Going Off at a Tangent: an Intriguing Deviation from Research

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Straight line with a second, curved line (ending with an arrow)
Image by Bruno from Pixabay

When that book comes from Amazon, I may be distracted. Well, it’s available online already, being very old and antiquated, but how can I refer to an embroidery book online, when I want it open in front of me whilst I sit sewing? I don’t care to read it on a tablet – I want the real thing, or in this case, a reprint of it. (You can’t so easily sit with markers in different pages, flicking between different stitches and patterns, on a tablet. )

What, you might ask, does this have to do with Scottish publishers or educational music? Absolutely nothing. It does have a tangential link to something that was once a research interest – hence my inability to let it go by me.

Watch this space. We’ll soon see if I am up to any of the suggestions in this book! Maybe it’ll arrive in time for the weekend.

Celebrating Milestones

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to buy myself something to mark a significant milestone – admit it, you do it too! Getting my second book submitted on time was certainly an important occasion for me. So, too, was commencing my Fellowship at St Andrews.

My gaze strayed to my eBay ‘Watch List’! I had ‘liked’ a lot of items. Some of them might, arguably, have been even more useful a month or two earlier, but I went through that list carefully. It was all printed matter, whether music or ephemera. I made a couple of offers (one has been accepted already!), then checked I couldn’t easily access the most desirable of the other publications some other way. That still left a handful of items I could definitely justify getting!

They will all be useful in the research I am now embarking upon – an extension of one particular aspect that enthralled me in my book project.

But one particular songbook – which I resolutely did not buy during the book-writing – sneakily snuck into my shopping basket! I had been telling it all along that it couldn’t be included, since it wasn’t published by a Scottish publisher. But although my specialism is Scottish music, there’s nothing to stop me buying something published by a contemporary English firm. And it is very pretty, as well as not being expensive! I’ll show you when it arrives.

Indeed, there are several English-published titles by ‘my’ Scottish educationalists that I now need to examine alongside the things they published in Scotland! But there’s a difference between treating myself and going overboard, so I deferred looking for those until another time. There will be library copies of quite a few of them.

Now, how do I explain the postie paying us more frequent visits for the next week or so?!

Image by Petra Reuter from Pixabay

Weekends are Dangerous

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

There’s going to be a lot of activity at my front door in the next few days. I confess I had a spending spree. First, I ordered new, not-terribly-exciting organ music (needs must, but not my own taste!) … and then I had to console myself with some old Mozart Allan scores. Ironically, I won’t be playing a couple of them publicly, but I feel I can’t write about delicate, topical issues without seeing these old scores for myself. Not out of any remote sense of liking them, but because it wouldn’t be right to address the issues without knowing exactly what the publications are like. No second-hand, reported commentary for me.

To counterbalance those, I ordered some Scottish piano tunes and an advertising brochure which has to come all the way from Canada. These will give me considerable pleasure!