So, we’ve talked about the church organ which has been relocated from Kilbarchan (near Paisley in the west of Scotland) to Prenzlau in Germany. Well, the first organist to play the instrument in Kilbarchan, went on to travel a whole lot further than that.
Edward Emanuel Harper
I have collated a lengthy document about the Glasgow Athenaeum’s second Principal. He was only with us a couple of years, of course. After that, he was Kilbarchan’s organist a little bit longer.
The family went briefly back to Southport, before heading to Ottawa – for a year – and then settled in Vancouver.
My notes are full of clips from newspapers, but there is an obvious disadvantage to this: the info in the clips is unsearchable, because it’s just captured in jpg’s. Something had to be done.
Microsoft 365 offers a dictate function, but – maybe it’s a company policy – I couldn’t use it. No problem, though: today, I had Teams meetings ‘with myself’, dictated and used Teams to transcribe my clips, and pasted the transcriptions into my notes. Sorted! Moreover, it had the added advantage of forcing me to read every single word, and noticing a few more tiny details that I might otherwise have overlooked or forgotten.
However, I was less successful with other aspects of my quest. I traced his first Canadian year as an organist in Ottawa – and some snippets of genealogical data in Vancouver. But nothing of his teaching, and no trace of a large compositional output. I’ve looked at library and archive catalogues. Even a promising entry to his ‘archive’ leads to one piece, contributed anonymously by post in 1971. I’ve seen a digital copy of it. It was self-published.
So What?
You might ask – I’ve already asked myself – why I need to know? (Apart from the fact that these little research questions tend to take on a life of their own!) And I think it’s because Harper was plainly a gifted individual – a PhD from Dublin, an LRAM, a brilliant proponent of Chopin, sought after as an organist and recitalist, and a prolific composer.
So where is his Canadian output, in manuscript or published?
And what led him to resign from the Athenaeum, seen by many as a ‘plum’ job? Our records are missing for that era. Did we let a genius slip away? Or were there difficulties that history has graciously concealed?!
Image: St Andrew’s Church, Ottawa (Copyright: Jamie McCaffrey, Flickr)
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 