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.
The image I’ve been using? I now have my own engraved, coloured antique print. It dates from 1831, was drawn by Thomas H. Shepherd, and engraved by W. Watkins. I treated myself to the print after our successful workshop last week. You must admit it looks lovely in colour!
https://m.soundcloud.com/napoleonandbritishsong/sets/napoleon-and-british-song
At today’s highly successful Claimed From Stationers’ Hall music research network 
workshop, we mentioned some songs written by women during the Napoleonic era.
This reminded me of Oskar Cox Jensen’s monograph on Napoleonic songs, which I bought for the Whittaker Library a year or so ago. Whilst checking the details of that book, I found Oskar’s SoundCloud. Do have a listen! Admittedly, Oskar’s book doesn’t mention the three songs that Brianna and I performed, so you won’t find our songs on his SoundCloud – but maybe one day we’ll record ours ourselves. Who knows?!
I’ll be blogging about our own workshop in the very near future, once I’ve gone through my (rather extensive) notes properly! I’ve typed up the minutes of the morning session, but there’s still more to do and to think about before I should share further!
Well, the arrangements are all in place. We have delegates, a board room to meet in, catering and other practicalities taken care of, and even lunchtime entertainment for our guests. I’m happy to say that we’ve made contact with ALL of the historical legal deposit libraries, and all but two of them will be represented at next Monday’s workshop, along with big data and digitisation experts and other interested scholars. I won an AHRC networking award last year, and here we have it – networking really bearing fruit. I’m so excited!
FLASHBACKS
TWO YEARS … To think that it’s two years ago since I presented this slide at the IAML (UK and Ireland) Annual Study Weekend: things have moved on quite a bit since then!
TWO HUNDRED YEARS … Lastly, I can’t resist sharing this – a snapshot of what was registered at Stationers’ Hall OTD (on 
that day) 26th March 1818. It really is a typical cross-section of music publishing at the time! Just look – three arrangements of contemporary or near-contemporary operatic works for domestic consumptions (let’s not argue about who had the copyright in what! – see the posting on this blog last month!), and flute duets by one of THE big names of the time, virtuoso performer and arranger Charles Nicholson:-
Bishop’s Overture and Songs in Zuma, Book 1; Burrowes’s arrangement of Airs from Il Don Giovanni [Mozart], Books 1-3; Paer’s Numa Pompilio Overture; and Nicholson’s Four Concertante Duetts for Two Flutes.
Asked, in connection with another project, where the legal deposit music is in Britain, it seemed a good idea to summarise the current position. What follows is a very broad outline, but it might prove helpful to anyone trying to track down an old British piece of music!
The British Library has always received legal deposit materials from the start, has the most complete collection and all are catalogued. The collection began as the Royal Collection, then formed the basis of the British Museum collection, from which the British Library evolved.
For the remainder of the legal deposit libraries, remember that historically, some form of library committee decided which music to keep. This varied widely:-
Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries – find out about today’s legal deposit system.
Introduction to Legal Deposit – a helpful introduction from the National Library of Wales.
Acknowledgement: image https://www.flickr.com/photos/yellowbookltd/ – https://www.flickr.com/photos/yellowbookltd/2875093931/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7093190
We’ve just had our attention drawn to a wonderful blogpost on Houghton Library Blog, uploaded on 24th June, 2016. The author, Andrea Cawelti, is a Rare Music Cataloguer at Harvard, and she had just attended Ian Gadd’s course on The Stationers’ Company to 1775, at Rare Book School – a summer school at the University of Virginia.Andrea spotted the registration of an additional verse to “God Save the King”, just three weeks after an assassination attempt. She mentions George Greenhill at Stationers’ Hall – the man who managed to get himself paid multiple times, but still struggled to keep on top of the job – and patriotic songs during the Napoleonic Wars. We know all about them too! Read on …
https://claimedfromstationershall.wordpress.com/bibliography/
Well, what else would you do if you were snowbound for a third day?! The bibliography has been updated considerably. This is not to say that I’ve read every single reference, which would be difficult in my part-time research existence, but hopefully there will be plenty of inspiration for anyone embarking on any aspect of the research network’s interests.
There’s a permanent tab on this blog for the bibliography, but you can go to it directly here.
The last day in February, and Scotland grinds to a halt. I had places to go and people to see, not to mention a blissful research day ahead of me. Still, if we get Snowmageddon over and out of the way, then we can look joyously ahead to the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall research network’s impending workshop here in Glasgow on Monday 26th March.
Workshop Monday 26th March
We’ll be talking about the heritage collections of Georgian/Victorian legal deposit music up and down the UK, looking at ways to promote it, contemplating the many ways it sheds light on contemporary cultural and social history, pondering how we can improve access to it, whether by finding aids or digitisation, and considering how big data might be used to reveal stories hitherto untold. Representatives of almost all the old (and the current) legal deposit libraries will all be there. (This must be a first! Assuredly, there would not have been a nationwide meeting of university librarians in the late Georgian era. Nonetheless, the Scottish universities were certainly in touch with one another, if only to liaise about their London agents, working more or less effectively to secure the publications they were owed! Getting their fair share of sheet music was probably the lowest priority on the libraries’ agenda back then!)
We have a limited number of workshop places left, so if you’re working or researching in this field and can manage a day-trip to Glasgow, do get in touch to tell us about your interest and secure one of those places! Our recent February Newsletter tells more about it.
THE WHEEL COMES FULL CIRCLE
As you know, every week or so, I check Michael Kassler’s invaluable bibliography, Music Entries in Stationers’ Hall 1710-1818, and see if I can find a piece of music whose anniversary of copyright registration falls on that day. Sometimes the piece is good, sometimes deservedly forgotten, but all of them tell us something about musical tastes and trends at the time they were written.
Today, as I cool my heels (and my toes) at home on an enforced snow-day, I turned to 1798 to see whose anniversary it might be today. I found Stephen Storace’s ‘O Strike the Harp. For one, two or three voices, with an accompaniment for the harp or piano forte. The poetry from Ossian‘, which the publisher Joseph Dale registered on 28 February 220 years ago. As Kassler states, the song can be found in the British Library: GB Lbl G.352.(42.).
Could I find an image of this song, clearly inspired by the late 18th century trend for minstrelsy, and still drawing on Macpherson’s Ossian poetry, despite the fairly well-proven doubts about its authenticity?
Well, yes! Coincidentally, I used an image of this very song in my write-up of Sandra Tuppen’s Big Data talk at IAML(UK & Ireland) 2015. See ‘ASW 2015: The Bigger, the Better – A Big Data History of Music’ https://iamlukirl.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/asw-2015-the-bigger-the-better-a-big-data-history-of-music/ (17 April 2015)
The wheel certainly does come full circle: in earlier research, I spent considerable time thinking about minstrelsy as it appears in national song collections, and here’s a song that’s not a “national song”, but certainly has links with literary literacy. I was beginning to get interested in big data, which is why Sandra’s research attracted my attention. And big data is one of the themes at our forthcoming workshop, with two of her colleagues in attendance. Isn’t it satisfying when links join into a chain?
Postscript. Today, I discovered that the song has also been referenced in a new book, Figures of the Imagination: Fiction and Song in Britain, 1790–1850, by Roger Hansford. He comments that the song is about relationships, and that the lyrics might have been written from a minstrel’s standpoint. Another book to go on my “must read some day” reading list!
The Claimed From Stationers’ Hall research network, whilst very well-represented in Scotland, is not actually focused on Scottish music. Nonetheless, we’re sharing this conference booking announcement for anyone who is working in that area.
Musica Scotica 2018 takes places 21-22 April 2018, in the Tolbooth, Stirling. You can find out where to book your place, here.
Literary Print Culture: The Stationers’ Company Archive, 1554-2007
Followers of the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall music research network will enjoy this five-minute video about Adam Matthews’ new product. These are digitised images, rather than text-searchable, but useful and worth a look nonetheless! There’s interesting commentary from William Alden, Clerk to the Stationers’ Company, and Robin Myers, Archivist Emeritus.
In the past month, I’ve been to Edinburgh, Cambridge and Oxford in connection with the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall research network. I’ve chatted with Almut Boehme in the National Library of Scotland, Elizabeth Lawrence and Jenny Nex at the University of Edinburgh, Margaret Jones and Jill Whitelock in Cambridge, and Martin Holmes and Giles Bergel in Oxford. We’ve talked about how different libraries stored and curated their legal deposit collections, attitudes towards music and cataloguing, and the influence of the British Museum’s mid-nineteenth century cataloguing rules. Several libraries began by categorising their music as instrumental or vocal – so to anyone wondering why our library does it that way – well, we’re following the Library of Congress, and they seem to have followed the British Museum too!
As I’ve mentioned before, our Victorian forbears periodically attempted to impose order on the never-ending stream of music that just kept on flowing into their libraries.
Both in Cambridge and in Oxford, we looked at old bound books of legal deposit music, 
and the lists of music – lists that came from Stationers’ Hall at regular intervals, and lists that were made of material as it was accessioned. Serendipity is a wonderful thing – Margaret looked out scores corresponding to material in the lists, and came up with a bound collection of various national songbooks – always a popular genre – not to mention an English opera that might have made no ripples in nearly two centuries, but certainly raised a few smiles in that meeting room in February 2018!
Meanwhile, Martin’s selection of scores included a composition by a young English woman whom I’d never heard of before – Sarah Allison Heward – and a network member in Germany has since unearthed a whole wealth of information about her and her musical family. Watch this space – there’s a blogpost coming up!
A tour of shelves at Cambridge University Library was enough to change the mental pictures in my mind from a general impression of scores gently drifting towards the various libraries, to a picture of a very, very large fountain – or an overflowing bathtub. You see, whereas the Scottish university libraries and Sion College lost their right to legal deposit books in 1836 – a very long time ago – the flood simply never stopped when it came to the national libraries, Oxford and Cambridge. For someone working in a conservatoire library – large enough on its own terms, but certainly tiny compared to the legal deposit giants – it’s quite overwhelming to see just how much music has actually been published. And then, to realise that it hasn’t all been catalogued online – a backlog of these proportions is a frightening thing to get one’s head around! I didn’t ask how many linear miles of bookshelves each library is responsible for – offsite storage and all – but they are certainly amazingly big institutions.
In Oxford, a large data-input exercise in the Philippines meant that most of the legal deposit music has now been listed online, but only by accepting that the catalogue data would be less clearly formatted, and more incomplete, than a modern cataloguer would consider acceptable.
My meeting with Giles, on the other hand, afforded me the opportunity to find out more about two projects using Stationers’ Hall data – one, a commercial database, and the other, a website that will go live in April this year. I also learned about optical recognition software being tasked with identifying different imprints of ballad texts and woodcuts – all fascinating stuff.
Our forthcoming research network meeting will bring together all the legal deposit library ‘descendants’ with a responsibility for the surviving sheet music. There might have been meetings or correspondence between groups of these libraries in Georgian times, but I think we can safely say that there has never before been a gathering quite like this before. We’ll be looking both backwards (at the history) and forwards (at documentation and access issues, not to mention big data considerations. It promises to be quite a day!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 