A few weeks ago, I had what was effectively a week-long fieldtrip.  Well, two short ones – first to Dublin, then to London.  I’ve already blogged about the trips to King’s Inns and Trinity College Libraries, where  I was hunting down national songbooks – neither expecting to find, nor actually finding, very many Georgian-era music scores or textbooks, but chancing across a few surprises, and also discovering that balladry – poetry – was rather more popular.  I should explain that collecting policies in Trinity at that time are known to have precluded much music being kept, whilst one would not perhaps expect any music to turn up in a law library unless it was donated!- but there was still a literary interest in the words of national ballads, in both institutions.

Anyway, back I flew to Glasgow, did a day’s work and an evening rehearsal, then got the overnight sleeper to London so that I could visit Stationers’ Hall, meet my music librarian opposite number at the British Library, and speak at the English Folk Dance and Song Society Conference.

I hadn’t had the opportunity to visit Stationers’ Hall before.  It’s very grand – used as a venue for conferences and weddings – but I was there to visit the archivist, and to have my first look at one of the Georgian era registers.

Faced with the choice of many years’ Stationers’ Hall registers, I had to make a choice.  My time was limited, and there was no hope of looking at more than one or two volumes.  I made my choice based on the fact that Kassler’s Music Entries at Stationers’ Hall lists full entries from 1710 to 1810, but the appendix (based on William Hawes’ summary listing for 1810-1818) gives much less information – most noticeably, no publication details and no library locations.  If I was going to spend a few hours looking at anything, I would look at a volume from the later era, to see how easy it was to spot music entries, and to get a bit more information about anything I found. 

1817*

I was also curious to see how long it would take to glean this information.  I wondered about actually transcribing the entries, but once I saw them, I realised that this was going to get me a limited amount of information with which I could do very little – I’d get more by taking a broad sweep.  Accordingly, I took my own copy of Kassler, and annotated the entries from June 27, 1817 to June 24, 1818 – this was a full year from the start of one of the register volumes, and also conveniently encompassed some royal events that I already knew were memorialised in song – the deaths first of Princess Charlotte of Wales in 1817, and then of her grandmother Queen Charlotte the following year.  I was able to note the publishers, look out for anything surrounding these events that I had not yet spotted in Hawes’ abbreviated listing, and I also spotted another royal event – Queen Charlotte’s visit to Bath, literally a couple of days before her grand-daughter died in childbirth.  Seeing the music in the context of all the other entries showed me just how much literature proliferated to commemorate the deaths in particular – elegies, other poems, a multitude of published sermons … if you remember the outpourings of grief when Diana, Princess of Wales died, then you can imagine similar outpourings back in 1817-18, using the media that was available at the time.

But an equally interesting discovery was the realisation that Mr Greenhill the warehouse keeper also recorded how many copies of any particular title were handed in.  Chappell always handed in just one copy, whether or not the legislation required eleven.  One assumes that the libraries requested his works from the lists that Greenhill sent them, because (although I’ve only checked a handful of titles from June to early July so far) they did actually get the music, presumably collected via agents rather than directly from Greenhill at Stationers’ Hall.  Other publishers might hand in one copy, or the full eleven, and I begin to think that the smaller publishers or self-publishers might have tended to hand in the latter. 

Here’s the challenge – a whole year’s music is quite a lot of music!  From the little I’ve checked so far, the libraries that I expected to have a lot of the registered music, had nearly all of it.  Those that I thought would have less, do indeed seem to have less.  But – I’ve only checked in Copac.  Until we check the “not catalogued online” holdings, we will not have the full picture.  So the next challenge is  a logistical one: how to get the checking done!  This might require another grant application.  Certainly, it requires more conversation with network members!

I’m toying with the idea of creating a Mendeley bibliography of the whole year’s output.  It’s a lot of work, but it might help at a later stage in the project: a decent bibliographic listing will have so much more information, even if a parallel Excel spreadsheet offers different benefits by way of comparing library holdings.

* Incidentally, the idea of taking one year and researching its story has already been done, albeit not in musical terms: a couple of years ago, Turtle Bunbury published 1847: A Chronicle of Genius, Generosity and Savagery  – so when I found out about it last week, I ordered a copy.  I’m really looking forward to reading it.  But finding out that someone else has not only had the same idea as me, but published it, doesn’t mean there isn’t mileage in exploring 1817.  Indeed, I would argue it just goes to show that the idea is a good one!

And What Next?

The next challenge, of course, is what to do with the data.  At the very least, it would indicate what survives for one notable year.  And there are other questions, too:-

• Is there a pattern as to which publishers deposited single or multiple copies?
• Is there a pattern as to what was more likely to be retained, in those libraries that retained less?
• Out of interest, how much of what was submitted, was composed by women?
• How many compositions/publications were  prompted by significant occasions of whatever kind?
• Would anyone be interested in a performance opportunity based on the output of that particular year? Or in facilitating a workshop locally?
• If we then took another year later in the century – possibly after the Queen Anne copyright act had been superceded – could we compare repertoire patterns, perhaps also comparing what survived in Oxford and Cambridge, or looking for pedagogical material?
• Lastly , of course, there is the possibility of creating further bibliographical listings.  At the moment, the Adam Matthews’ digital offering is beyond our means.  It offers digital images, not full-text searching capabilities, but further grant funding might make it possible to create listings using the digital substitute, rather than having to travel to London to consult the registers themselves.

There’s a lot to think about, isn’t there?  As always, all comments and suggestions are very welcome!