives an indication as to whether it’s worth spending time on.

And home-time!

From Magic Lantern to Microphone

Next week, I’m giving another talk, this time to the Institute of Scottish Historical Research. It’s all written, so I just need to read the whole thing out loud to myself between now and then, to ensure there are no tongue-twisters to trip me up!

Crucial to the talk ….

And after carrying far too much to last week’s talk, be assured that I won’t make the same mistake again! My props will be no larger than will fit in a pocket.

Music by Subscription

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Contributed Chapter

Music by subscription : composers and their networks in the British music-publishing trade, 1676-1820 / edited by Simon D.I. Fleming, Martin Perkins. (Routledge, 2022)

I wrote a chapter for this book, which came out in 2022. I wonder if anyone has read RCS’s e-book version? The hardback itself seems to have sat on the shelf unnoticed for a whole year ….

‘Strathspeys, reels, and instrumental airs: a national product’ (pp.177-197)

I write about British Women in Music …

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

It wasn’t until I needed to draw up a list that I realised just how much I’ve focused on British women in music in my research over the past five or six years! Quite a bit, it appears.

‘Mrs Bertram’s Music Borrowing: Reading Between the Lines’, 18 Sept 2017, Guest blogpost: EAERN (Eighteenth-Century Arts Education Research Network) https://eaern.wordpress.com/2017/09/18/mrs-bertrams-music-borrowing-readingbetween-the-lines/

‘My love to war is going’: Women and Song in the Napoleonic Era’, jointly authored with Brianna Robertson-Kirkland, Trafalgar Chronicle, New Series 3 (2018), 202-212.

‘A labour of love for Miss Lambert’, Nov 20, 2019, Personal blogpost: https://karenmcaulaymusicologist.blog/2019/11/20/a-labour-of-love-for-miss-lambert/

‘The sound of forgotten music: Karen McAulay uncovers some of the great female composers who have been lost from history’, in The People’s Friend, Special Edition, 11 Sep 2020, 2 p. Dundee : D C Thomson.

‘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), 13-33.

‘An Extensive Musical Library’: Mrs Clarinda Webster, LRAM, Brio vol.59 no.1 (2022), 29-42

‘Representation of Women Composers in the Whittaker Library’, Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice. Vol. 11 No. 1 (2023): Special Issue on Breaking the Gender Bias in Academia and Academic Practice, pp.21-26. (Paper given at the International Women’s Day Conference hosted by the University of the Highlands and Islands, 2022.) DOI: https://doi.org/10.56433/jpaap.v11i1.533

Newsletter article, ‘‘Our Heroine is Dead’: Miss Margaret Wallace Thomson, Paisley Organist (1853-1896)’, The Glasgow Diapason, March 2023, 10-15. (You can find this article in full on this blog)

FORTHCOMING: Article in History Today â€“ due Dec 2023 [Marjory Kennedy-Fraser and Annie Gray, fin-de-siecle performers]

Meanwhile, back in the Whittaker Library – a Catalogue Entry

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

One day, when I’ve retired from librarianship, all that will be left to show for my 36 years here will be the books and music on the shelves – and their catalogue records. Naturally, I made sure RCS has a copy of Mozart Allan and Jack Fletcher’s The Glories of Scotland in Picture and Song. Click on the title to see how I’ve catalogued it!

I think you’ll agree I’ve managed to insert enough hints as to why I think it’s significant. There’s a book chapter coming out in an essay collection from the Centre for Printing History and Culture at Birmingham City University, so there will be more to read in due course.

The Fear (aka, Revising a Big Piece of Writing)

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

The Fellow sits outside Cromars fish and chip shop, and cogitates. The chips – which were too hot to handle five minutes ago – have magically cooled to the ‘am I still enjoying these?’ stage, but I have achieved my aim: a short walk by the sea, and chips outdoors for lunch. Now I have to go back to my desk and face The Fear.

Writing a book? You take a deep breath, and start. One chapter at a time, head down and just keep going.

You get it as good as you can, submit it, and wait for the feedback. Not so different from writing an academic assignment, really.

The report comes back. Taking a deep breath, you read it. Then again, carefully. In my case, it was kind and eminently reasonable. After a bit of thought, you respond.

But now for the scary bit! The revision. At this point, you have to address the gentle suggestions for improvements. Not only are you reaching into the recesses of your brain to produce new sparkling prose to align with someone else’s carefully considered suggestions, but there’s another deadline.

I’ve booked some scattered annual leave (so as not to cause too much inconvenience) and mapped out my time.

The Fellow has a busy couple of months ahead, disregarding the festive season!

What a Day! Action-Packed …

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I attended a lunchtime concert, gave a talk, and heard a doctoral presentation. Surprisingly – or maybe not – I’m knackered!

‘What are we doing in St Andrews?’, the books asked.

I have a bone to pick with Mozart Allan. I brought a backpack full of his publications with me. If anyone has seen a small, middle-aged woman with a heavy backpack, staggering around St Andrews, the lady is not a tramp! It just renders me incapable of going up or down stairs at anything faster than snail’s pace.

I really HAD to bring Morven with me, but I was starting to regret my decision before I’d even reached St Catherine’s Lodge yesterday morning! Much as I love my travelling companions, I’ll be glad to put them safely back on my shelf at home, where they can talk about the exciting time they had being the centre of everyone’s attention.

Those Wakeful Hours weren’t Wasted

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I would still have preferred a couple more hours’ sleep yesterday morning, but I sat down to revise my paper in the afternoon, and found my early morning brain had done me a favour: moving a couple of chunks of text didn’t involve much rewriting, and I think it makes a more interesting narrative.

My weekend working pattern is a bit disjointed – anyone running a household will understand – but that’s just my reality. Revise a bit of writing – start cooking dinner – a bit more revision. And so on. I tell myself that my subconscious mind is still working on it. (So, when I was carving the roast …? No, I don’t believe it was working at all!)

How to Slow Down Speaking Pace?

I also timed my paper. I think I must still read a bit too fast, though, although I do try to pace it. I don’t gabble. Maybe I should try again tonight, as slowly as I can manage. How do other folk get themselves to slow down? Any special strategies, tips or hints?

Here are suggestions from friends and colleagues. I’ve been practising with the first two already:-

  • Count one for a comma, two for a full stop, and three for a paragraph
  • Mark the script with where to breathe
  • Imagine you’re speaking to people for whom the language you’re speaking isn’t their first language.

I woke early again this morning, but thankfully my wakeful brain wasn’t in editorial mode today…

‘Sleep, Sleep, I couldn’t go to Sleep’ (to quote Eliza)

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I didn’t sleep well last night.  Apart from external disturbances, once I was FULLY awake at 5 am – the fourth time I’d woken up – my mind did its usual trick of rehearsing anything I was worried about. I  reflected about my choir (I’m a church organist); had a wee think about an optician’s appointment; wondered  – again  – whether someone about to revise a book draft had any right to think about sewing a jacket – and mused contentedly about the first of two talks I’m giving this month.

Then, there it was. The second talk – the whole hour of it – there in my mind, Word headings structured down the side and all.  It’s a perfectly good paper, and I was happy enough with it earlier in the week. I was still pleased enough yesterday evening.

Or was I?

Yes, I was – consciously, at any rate.  Plainly, there was a subconscious part of my mind that was less so.

All it amounts to, is moving a chunk of text, and I can see how to make the link smooth at the beginning of it.  I’m just concerned about the other end of it. But lying in the dark, I was warm and comfy – and tired, albeit awake – and nothing was going to drag me down to my laptop at five in the morning.

My mind decided to have a go at something else: the PowerPoint. It’s a lovely set of slides, no problem there.

‘You’re going to have to rearrange the slides’, said my mind, shoogling them about in its imagination. ‘You’re bound to get in a muddle with the order.’

I don’t really think that’s a big deal, though. Just a practical detail, not a conceptual one. 

Huffily, my brain metaphorically shrugged its shoulders. ‘Suit yourself. Wanna go back to sleep, then?’

At 6.54 am? On a Sunday morning, when I have to rehearse the choir at 10? Nope, no more sleep. I put the light on. ‘Why is the light on so early?’, asked the other sleepy organist beside me.

So early? He doesn’t know the half of it. And I can’t do anything about my paper until this afternoon.

But it could have been worse – at least I wasn’t Eliza, after a giddy night out!:-

Bed, bed I couldn’t go to bed,
My head’s too light to try to set it down;
Sleep, sleep I couldn’t sleep tonight,
Not for all the jewels in the crown.
[I could have danced all night …]

Sung by Eliza in My Fair Lady, by Lerner and Loewe

Image by DanFa from Pixabay

Slavery and Empire: Exhibition at Kelvingrove Art Gallery

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Definitely on my To-See list! Details here

I’ve done quite a bit of work about diversity in library collections – whether diversity in terms of music composed by women, or music composed by people of colour. I’ve also devoted quite a bit of space in one chapter of my forthcoming book, to the influence of the craze for ‘minstrelsy’ music towards the end of the nineteenth century.

I was very much taken with the exhibition at the Hunterian Museum a couple of years ago, and I’m also very interested in Glasgow’s history as ‘Second City of the Empire’, and finding out more about some of our dubious merchant forebears. So – will I be going to see the Kelvingrove exhibition? You bet I will!

I’m conscious that I haven’t posted with my research hat on this week. Fear not, I’ll be back! But not in today’s posting. The exhibition very much deserves to be showcased in its own right.

Image by Michał from Pixabay

Missing in Caption

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

So here’s the thing, as we say in Glasgow.  Looking up Doris Ketelbey some weeks ago, I thought I saw an interesting heading in one of her books: it was the title or first line of a Scottish song.  And I did EXACTLY what I warn students not to do.

It made such an impact that I was sure I’d find it again. After all, her book titles weren’t that numerous. Of course I’d remember. Moreover, if I’d found it once …  right? (It’s possible that I found it by accident, with an unlikely set of search words, though.)

I bought a copy of her most popular school textbook, shelved it, and that was me. Sorted!

Until I looked at it more closely. This was European and a bit of world history. Post-Jacobite, I couldn’t see anything where a Scottish song title would have been a suitable caption. And – had there been an illustration above it? – or was I havering? (The caption might have been on a digital image, not searchable as text, maybe …)

Maybe I imagined the illustration, but I remained convinced about that caption. Just a pity that I couldn’t remember the song!

  • I started searching last night. In bed, I lay awake, agitated by my failure to source the mystery book.
  • Today, I searched Hathi Trust and Open Library. No luck. 
  • I looked at Jisc Library Hub and Worldcat, but they weren’t going to show me what I needed.
  • Finally, I made a list of any Ketelbey titles which might possibly have touched on Scottish history (given that she wasn’t first and foremost a historian of Scottish history), and came up with another pair of books possibly also aimed at secondary schools.

There’s only one problem: the nearest copy is in Edinburgh.  I had hoped to find it  in Glasgow’s epic Mitchell Library, but this time I had no luck.

So … Amazon and eBay

However, I’ve ordered the pair for about the cost of a return to Edinburgh. If what I’m looking for isn’t there, then I have to admit defeat. I still don’t understand how something I found before is now so very elusive…

Image by Pexels from Pixabay and by succo from Pixabay