It’s time for another news round-up! Top up your coffee-cup, sit back and enjoy ….
And that was Paris
Monday last week saw me flying to Paris, to talk about the Highland/Gaelic cultural side of Sir John Macgregor Murray. Most of the workshop papers were about Persian manuscripts he had either commissioned or collected, but the interesting common thread was his careful collecting of information about different aspects of life in India, whether religious, agrarian or otherwise. My paper was paired with a paper about his correspondence concerning the preservation of the Taj Mahal. You might not imagine that Highland culture had much in common with an Indian mausoleum, but in fact the papers sat together really well. They show an awareness of the importance of cultural heritage, and an appreciation of the need for fieldwork to document different aspects of that heritage.
If you follow this blog, then you’ll realise that I had done quite a bit of digging around to find out more about his Highland/Gaelic activities, since I previously only really knew of him in the context of his bringing Joseph Macdonald’s draft piping thesis back to Scotland, and assisting Alexander Campbell in devising an itinerary for his song-collecting expedition. I hadn’t intended to pursue his manuscripts etc any further after this week, but I suspect I may have to, since I can’t bear to think there could be something interesting lurking in some British or European archive or library that I haven’t unearthed yet. I haven’t yet found him writing ABOUT music other than reports of a few comments to the Highland Society of Scotland and their piping contestants – but what if there was something out there that I don’t know about? Oh, we can’t have that!
So, I’m very grateful to have been an invited speaker at the workshop, and to have been allowed an insight into the work people of other disciplines have been doing into the activities of this Highland chief, who is comparatively unknown today. Add to that a wonderful Italian evening meal at the end of the day, which had the added novelty of Japanese saki, brought by one of our session chairs from his home country.
(And I didn’t get myself lost on public transport, thanks to Google maps – remarkable for someone with absolutely no sense of direction. Not only that, but I found I was perfectly capable of buying beer and a bagel, coffee and a cake, en francais! I returned to Glasgow with my head held high … )
Edinburgh, Dundee, Paris …
I’m a bit of a juggler at the moment! The Claimed From Stationers’ Hall network has a dedicated Brio issue forthcoming in November, which I’ll be co-editing with Martin Holmes, the regular editor. Various articles have been promised, and I need to do some writing as well. Not to mention needing to do some book-reviews. I have several ideas there – I need to order some books that I’ve recently come across, to decide if they’d be usefully reviewed for our music librarian audience.
I also need to revise an article for another journal – I first wrote it a couple of years ago – to reflect the fact that the network came into being and more work has since been done.
But before that – next week I’m heading to the Sorbonne in Paris, as an invited speaker, to talk about Sir John Macgregor Murray’s involvement in Gaelic culture and song-collecting. The man who got a couple of passing mentions in my thesis and book, has been a major focus for historians interested in his involvement in commissioning and collecting Persian manuscripts on Indian customs and culture, whilst he was active in the East India Company’s private army. I’ll be the only musicologist there – I’ve polished my paper within an inch of its life, so hopefully it will be of interest to scholars from a different discipline and with a different focus. I made a page about Sir John, which you can visit if you’d like to know more about the man.
I’ve been awarded an Athenaeum Award by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, to enable me to attend the whole of the International Society of Eighteenth Century Studies conference in Edinburgh in July, where I’ll be joining a panel on paratext. I think paratext is probably one of my all-time favourite research topics, so this is very exciting.
But to clear the decks for some serious writing about paratext, I got my next speaking opportunity all written up and timed well ahead of schedule: I’m talking about copyright and John Cage in a Pecha Kucha presentation at the CILIP Icepops seminar on copyright literacy education towards the end of June. Writing to fit 20 slides each lasting for 20 seconds is a rather different challenge to writing a conference paper! Here’s a hint: if you Google it, you’ll find yourself recommended to write 60 words per slide. However, if you use a lot of long words, then this advice is not for you!! Take it from one who [now] knows!
I’m attending the Icepops conference in Edinburgh with my librarian hat on. In fact, I was at Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago for the National Bibliographic Knowledgebase roadshow – an interesting update – and a couple of days ago, I went to Dundee for a Rare Books Scotland meeting. Again, I wore my librarian hat, but had the opportunity to share an update on the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall network whilst I was at it.
And what else? As I mentioned, I have a glorious idea for a new grant application … but I’ll keep that under my hat until plans are a bit more advanced….
From Stationers’ Hall to the Wider World
With my most scholarly hat on, I can announce …
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!
Chasing After Ossian: the Impossible Mission
Today, I went to the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland (the successor to the Highland Society of Scotland) to explore various manuscripts in their archives. In my search for documentation about Sir John Macgregor Murray’s Gaelic interests, I felt it only right that I should inspect these mss to see if they shed any more light on the man and his obsessions.
As well as letters by Sir John, I looked at someone else’s 1807 tour of the Highlands in search of Ossianic “reciters”. Mr Stewart referred to himself as the “Tourist” in his list of interviews with twenty different individuals from all walks of life. Oral history transcription never was straightforward, and poor Mr Stewart didn’t have it easy at all! When you imagine this kind of activity being pursued by a number of “tourists” over several years, as they endeavoured to prove what exactly James Macpherson had used back in 1760, it’s not too hard to extrapolate a complex picture of overlapping expeditions, and I wonder how many people got sick and tired of being interviewed, cajoled into reciting their precious repertoire, or declining more or less graciously to cooperate!
I shared some of Mr Stewart’s experiences on a Twitter stream this evening. It’s really going off at a bit of a tangent, considering he only alluded to Sir John three times, but I was interested because of my own doctoral researches into the musical side of Scottish song collecting.
Anyway, here’s the story as it appears on Twitter:- My curated Twitter “Moment”
Incidentally, Friends of Wighton associate, harpist Simon Chadwick has shared with me some live recordings of Ossianic verse being declaimed in more recent years – I’ll share his link, and you can explore it for yourself! Early Gaelic Harp Info: Lays: Recordings
Image: ‘Ossian Relating the Fate of Oscar to Malvina’ – from The Poems of Ossian by James Macpherson -artist, William Brockedon, via ArtUK
Networking with Other Networks: Romantic National Song
I’ve mentioned before that I am a member of the Romantic National Song network, spearheaded by scholars at the University of Glasgow. There’s a lot of new content on the website today, so I’m happy to share some links which you might enjoy.
The new content website includes the concert video, programme and gallery and two new blog posts reflecting on the concert.
- Concert page: https://rnsn.glasgow.ac.uk/concert/
- Concert video: https://rnsn.glasgow.ac.uk/concert/concert-video/
- Concert programme: https://rnsn.glasgow.ac.uk/concert/concert-programme/
- Concert photo gallery: https://rnsn.glasgow.ac.uk/concert/gallery/
- Reflections from the singers blog post: https://rnsn.glasgow.ac.uk/singing-british-national-songs-1750-1850-our-performers-reflect-on-the-rnsn-concert-on-18-march-2019/
- Reflections from network members blog post: https://rnsn.glasgow.ac.uk/reflections-on-our-rnsn-concert-of-british-national-songs-1750-1850-by-members-of-the-rnsn/
Please do share with interested colleagues. If you use social media, please share or tag @UoG_RNSN!
The Dead Mouse
I’ve typed so much, and moved so much text around – not to mention manipulating images on the PowerPoint – that my mouse has died.
Yes, it has been another working weekend – I’ve edited and resubmitted a librarianship article to a librarianship journal, licked my seminar paper about Sir John Macgregor Murray into its final, polished shape, and totally indulged myself sourcing suitable images for the PowerPoint! No kidding – I have had to abandon the mouse, which I’ve left twitching at the back of my desk. It has had a long and interesting life.
I do have a day-trip planned for this week, to the archives of the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland. I’m off to inspect more Macgregor Murray documents – I can’t NOT see them! It has been an interesting assignment, because I’ve found out so much more about him than I knew at the time of writing my PhD.
And then … back to grant-writing. And thoughts of Stationers’ Hall music, amongst other things!
A Working Weekend?
Try as I will to avoid the temptation, my research interests overspill into my weekends. Saturday saw me inventorising the late Jimmy Shand’s less-antiquarian accordion music at the Wighton Collection in Dundee. I had much amusement looking at the accordion instruction books! There might be mileage in a wee general-interest article about these, so I can see I’ll have to look at them more closely when I return to finish my “honorary librarian” duties another time. (I’m obsessed with paratext for its value as cultural context, and music instruction books are a bit of a spin-off from this – even if they’re not from the Georgian era!)
Back at home on Sunday, I did a little more work on my Sir John Macgregor Murray paper.
A Biteable Bank Holiday
I couldn’t help myself – this afternoon, I was finding out more about Sir John Magregor again – initially by rereading Ronald I. Black’s article, ‘The Gaelic Academy’ in Scottish Gaelic Studies vol.XIV part 2 (Winter 1986), 1-38, and then by visiting the British Library’s 19th century Newspapers website. This was very absorbing – possibly too much so! It was, however, nice to discover that Clan Gregor offered their condolences to Sir John’s son Evan, when their clan chief died – and that the toasts on that evening were punctuated alternately by music from Gow’s band, and by a piper. Sir John would have liked that, I’m sure of it. (He was a judge for Highland Society of Scotland piping contests, and was also responsible for rescuing Joseph Macdonald’s draft bagpipe tutor from India and returning it to Scotland.) Admittedly, once I’d learned that Clan Gregor met at Oman’s Hotel, I didn’t really need to find out where the hotel (aka Oman’s Tavern) actually was … I did find out, but decided to stop delving any further.
Maybe I also didn’t really need to make a biteable video about Sir John! I have by no means encapsulated all his contributions to Gaelic culture – in 90-odd seconds, that simply wouldn’t be possible. However, perhaps it does illustrate why he is a character worth remembering. Here it is:-
Pipes, Tutors and Tartan
Writing about writing (sharing a blogpost by Dr Jane Secker)
I know this isn’t about copyright music! But it’s a very interesting blogpost by someone who does write elsewhere about copyright-related matters! Jane articulates very well the benefits of reflective writing.
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 