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.
Last week, I was on a research visit to the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. I’ll blog about the visit on my next dedicated research day. However, in the interests of giving blog followers something new to look at, here’s the resource that Oxford scholar Giles Bergel is collaborating on, with the support of CREATe:-
Do follow the link to find out more!
As to my recent trip – ah, patience, dear reader! More anon…
I’ve just been reading a great article by William Lockhart, ‘Trial by ear: legal attitudes to keyboard arrangement in nineteenth century Britain’, Music & Letters 93.2 (2012), 191-221. It’s on JSTOR:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41684166
Now, it’s not about legal deposit per se, although it is mentioned. (If I were to make one minor point, it’s to clarify that when the author states that items were ‘physically deposited’ at Stationers’ Hall, this implies that the Hall was, itself, a legal deposit repository, but this was not so. Stationers’ Hall registered publications, then passed on the legal deposit copies to the libraries – if they weren’t directly sent from the publishers themselves.)
The article is, in fact, an excellent analysis of three British music copyright cases. Considering how prevalent musical arrangements were, it is no surprise that there was litigation concerning copyright from time to time. Legal arguments examined various factors. No-one disputed the importance of the melody, but as we all know, there is more to a composition than that, and as for a series of opera tunes rearranged into a different order for dancing to? Well, you’ll have to read it!
It was interesting to find names that I have often encountered in other capacities, and particularly fun to meet my friend the quadrille arranger, Philippe Musard, again. (I looked at some of his quadrilles while reconstructing the contents of the University of St Andrews’ most popular copyright music volume, vol.284, now missing.)
Even if I don’t rush off to follow up all Lockhart’s references, there are a dozen or so that I shall be adding to our bibliography. There’s a lot there, excellent for providing context to our own research:-
When I get the chance to open my laptop, I will get these references into Mendeley and then into the bibliography. For now, with a tablet on a crowded Virgin train, I have to concede temporary defeat!
NB. As well as posting this as a regular blogpost, it has also been replicated as a separate page, so that it’s easier to find later on using the tabs along the top of the blog.
This is a bibliography covering the various aspects of the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall music research project. It’s a work-in-progress, and suggestions for further additions are warmly welcomed. Click here to access the pdf.
It should be noted that blank headings have been left for any documentation about the institutions themselves, rather than just about their libraries. This is because so much information was accumulated about the University of St Andrews, and it was felt that similar material might later turn up in connection with the other legal deposit libraries.
Headings cover the following topics:-
Posted on the very excellent Echoes from the Vault blog by the capable and insightful Special Collections team at the University of St Andrews, another interesting article touching on the Copyright Collection there. (And it’s about one of the seminal books in Scottish music, as I discussed in my book, Our Ancient National Airs …)
The Lighting the Past team share their highlights from the ‘M’ section of the Copyright Deposit Collection. You can see the previous posts in the series here.
The title page of vol. 1 of the St Andrews copy of The Scots Musical Museum. s M1746.J8S3 Vol. 1
While cataloguing the ‘M’ classmark (music) of the Copyright Deposit Collection, Lighting the Past discovered 5 volumes from The Scots Musical Museum, a 1787-1803 Edinburgh publication attempting to capture all Scots folk music and verse, amounting to 6 volumes once complete.
Robert Burns took a keen interest in the planned compilation project whilst in Edinburgh in 1787, writing ‘An Engraver, James Johnson, in Edin[burgh] has, not from mercenary views but from an honest Scotch enthusiasm, set about collecting all our native Songs and setting them to music.’ With Burns as the principal editor of vols. 2-4 (he died prior to the publication…
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Read the latest update here!
And I omitted to mention that I have had two abstracts accepted this week:- IAML’s international Congress in Leipzig in July, and the RMA Conference in Bristol in September. Very exciting!
This fascinating blogpost about Isaac Nathan appealed to me because his Hebrew Melodies were very popular in their day. (I know – people were borrowing them from St Andrews University Library!)
A gift from Australia from one music librarian to another.
Sometimes you don’t always end up writing what you intended…This started out as a post for Australia Day 2018; but ended up as a rather different story. So how did MusiCB3 manage to travel from Poland to Sydney, via Canterbury and Cambridge, in the company of aristocrats, an intelligent woman, a notable disaster, and a superstar? Stopping off at London en route, and bumping into an expedition that went wrong, although it turned out right. Welcome to the sometimes topsy-turvy world of Isaac Nathan.
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Nothing is more satisfying than talking about one’s research passion. So, clearly, this announcement from the National Library of Scotland would prove irresistible:-
“The National Library of Scotland Slam Week offers a platform to tell an audience and a judging panel about your work.
“Compete in one of our slams and you will have three rounds (each two minutes long) to convince the judges that you are the worthy winner.There are two slams to choose from — research or poetry — and both are free to enter. “
I saw the announcement a few weeks ago, and initially hesitated. I could say plenty about our research network, but could I say enough about my research in NLS? But then I saw another online announcement, thought again, and realised that actually, there was plenty I could say. Without further ado, I signed up! I wonder if anyone I know will be there?
The research slam is on Wednesday night, 24th January, at 6 pm. Sitting here in Glasgow this weekend, and scowling balefully at the snow outside, I have been praying that the weather forecast will prove correct and that both the pavements and public transport will have returned to normal by Wednesday!
There are three rounds in the research slam, and we can now speak for a maximum of three minutes in each session (there are only seven entrants):-
I’ve written my three contributions – and there’s still time to polish my prose! I felt a little wobble when I realised that the 2017 winner produced their contributions in poetry! I can only write limericks or metrical verse, and my last effort at poetry fell flat on its face, so I think I’d best stick to normal sentences for my own attempt!
Maybe I’ll see you there, dear reader?
No disrespect to my day-job, but years of cataloguing have trained me to tolerate repetitive tasks to a very high degree! Cataloguing can be repetitive and, I’m afraid, monotonous. However, in terms of endurance training, this background stands me in good stead. I just keep on going, like the Duracell bunny in the battery ads!
My innocent vacation amusement this week has been the rather slow-moving exercise of comparing one database with another. Why would anyone spend hours, days, starting to go through a list that amounts to some 2000 pieces of music? Ah, for a very good reason. This is the list of Edinburgh University Library’s Reid Hall Cupboard collection, and I’m finding out how much legal deposit music was actually retained. First, I compared it with the entire registered output of 1810 as listed in Kassler. Very little was there. Then with the registered output for 1818, the last year listed there. Possibly one match. Then I compared the Reid Cupboard contents with the material listed by the Advocates in 1830 – twelve years after the period itemised in Kassler. Very little correlation there, either.
However, at different periods, copyright music WAS selectively retained at the University of Edinburgh. I concluded that there was nothing for it but to go through that a significant sample of that spreadsheet, just to begin with. Some music is continental (mainly French or German) in origin, and some is in manuscript; these categories don’t form part of my investigation. The problem is that no single approach can be taken to the whole corpus. We’re not comparing like with like, and different listings cover different periods, apart from any other considerations:-
was published before 1819); checking Kassler in digital format is generally easier than in the paper edition, because one can check by title in the e-book. The physical book has various indices, but there’s no alphabetical title listing, and only the composers’ names are listed, not their works.After several lengthy sessions checking and cross-referring, I had nearly finished composers beginning with “G”!
Thursday – the brightness of a [rainy] new dawn …
Faced with a very large collection of Haydn publications, I concluded that although the most comprehensive approach would be a complete comparision of the EUL Reid Hall cupboard contents with Kassler, St Andrew’s online copyright collection, and items listed in Copac, maybe this isn’t necessary immediately. Instead, a few broad statistics give us an overview of what’s there.
A few months ago, I sewed a collage representation of the music from the Georgian copyright music era. Different media appeal to different people; not everyone will want to read the musicological detail of our research, but they might like some of the cultural history we’re unearthing: Napoleonic songs, lovesongs, piano music, Vauxhall Gardens theatrical material …
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I had another idea. This time, I whiled away some travelling time writing a short poem. Well, a verse, anyway. I can’t really privilege it by calling it a ‘poem’! Librarian B C Kaemper saved it as an image, which I share below:-
What do you think? Is there any merit in disseminating research findings this way in addition to the more conventional formats?
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 