A Breathless Whirl

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Edinburgh_-_University_Library_01-e1478712223864This week, I visited Elizabeth Quarmby-Lawrence at Edinburgh University Library, where we had a very useful discussion about library history, legal deposit, and the fate of the University’s legal deposit music.  Some great ideas arose out of our chat, of which more anon!  I now have more to read, more people to make contact with, and a brand-new copy of the University’s recent publication, Directory of Collections, edited by Head of Special Collections Joseph Marshall, and published by Third Millenium Publishing in 2016 (ISBN: 9781908990891).

This morning, I have made a start on the bibliography that will be one of the outcomes of the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall music research network project.  The coverage is already looking good, but bibliographical pride prevents me from putting it online quite yet!

And if all that isn’t breathless enough, then the press release about a new Adam Matthew Digital online resource, Literary Print Culture: The Stationers’ Company Archive, is enough to make any bibliographer’s heartbeat race.  There’s a video about the database, here.

Sion College Library Provenance Project

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Followers of the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall music research project may be aware that Sion College (in London) was one of the original legal deposit libraries, and Karen is planning to pay a visit to Lambeth Palace Library, where the Sion College library holdings ended up, in the next few months.

It is therefore of HUGE interest to note that Lambeth Palace Library is working on a really significant project tracing provenance of the Sion College Library collections.  A circular was emailed to rare books librarians today, explaining precisely what this project is all about.  We have permission to share this notification here, and are more than happy to spread the joy!

“Lambeth Palace Library is pleased to announce the re-launch of the Sion College Library Provenance Project, which has been migrated to a dedicated WordPress account. The new site allows you to search through galleries of hundreds of images (which are being regularly uploaded), including an array of armorial bindings, bookplates, inscriptions and much more from the Sion College Library collection.

“All the pre-1850 material from Sion College came to Lambeth Palace Library in 1996 and is now the focus of a major cataloguing project which is uncovering a wealth of provenance evidence. Viewers are warmly invited to not only search the database to discover its fascinating contents, but are encouraged to actively contribute by helping us identify marks of provenance within the collection, providing information with which to supplement and enrich our detailed catalogue records. Please do have a look and try your hand at some transcriptions and identifications. We look forward to hearing your comments!”

Sion College Project

Open Invitation to Join the Conversation

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Stationers Hall fabricAnyone with a research interest in early UK legal deposit music, its publication, its distribution or subsequent curation and use, can join the network.  You can be added to the mailing list, if you let us know your email address.  (You’ll find our contact details here.)  You can also follow on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest.

To take your involvement to the next level, why not consider joining our Jisc mailing list, which allows us to discuss with one another in a safe and supportive environment.

The AHRC-funded Claimed From Stationers Hall music research network gets a JiscMail Discussion List

JiscMail offers the facility to set up discussion lists about education or research interests on a particular topic, carried out by email.  Correspondents generally have some connection with higher education, but this is not compulsory.

We have set up a list for sharing information about research interests in the historic British legal deposit music registered at Stationers Hall, and our groupname is MUSIC-FROM-STATIONERS-HALL.

How to subscribe?  Basically, there are two ways of subscribing:-

  1.  You can use this link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=MUSIC-FROM-STATIONERS-HALL&A=1 New subscribers can complete their details to join the list.
  2. Subscribers can also join the list by sending an email to listserv@jiscmail.ac.uk as follows:-

Subject: Subscribe Message: SUBSCRIBE MUSIC-FROM-STATIONERS-HALL Firstname Lastname

You should receive a confirmation email; if it doesn’t pop up in your inbox, it may be worth checking “junk” or other filter folders.  You then need to confirm the Jisc confirmation, quite promptly (otherwise they assume you didn’t mean to subscribe)!  Please get in touch if you have any problems.

FAQs

  1. You’ll find instructions at the FAQ for Subscribers page: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/help/subscribers/faq.html.
  2. What is JiscMail?  Visit http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/about/whatisjiscmail.html
  3. Can I use institutional access?  Certainly.  If you’re in a British HE institution, you can use institutional access (Shibboleth), as you would with most electronic resources.
  4. Are there any rules?  The JiscMail Service Policy document, http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/ describes the way in which Jisc expects the service to be used, by list owners and subscribers.

Workshop

We’re also aiming to set up a workshop of some kind in early Spring 2018, so do watch this space.

Social Media Activity

Please feel free to tweet, “like” or share on Facebook, and generally make a big noise about this exciting new venture.   (I made a Pinterest board, for what it’s worth – I read that it was a good marketing tool.  At the moment I’m not quite sure …!)

Could You be a Guest Blogger?

I’m trying to blog at least weekly, and have also posted three podcasts to date, so do keep looking in.  But this is a network – so we need more bloggers!  Here’s your opportunity to raise your research profile.  Could you offer a guest-blogpost to this blog on any topic that has some loose connection with early British legal deposit music, its libraries, the publishers, the composers or music users? Or do you know anyone who has any expertise about legal deposit in other nations in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries?  This would all be exciting, too!  (We’ve had two offers along these lines already, which we are very much enthused about.)  If anyone has even a little half-idea about something that you could share, please do get in touch.  Blogposts should be approximately 500-1000 words, but please run your idea past us first before you start writing it.  We’re hoping to post a guest-blogpost roughly once a month, but more would  be welcome, of course.

Professors as Gatekeepers

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

In my doctoral research, I encountered a few instances where learned individuals acted as informal gatekeepers, or intermediaries, between Scottish song (and custom) devotees on the one hand, and new knowledge on the other – I could name people such as George Paton or John Ramsay of Ochtertyre in the late 18th century, or John MacGregor Murray in the Georgian and Regency era, and of course David Laing, who became librarian to the Society of Writers to H. M. Signet in the 19th century.  These unofficial gatekeepers were seen as sources of information, and were often surprisingly generous in the sharing of it.

Today, in the latest University of St Andrews’ Special Collections blog, Echoes from the Vault, I was reminded of these luminaries.  The latest blogpost, ‘Banned Books at the University of St Andrews‘, shares early 19th century Senate discussions as to which books should remain banned to Divinity students; it also describes the Senate’s efforts to regulate public access to their library books.*

Banned books – be they novels or otherwise – are outwith the scope of the Claimed from Stationers’ Hall music research network, but public access is another matter entirely!

The loan records, you will recall, faithfully record every single loan of the copyright music volumes to anyone, professors or students, or the professors’ friends.  Between 1836-1839, Dr Gillespie even borrowed the music catalogue itself on several occasions!

Bearing that in mind, the Senate’s deliberations between 1820-21 to restrict the public’s direct access to library books are actually quite significant.  We learn that in 1820, the Senate decided,

to consider of the Propriety of restricting the Public at large in the use of books which they are at present allowed to have out on Professors’ pages  (Minutes of Senatus, 14 December 1820. UYUY452/13, p. 110)

The subsequent decision was clear: the public were neither to borrow directly, nor to send their servants to do so on their behalf:-

The committee farther recommend that all persons not members of the University whom the Professors may be desirous of accommodating with the use of Books should henceforth receive such books through the Professors themselves & not by going directly to the Library or sending their Servants to it for the purpose of taking out Books in the Professors’ names.  (Minutes of Senatus, 13 January 1821. UYUY452/13, pp. 114-116.)

So University Gates St Andrewswhat we actually have here, is the professors acting as intermediaries, or gatekeepers, to the collection.  Considering the materials were valuable, and many of them had been deposited under copyright legislation, this is quite understandable.

What it means, in terms of the music collection, however, is that if we are reading this correctly, and if the rules were subsequently interpreted strictly, then all the friends’ music loans after 1820 were actually made by the professors and not selected by individual townspeople standing at the shelves on their own account.  So, who chose the music?  We’ll never know.  We cannot tell how strictly the rules were enforced, nor for how long, and we certainly cannot guess how often Miss X asked for a particular kind of music, or a particular piece.  Unless they knew what was in individual volumes, it is quite probable that their professorial friends were asked to, ‘just find me some piano music’, or perhaps on occasions to ‘bring back something new’.  Who knows?

Does this drive a coach and horses through my analysis of who borrowed what, and when?  I don’t think it does.  We really don’t know the precise circumstances of all those hundreds and thousands of music loans.  Even if the professors were more involved in selecting music than we might have imagined, the statistics we’re left with give us a picture of what kinds of music different borrower types were exposed to.  Maybe the professors made assumptions about what their friends might enjoy singing or playing.  But they must have got something right, or the music wouldn’t have continued to fly off the shelves!  Moreover, a strict rule in 1821 wasn’t necessarily strictly enforced even a few years later.

The Senate’s restrictions do, however, serve to remind us that we need to keep an open mind about many aspects of the library’s lending patterns.  It does no harm to be reminded!

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*Echoes from the Vault post,  29.09.2017, celebrating Banned Books Week

Following Other Networks: EAERN

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Followers of the Claimed from Stationers’ Hall music research network might also be interested in EAERN, the Eighteenth-Century Arts Education Research Network.  We’re taking the liberty of sharing a fascinating series of workshops that commences next week!  Maybe we’ll see you there?

 

Claimed from Stationer’s Hall – Update

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

There’s a Scottish saying, “What goes around, comes around”. I didn’t realise, when we selected the image from Challoner’s New Guida di Musica for this University of St Andrews Echoes from the Vault blogpost, that I would encounter it again in a later stage of my research! Whilst tweeting for the new AHRC-funded music network, Claimed from Stationers’ Hall, I idly looked to see what was registered “on this day” a couple of hundred years ago. Stretching a point slightly, I chanced upon – yes, Challoner’s piano instructor, for that’s what it actually is – registered at Stationers’ Hall on 24 September 1812. Checking my records further, I learned that the volume containing it was actually bound – and borrowed – within three months’ of registration, and clocked up 14 loans between 1812 and 1849. If you really want to, you can even “play like it was 1812” because it has been digitised at Baylor University:- http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu/cdm/ref/collection/fa-spnc/id/149327

St Andrews Special Collections's avatarEchoes from the Vault

Earlier this year we published a blog post by Dr Karen McAulay of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland about her research using the St Andrews Copyright Music Collection – https://standrewsrarebooks.wordpress.com/2016/08/18/claimed-from-stationers-hall-st-andrews-copyright-music-collection/

Copyright Music Collection in the stacks Copyright Music Collection in the stacks

An example of a volume in the copyright music collection - Challoner’s New Guida di Musica, ‘improved edition’ (London: Skillern, [1812]), St Andrews University Library sM1.A4M6; 141’] An example of a volume in the copyright music collection – Challoner’s New Guida di Musica, ‘improved edition’ (London: Skillern, [1812]), St Andrews University Library (sM1.A4M6; 141). Karen has continued her research and has now written an update, available on her blog at:

https://karenmcaulay.wordpress.com/claimed-from-stationers-hall/

Karen will be returning to St Andrews in due course – we look forward to welcoming her back to the Reading Room and to future updates as she continues to unravel the history of this collection.

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Legal Deposit of Music – a Soundscape

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
2017-05-25 09.47.08
Parliament Hall & the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh – one of the old legal deposit libraries.

I should confess at the outset, that this is a reflective piece, rather than a seriously documented aspect of the legal deposit music research.  It outlines what can best be described as a playful attempt to describe the legal deposit process by evoking the imagined sounds of the early nineteenth century.  I was contemplating different ways to bring the story alive to an audience unfamiliar with the context of my research.  After I’d told the story in what I hoped was an accessible and reasonably lively way, I continued to reflect upon ways of utilising other media to enliven things another time.

I offer you two SoundCloud recordings today, firstly a podcast update, which goes on to outline my experimentation with making a playlist of appropriate sound-effects.

  1. Claimed From Stationers’ Hall: Podcast no.3
  2. Legal Deposit of Music – a Soundscape

For the purposes of transparency, the individual audio-clips in the Soundscape are listed below, acknowledging the sources and durations.  My thanks go to their creators.  I particularly thank Alessandro Cesaro and Simone Laghi for uploading their beautiful performances to SoundCloud.  They’re wonderful!

Only by listening to the podcasts will you be able to discern why the other audio-clips – all sound effects – were chosen!

  • Michelle’s Pen on Paper (0:10) / Kate Baker Music
  • Wrapping Parcel (0:31) / SoundMods
  • Sound Effect of Door Opening 0:06) / Switcher12
  • Door Slamming Shut (0:02) / Amy-Jane Wilson 1
  • Footsteps Sound Effects (0:08 ) / l13hk
  • Horse on Cobbles at Münster (0:30) / Simon Velo
  • Boat at Sea (1:58) / Misha Rogov
  • In Bruges / Clip & Clop (0:30) / Bib-6
  • Door Open And Close Puerta Abriendo Y Cerrando 2 (0:50) / FX Sounds
  • Turning Pages (0:05) / Angela Morris
  • L. Dussek Rosline Castle with variations, piano (5:02) / Alessandro Cesaro
  • Ensemble Symposium – Gioacchino Rossini – Quartetto Originale n. 3 – Andante (3:09) / Simone Laghi
  • Countryside Birds – Ambisonics sound effects library (1:30)/ A Sound Effect

 

Building a Network (and Newsletter 1, September 20, 2017)

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

spider-web-with-water-beads-921039__340

I spent the day authoring and starting to disseminate the first network Newsletter; actually, it’s both an update and an invitation to particate!  After spending some time this evening reading MailChimp’s instructions, I worked out how to get the hyperlink for viewing in your browser.  Triumph!  Click the link to read it, here.

By way of light relief, I opened my favourite book – Kassler’s Music Entries at Stationers’ Hall* – to see what was registered on this day, over 200 years ago.  Two surprises awaited me.  In 1784, John Valentine of Leicester registered Thirty Psalm Tunes in Four Parts, and eleven copies are still extant, not only in legal deposit libraries.  Plainly psalm tunes were considered worth keeping (or leaving to libraries!); not only that, but Trinity College Dublin has a copy, and they didn’t as a rule show much interest in trivial matter such as legal deposit music.

The second surprise was some piano trios by Pleyel, dedicated to Miss Elizabeth Wynne and registered on 20th September 1790.  According to Copac, several copies survive in UK, and the British Library also has copies with a later date posited.  And there could still be others not yet catalogued online.  But here’s the exciting bit – you can access a German edition on IMSLP.  Who wants to be first to play it?!

http://imslp.org/wiki/3_Keyboard_Trios,_B.437-439_(Pleyel,_Ignaz)

* Michael Kassler, author of Music Entries at Stationers’ Hall, 1710-1818 : from lists prepared for William Hawes, D. W. Krummel and Alan Tyson  (Ashgate 2004), advises us that ‘since the demise of Ashgate, it is now published in hard copy and as an e-book by Routledge, and the e-book is £30 cheaper. See https://www.routledge.com/Music-Entries-at-Stationers-Hall-17101818-from-lists-prepared-for/Kassler/p/book/9780754634584

19th September – a pure coincidence

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I checked Kassler’s Music Entries at Stationers’ Hall (2004) last night, to discover that although music wasn’t registered on a daily basis, it was actually registered on that date in three consecutive decades: 1797, 1807, and 1817.  A curious confluence of the stars, nothing more, but it made an interesting thumbnail case-study.Rauzzini On 19th September 1797: Singer and singing teacher Rauzzini registered no.7 of his Periodical Collection of Vocal Music.  Few copies survive, and it’s a bit hard to tell which volume contains no.7, though I know an expert who could probably locate it!

vauxhall gardens theatreAlso OTD in 1797, Bland & Weller registered James Hook’s Vauxhall Gardens song, Maidens would you know?, along with Hook’s Welsh song, Jem of Aberdovey, and his When the sprightly fife and drum.  It’s all pretty typical fare – a song  by a popular Bath impresario, and some Vauxhall Gardens songs including a ‘national’ and a military song, by composers still (just) known today.  As it happens, there were also imprints of another ‘Jem’ song by Hook under English, Irish and Scottish imprints – Jem of Aberdeen! – but that’s not part of the 19th September story.  You can trace a few copies in Copac, but certainly not in all of the legal deposit libraries.

Jump forward to 19th September 1807, and publisher Goulding registered 2 Dibdin songs for a show, Bannister’s Budget.  Copies survive in three Copac libraries today.  (If musical theatre is a popular genre today, it’s a case of ‘plus ca change’!)

Bath Assembly RoomsMeanwhile, exactly two hundred years ago yesterday, Bath musician John Charles White registered his piano rondo, The Fairy Queen on 19th September 1817.   There are seemingly three surviving copies in the UK.  However, there could be further copies of any of the aforementioned titles, because not all of the early legal deposit music has been catalogued online.  That’s the intriguing part of this story!

For now, this tiny snapshot of three anniversaries neatly encapsulates the kind of music popular in those decades: typical of their eras, they represent concerts by famous names in Vauxhall Gardens; touch upon the fashion for songs of a military nature during the Napoleonic Wars, the popularity of national songs; and a plethora of piano rondos for the amateur pianist.   Not bad, for a random handful of music entries in the Stationers’ Hall registers!
Vauxhall gardens scene

Networking is the Name of The Game

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Pinterest British Library Spiders Web

The first network steering group meeting took place a couple of weeks ago, and in the past week more networking has taken place.  I’ve already blogged about Monday’s highly satisfactory meeting with retired University of Aberdeen music librarian Richard Turbet, in Norfolk.

Back in Glasgow, on Friday I attended a collaborators’ meeting for another new network, this time at the University of Glasgow: the Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded Romantic National Song Network.  It is spearheaded by Principal Investigator Professor Kirsteen McCue and Postdoctoral Research Assistant Dr Brianna Robertson-Kirkland.  My own doctoral research was about late 18th and 19th century Scottish song-collecting; I had examined collections both with and without accompaniments.  The new network focuses largely on collections with accompaniments, and certainly – like my own research – on collections with music, aka, “songs with their airs”.

Although the focus of my research has changed slightly since my PhD, I can see that the work I did on the borrowing of “national song” collections from St Andrews University library could be pertinent in the context of the RNSN.  I am also enthusiastic about the possibility of revisiting some of my favourite nineteenth century Scottish song collections!

Mrs Bertram’s Music Borrowing: Reading Between the Lines

Moving on to another research network, I recently wrote a blogpost for the EAERN (Eighteenth-century Arts Education Research Network) .  “Mrs Bertram’s Music Borrowing” occupied quite a few evening hours when I stumbled across a reference to her in my perusal of the early nineteenth-century St Andrews University borrowing records, and I was very pleased to have the opportunity to write it up in to a coherent piece for EAERN.  Yes, I’ve stretched a point – we’re talking about the long eighteenth-century here!  Nonetheless, I think it will demonstrate the value of interrogating archival records in minute detail.  After my many years spent cataloguing music materials for the Whittaker Library, my endurance levels for dealing with repetitive detail are exceptionally high!  It’s very rewarding when hours of capturing data can be turned into a human story about someone who lived, breathed and – most importantly – borrowed music from the library!  Do visit the EAERN website.

And lastly – some more networking news about the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall network.  We now have a Facebook page:- https://www.facebook.com/ClaimedStatHall/ – and I’ve also set up a Jiscmail list, so at some stage this week I’ll be sharing details with people whom I think might be interested in joining in the discussion about this fascinating, but often overlooked body of music.