I’ve been a member of the Eighteenth-Century Arts Education Research Network for the past couple of years. Although I wasn’t able to attend the third and final Colloquium, I have followed with interest, so I thought I’d share the link to their latest blogpost here. It summarises the day’s activities – and makes me wish I’d been there!!
Music Professors, Degrees and Curricula
Last week I shared some of my findings and thoughts about the absence of sheet-music at Trinity College Dublin in the early 19th century (see Literary Minstrelsy: the Books Trump the Scores!). To be fair, there was neither music professor nor music department at Trinity in the Georgian era, so the absence of sheet-music probably barely caused a ripple!
Nonetheless, I provoked a little Twitter-storm of knowledge exchange on the subject of TCD music degrees, and I saved that conversation into a Twitter moment, in order to keep record of the thread: Minstrelsy, Music and Honorary Degrees. (2018-11-21)
I was recommended a chapter contributed by Lisa Parker to Paul Rodmell’s ‘Music and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, which I read with interest this morning. Whilst the history of music education at the University of Dublin really took off after the Georgian era, I find it interesting to look ahead to see how things did ultimately develop. As I mentioned last week, the earliest listings retained from Stationers’ Hall dated from 1859-60.
Parker’s chapter perhaps helps us understand why it took so long before there was much interest in curating music in the library, so I’ve extracted a timeline which I think you might find informative:-
- 1612 TCD first awarded a Bachelor in Music degree – MusB
- 1764 Appointment of the first music professor, Earl of Mornington, Garret Wesley (1735-81) – his role seemed to be in composing suitable pieces for TCD occasions.
- 1774 Mornington resigned, and wasn’t replaced for 73 years!
- 1827 John Smith, the man who would become the next professor some years later, received his MusD – a music doctorate. This didn’t mean he had done the kind of intensive study that doctoral students do today! There had been no requirement to be residential, no course of teaching and learning, and no thesis.
- 1844-1846 – Robert Prescott Stewart, who would later become John Smith’s successor – became organist of the chapel, and then also conductor of the university choral society.
- 1847 John Smith was appointed music professor. Opinion was divided about his expertise. His only duties entailed assessing ‘submitted exercises’, but there’s also reference to a lecture. He could teach private students but gave no ‘formal tuition’. There were still no student residency requirements, and only four music degrees (other than honorary ones) were awarded in his 14 years’ professorship.
- 1851 only now did Smith get his doctoral robes (TWENTY-FOUR YEARS LATER – not impressive! David O’Shea informs me that the gowns were copied from the Oxford style of academic dress, since there weren’t actually gowns for music degrees at TCD prior to this). Smith got these at the request of the choral society (not the university authorities) – and it looks as though Stewart received HIS robes at the same event, with the latter’s MusB and MusD exercises being performed.
- 1861 Smith died.
- 1862 Robert Prescott Stewart became professor, also remaining in the roles of University organist and conductor of the University of Dublin Choral Society His duties involved conducting the exams and presenting candidates at graduation, but he could also deliver public lectures if he wished, and could give private instruction to members of university. Shortly after his election, introduced literary examinations, and introduced a requirement for music students to matriculate in a variety of arts subjects. This was influential upon music degree arrangements at Oxford and Cambridge.) That decade, requirements were tightened up and spelled out, as to what was needed in degree compositions.
- 1871 Stewart’s duties were revised, and class lectures were required. These could have been the public lectures he gave between 1871-77.
- Parker notes that 97 music degrees were awarded to 63 candidates during the period 1862-1894. It’s noteworthy that music degrees were often not regarded as being as rigorous as other kinds of degrees – and that they tended to be awarded to church musicians. It would be interesting to see if this was reflected in the library stock, both of scores and texts, although I won’t let myself be distracted just now!
The above information is all from Parker’s chapter, which I’ll reference fully below. Much of Parker’s chapter is about Stewart’s work on the syllabus, and then Ebeneezer Prout’s, so it’s about an era later than my main focus. In an effort to remain focused, I skimmed these last pages, but at least I know they’re there if I need them. (I’ve generally used 1836, the change of copyright and legal deposit legislation, as my cut-off date, but of course, legal deposit was still being made at a smaller number of universities, and Trinity College Dublin was one of them.)
TCD musicologist David O’Shea comments that librarian James Henthorn Todd was involved with music in the library collections around Smith’s time, so I need to refer to Peter Fox’s 2014 monograph about the Library to find out more in this regard. (The book is sitting at home on my desk, demanding my attention, so this won’t be a hardship at all!)
REFERENCES
Peter Fox, Trinity College Library Dublin : a history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)
Lisa Parker, ‘The expansion and development of the music degree syllabus at Trinity College Dublin during the nineteenth century’, in Music and institutions in nineteenth-century Britain, ed. Paul Rodmell (Ashgate, 2012), pp.143-160
Imagine these Starlings were Scores
One of my more fanciful ideas about the legal deposit scores Claimed From Stationers Hall in the Georgian era, is the mental image of birds migrating – all those scores being registered at Stationers’ Hall and then disseminated around the country to the waiting libraries. When I saw Scott Waby’s video footage of the Aberystwyth starlings, on Twitter today, I was reminded of this image! Some ‘birds’ land and then take off again. Some jostle for space. They’re the scores that either didn’t get to their destination, or were dumped in an attic pending a decision as to whether they were allowed to stay. Or were sold later. Okay, it’s fanciful! Maybe I can’t do anything with the metaphor, research-wise. But let me share the footage with you anyway – it’s beautifully filmed, and I did spend a year in Aberystwyth many decades ago as a library school postgrad, so I have a particular affection for the place.
The photographer, Scott Waby, is head of digitisation at the National Library of Wales. I still have fond memories of many happy hours in NLS constructing a bibliography on Victorian education, as part of my postgraduate librarianship diploma!
A few clips from the short documentary I’m shooting on the Aberystwyth starlings. Not sure what I’m going to do with this project yet – so If you have any ideas, or want to collaborate, get in touch. pic.twitter.com/1DjTn8RcaN
— Scott Waby (@ScottWaby) November 24, 2018
I could weave these images of starlings into an elaborate #metaphor for the migration of Georgian musical scores #ClaimedFromStationersHall, but maybe I’m just too whimsical …! Beautiful film, anyway! @ClaimedStatHall https://t.co/xs7Q3kfDwg
— Dr Karen McAulay (@Karenmca) November 25, 2018
Literary Minstrelsy: the Books Trump the Scores!
I’m still sorting through my notes after my research field trip to Dublin a couple of weeks ago. I may have mentioned that I went armed with a list of national music compilations from the Georgian era (and a little beyond), to see if either King’s Inns Library or Trinity College Dublin Library had retained any such volumes during the 1801-1836 legal deposit era. (Neither received legal deposit materials before the Act of Union, and King’s Inns lost their entitlement after 1836, though Trinity retains it to this day.)
I already knew that King’s Inns had a handful of national songs, some musical (“songs with their airs”, as Georgian musicians would have said) – and some purely literary, such as Allan Cunningham’s Songs of Scotland (1825) – I alluded to it in my book, Our Ancient National Airs.
I also knew that Trinity College Dublin had instructed their agent NOT to supply music, novels or school-books, from 1817 onwards, and my opposite number in the library had warned me that there was very little music from the Georgian or even early Victorian era. Indeed, the earliest extant lists of legal deposit music there date from 1859-1860.
So, I knew I was probably just going to prove to myself that there really wasn’t much legal deposit music in Dublin at this time, and indeed, that it was hard to identify anything as positively having come from Stationers’ Hall. The rest of today’s posting will confirm just that!
- In 1811, Stationers’ Hall music was being put “into MS Room in the press in the N.W. angle”, having previously been lying in the Library Room. (From Peter Fox’s book, Trinity College Library Dublin: a History (2014), I know that the Manuscript Room would have been the new MS room on the first floor, converted between 1802-1803.)
- I found the same in July 1815, when music was sent from Stationers’ Hall in parcels. It went into the same press (ie cupboard). However, other materials were left on the table in the MS Room “until a list of them could be made out and entered in this book”. Clearly, no-one was planning to list the music!
- By July 1817, their agent had been advised to send no music, novels or school books.
We know from the minutes that materials arrrived in baskets, bundles and chests, delivered to a Dr Nash. Dr Nash was an assistant librarian in the previous decade, and had other roles by 1810 and 1820, but perhaps he also kept an involvement with the library even when he was otherwise occupied. We don’t really need to know much more about him, anyway!
From comments in 1817, we see that on at least one occasion, the materials arrived in cases from “Mr Elliot’s men” without a list, and at least once the materials arrived damaged and irreparable. (In 1821, Edinburgh appointed the same Mr Elliot as agent – St Andrews strongly objected, as is minuted in a meeting there!)
After the decision not to take music, schoolbooks or novels, music doesn’t seem to have been collected until the 1850s. Armed with my trusty national songs list, I went through the 1872 printed library catalogue, which is now conveniently available online.
James Henthorn Todd’s 1872 printed catalogue
I wasn’t surprised to find that Trinity College Dublin seems actually to hold NO NATIONAL SONGS from my list, as regards printed music, between the Welsh collection, Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards by Edward Jones (1784, 1794), and Bunting’s Ancient Music of 1840. The situation does match a parallel interest in literary balladry, in King’s Inns (where there is only marginally more music from the 1801-36 era), for both libraries certainly hold literary balladry publications from this era – such as Motherwell’s Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern (1827-8). A little later in the century, I found that Trinity holds Drummond’s Irish collection, Ancient Irish Minstrelsy (1852) dedicated to Revd Richard MacDonnell, Provost of Trinity College Dublin. (There’s an online version here:- https://tinyurl.com/DrummondAncientIrishMinstrelsy)
It’s hardly surprising that literary minstrelsy trumps musical collections, though. After all, music is generally folio sized, and the London agents weren’t collecting it. Literary minstrelsy would just arrive along with other legal deposit books – if such WAS their provenance, for there’s nothing about the volumes I looked at, to indicate where they came from – and if there was an appetite for historical balladry, then it would be added to stock. (Later in the century, I have looked at William Chappell’s involvement in English national songs and ballads, and the amount of activity in England and Scotland certainly does suggest an enthusiasm for the genre amongst antiquarians and the like.)
So much for national songs-with-their-airs, and literary ballads. It’s just a small sampling of music, but I think it served my purpose. Books do trump scores, when it comes to Georgian music in two particular Dublin libraries. I did also look for pedagogical musical material, and stumbled across one or two music textbooks, but that can wait for another blogpost, I think!
SEQUEL! And now there’s more – see my new blogpost about Music Professors, Degrees and Curricula at Trinity College Dublin.
Princess Charlotte Augusta (died 1817)
I’ve referred to Charlotte before – as we know, her tragic death inspired people to write anthems, author poems, mass-produce commemorative porcelain ….
I’ve just found a Twitter link to a blogpost that Kyra C. Cramer wrote about her, so I thought I’d share it here:-
The Funeral of Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales https://t.co/G0aWYNBYFW
The nation mourned the loss of its heir and most popular royal … #Twitterstorians #History #GeorgianBritain #Regency #19thCentury— Kyra C Kramer (@KyraKramer) November 19, 2018
By Way of a Change
The library received a donation a couple of weeks ago. Commercially-produced Scottish songs and dance tunes, and a few pop ballads or songs from shows, all from the 1940s-70s. We’ll keep the majority of them. I’m conscious that these will be ‘history’ one day – indeed, they already are, since they were all produced long before today’s students were born.
(After all, the collections that I myself write about were current once – well over a century ago. This is just continuing forward in time!)
ON TO DUNDEE
So it will come as no surprise when I say that I was in Dundee’s Wighton Centre yesterday, working on a different collection in a voluntary capacity: listing the music that the accordionist Jimmy Shand owned. I’ve already listed the historic material that the Friends of Wighton acquired at auction, but this secondary material is Shand’s working collection, the sourcebooks for his own repertoire. As such, it needs to be documented, so that’s what I was doing yesterday. I haven’t nearly finished the task! I can’t begin to categorise it until I have a complete list. I don’t think I shall be indexing each volume – it’s a big enough challenge listing the collection at book level. These images show just two items that caught my eye!
By doing what I’m doing, I like to think I’m helping preserve a little bit of 20th century musical history, for later generations. I think Dundee’s Andrew Wighton, and the late Jimmy Shand, would both approve! There’s a good chance I’ll write about these collections at greater length in due course, but first I must get the bibliographical details sorted out & respectably listed, so it won’t happen for a while ….
AND ANOTHER THOUGHT
I would urge music and rare books librarians to make efforts to conserve twentieth century national music editions. What to us might just seem to be rather dated repertoire, may have greater significance in the future. Don’t ditch them! Put them in a stack, make sure they’re catalogued and indexed appropriately, and maybe one day someone will bless you for your forethought! Similarly, if you know someone that was in a significant trad music ensemble – maybe now in retirement – ask them to give some thought to what they might do to ensure the survival of any archival documentation!
Rant over. I’m off to see if we have any more mid-twentieth century trad scores lying around!
Making Sense of it All
After last week’s gallivanting, today was the first opportunity to go through my research notes and try to make sense of it all. I’ve by no means finished the challenge yet!
- Last Monday: normal day at work;
- Tuesday-Wednesday: visits to King’s Inns and Trinity College Dublin libraries to check the old guardbook catalogues at the former, and archival documentation at the latter, also fitting in an informative meeting with the music librarian there
- Thursday: another normal day at work, then taking a choir-practice, and finally the overnight Caledonian Sleeper to London
- Friday: a visit to Stationers’ Hall archives to see the registers in which new publications were registered in the Georgian era; then a meeting with one of the music librarians at the British Library to discuss future plans
- Saturday: speaking at a conference at Cecil Sharp House, the English Folk Dance & Song Society’s headquarters
Today, I tackled my notes from the visit to King’s Inns. You wouldn’t expect a legal library to hold much music, would you? But they do have a few books of national songs from the Georgian era – not many, but a few. They also have quite a bit of poetry – I found Burns, Thomas Moore and Byron, for a start, not to mention works by Sir Walter Scott, and William Motherwell’s Minstrelsy. Surprisingly, there are quite a few libretti (the word-books) for late 18th century ballad operas by Dibdin – many predating the legal deposit era, so however they got there, it wasn’t from Stationers’ Hall! Someone had a passion for the theatre, that’s for sure. And although I didn’t find folio-sized sheet music (in other words, roughly the size of sheet music today, perhaps slightly larger), I did find smaller publications – books- about the history of music, and a couple of pedagogical tomes which are also in some of the legal deposit libraries in England and Scotland. One was a likely legal deposit arrival – the other was older, so could have arrived by any route, perhaps a donation from an old lawyer or his descendants. I only saw the catalogue records, so I may need to follow up with a few queries about some of these items, to see if there’s a standard binding style or any stamps indicating where they came from. As a librarian myself, I do very much appreciate help received from host libraries – I know how long it can take!
Tomorrow, I’ve got a day’s leave – whether I push on with my notes from Trinity College rather depends on what else I need to do at home, of course! So … watch this space. I’ll be back as soon as I can!
Caught Up With Mr Greenhill At Last!
It’s about a year since I visited Lambeth Palace and the British Library, making a minor detour via St Paul’s and Stationers’ Hall (virtually in the shadow of St Paul’s) on the off-chance of making an impromptu visit to the Hall. I wasn’t surprised to be disappointed on that occasion; I hadn’t expected to have time to drop by, which is why I hadn’t made an appointment.
Today, I had booked an appointment in advance, and had the pleasure of poring over one of Mr Greenhill’s registers – I’d chosen the one that began at the end of June 1817, and I just had time to look at the records for one year. For all the complaints about Mr Greenhill and his inefficiency or inability to collect all the legal deposit copies for the receiving libraries, I now have one thoroughly good thing to say about him: his handwriting is beautifully legible! Everything nicely spaced out, not sprawling or squidged into the end of a line or bottom of a page. Indeed, there were some days when he must have done little else than sit or stand and carefully inscribe book details into his ledgers – there were so many detailed entries, even two hundred years ago!
If you’ve used Kassler’s index of Stationers’ Hall music, you’ll know that the last few years are less detailed, because they came from a different source – William Hawes’ abbreviated copy from the registers for 1811-1818. This is why I wanted to see a register from this era, because I guessed there would be more to see. There was!
I was also curious to know how long it might take to transcribe the music entries from 1819-1836. I didn’t try timing myself, though, because I got interested in other aspects of the registration process. It’s lucky I had taken my own copy of Kassler with me – the pages for late June 1817-1818 are now carefully annotated in pencil, and I have work to do when I get back to Glasgow. I’ve had an idea! More of this very soon. I might have found the data-slice that the network has been looking for – it fits in rather nicely with some other threads I’ve been pursuing.
This afternoon, I also paid a visit to my opposite number in the British Library to mull over possible future directions for the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall research network. Whilst “Big Data” is appealing, there are also other ideas worth considering – which might indeed help acquire the big data that we need. We’ll see!
Tomorrow, I’m spending the day at the EFDSS (English Folk Dance and Song Society) conference, and giving a paper about national airs in Georgian British Libraries. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to have the opportunity to combine my doctoral interests in national song collecting, with my postdoctoral interest in repertoires and library collections on a national scale. Here’s my Powerpoint: National Airs in Georgian British Libraries. (You’ll also find it listed on the Calendar page of this website.)
No archival pictures today, I’m afraid. I was far too busy annotating my copy of Kassler’s Hawes appendix! But, since a posting is dull without a picture, I’ve shared a familiar outline – and the image from the conference website – with you …. !
Trinity College Dublin & the Wastepaper Merchant (in 1917!)
Trinity College was the legal deposit library that did, initially keep legal deposit music (in the attic), but then by 1817, they had instructed their London agent not to collect sheet music, school books or novels. It seems virtually no music was retained before the 1850s, when they started keeping it again.
A full century later, in 1917, it’s minuted that “All the unsorted music which was filed in the West Attic … was sorted by the librarian.” Well, if the word “filed” slightly gladdened your heart, you’re about to be rudely disappointed! The minutes go on to record that,
“Several sacks filled with separate band parts and music-hall rubbish were sent to the wastepaper merchant.”
It went away in bin-bags! Nowadays, I suppose it would have gone in the shredder. (Let’s face it, loose band parts can be a bit of a pain, and who knows what state the music-hall material might have been in. Maybe the librarian saw no use for it, back in 1917.) The good news is that “Full scores were put in Dr Todd’s cabinet in the Librarian’s Room.” Ah, so it didn’t all get chucked out!
Notwithstanding the disappointment about the sacks of rubbish, I enjoyed a fruitful conversation with my “opposite number” at Trinity, had an atmospheric stroll through the galleries of the old library, perused the old minute books, and looked at a handful of surviving music textbooks and minstrelsy verses – not musical scores, certainly, but I was looking for ownership marks and library property stamps, and I did find those! Trinity has a whole run of The Harmonicon, a music magazine which was extremely popular at St Andrews – and I’m happy to say that Motherwell’s Minstrelsy is there in the 1827 edition, which has a bunch of tunes at the end.
Expedition to Eire
I’m writing this from Dublin! I’ve spent a fascinating day delving through absolutely enormous guard-books at King’s Inns Library – a historic legal library – and tomorrow I head to Trinity College Dublin.
I won’t write about what I found today, because I need to assimilate it and ask a few more questions about some of the volumes. But to whet your whistle, I thought I’d share just a few striking pictures.
Guardbooks, A to Z
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 