Diversifying Your Repertoire: Music by BIPOC Composers

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

At the Whittaker Library, we use the Portal (a bit like Moodle, it’s a kind of intranet for material shared within the institution) for useful information to help our students and colleagues.

A while ago, I compiled lists of music by women composers, subdivided into categories, such as music for children, music for tuba, music for mixed chamber ensemble – but until now, I hadn’t done much in the way of subdividing the lists of music by BIPOC composers. So, I have been working on it.  Despite having acquired quite a lot of music, I have discovered that the commonest instruments have by far and away the most music. Poor tuba player, if you want to diversify your programme with music by people of other ethnicities.

Some university libraries have put in a lot of effort helping students find this kind of thing – especially in Canada and the USA – and there are some useful databases to help – but I have still been struggling to find materials for some of the more minority instruments. Not a great deal for piccolo, tuba, accordion – or bagpipes! (Well,  there might not be as much pipe music over there – we started the piping tradition here in Scotland. However,  there are plenty of non-Scottish pipe bands. Some international pipers must also compose!)

If you play tuba, trombone, piccolo, oboe, saxophone – you get the picture – and your repertoire includes a fabulous piece of music by a BIPOC composer, PLEASE do recommend your library to get that piece in stock so that other musicians can also find it! It won’t be up to me to continue ordering music at RCS after the end of June – and that’s a strange feeling – but I can, right now, highlight the fact that libraries need to pay attention to the repertoire they buy.

If you’re a librarian – by all means, keep the standard repertoire up to date. Buy what your patrons need and ask for. But if you have a chance to do stock development, please keep the BIPOC composers in mind. They are, after all, the global majority! And I’m ashamed to say, we don’t know enough about them, though I can, hand on heart, say that I’ve been making a determined effort to find out.

I had hoped to do one last workshop about all the exciting new repertoire in the library, before I retired. Sadly, this isn’t going to happen. Never mind – maybe one day, someone will find this blog post and feel inspired to explore it all for themselves.

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

We’ve been Spoiled! (Virtually)

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

It’s Sunday evening, when anyone with any sense is sitting with their feet up, relaxing before the next week starts. So what do I do? I attempt to sort the vacuum cleaner and order it some new filters; eye the ironing basket balefully; and try but fail to contact the dishwasher warranty people. Yes, I know – it’s a Sunday – but the website categorically said there was someone to help me from 8 am to midnight every day of the week. They didn’t say that the ‘someone’ was a bot, who would advise me to phone a particular number, which in turn would require me to answer loads of questions and then tell me they were closed. Technology and online services are conspiring against me tonight.

So, I thought, I’d go over tomorrow’s talk one more time. Inevitably, even though I’ve successfully given my talk once ‘in real life’, I still found things I thought I could improve upon. The only problem was, I’m sitting at home, and what I needed was neither on my shelves nor available digitally.

  • A three-volume book of Scottish songs, which I can see in the library at RCS tomorrow. But there’s only one ‘pupil edition’ book of ONE of the volumes available for purchase anywhere online, and I rather think I’d like the whole set of the teacher’s edition, for myself. In my dreams!
  • So … I had already worked out that the title hadn’t made much of a stir in the contemporary press. Indeed, I think I’ve returned to this question several times, so I needn’t have imagined I would reach a different conclusion today. I searched again. I failed again. We’re not used to searching and not coming up with results!
  • Ah, of course. There’s a particular magazine which might have a review in it. I have a rare copy of the first issue, which I found on eBay a couple of years ago. But my copy is a bit too early to hold the review I’m hoping for. Where is this magazine to be found? One library, in Edinburgh.
  • Not to be found in electronic format.
  • And … no direct trains to Edinburgh this week – they’re clearing up after last week’s storms – whilst I’m tied up all February.
  • So … A couple of desperate emails on the off-chance that they might yet be in other libraries, albeit not in an online catalogue. And I wait. Because it’s Sunday night, isn’t it? And I hope they’re nowhere near their laptops!

When I think that, doing doctoral studies the first-time round, I would have looked things up in books and journals in the library, or gone home and written a letter to ask if I could visit another library half-way across the country – then waited for a reply – and even the second, completed doctoral attempt was fitted in around full-time employment – I can’t help feeling a little guilty that I’ve become so impatient. In any case, the paper is good enough. I changed a few words, and I’ll print it out again tomorrow. 

(Moreover, in my early postgrad student days I washed things up in a wash-hand basin, so dishwasher repairs weren’t even on my radar! There are advantages to being in employment.)

Some things don’t change, though. I still need to do the ironing. Gah!

Image by Capucine from Pixabay

From Glasgow to Edinburgh re Dundee: the Wighton Collection [My talk, Part 2]

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

This is the second part of the talk that I gave at yesterday’s conference, ‘Towards a Scottish Traditional Music Archive’ (Saturday 11 June 2022). The first part of my talk was about Dundee’s Wighton Collection, but in the second part I address the question of the broader printed music legacy when it comes to Scottish traditional music resources held in Scottish libraries.

Documentation

Lecture Theatre, Scottish Storytelling Centre

The Wighton Collection is a priceless resource, but it’s only fair to point out that it is complemented by other facilities containing some of the same titles, since Andrew Wighton was not the only Victorian or Edwardian collector of this particular repertoire.  If you take an overview of what is actually available in all these different collections, it’s a remarkably rich legacy.

A generation younger than Wighton, the Edinburgh bagpipe firm owner and music antiquarian John Glen lived from 1833-1904.  When he died, his collection was bought by Lady Dorothea Stewart Murray – or Dorothea Ruggles-Brise, to use her married name – and it ultimately ended up in the National Library of Scotland.  Dorothea was born the year Wighton died, so she was a younger generation again. She, too, collected Scottish music, gifting her own collection to Perth, where the A K Bell Library holds it as the Atholl Collection.

NLS DIGITAL GALLERY 

Glen’s collection – and that of Alexander Inglis of Glencorse – has been digitised and forms part of the National Library of Scotland’s Digital Gallery.

PERTH – THE ATHOLL COLLECTION CATALOGUE

Meanwhile, the Perth collection was catalogued by Dr Sheila M. Douglas, in a book published in 1999:-

UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES 

The University Libraries also hold a considerable number of Scottish music publications.  Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and St Andrews all have admirable collections.  They were each legal deposit libraries until the early nineteenth century, which means they were entitled to one copy of every British book published, although history has revealed that they adopted different approaches to the music that could have come their way. Moreover, some music was never properly recorded at Stationers’ Hall in London.

The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland has a few historical published titles in the Library, but nowhere near as many as the universities can boast, particularly in terms of really old, pre-nineteenth century materials.  Our strengths are more in the more recent publications which our students use as performance resources. 

And of course, all universities have archival resources, by which I mean unique, manuscript or at least, non-published materials.  The structural management of a university archive may be alongside but not necessarily part of the library. The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland has an archive which is part of the Information Services Department; it’s off-site and does not share the same catalogue.  (Bear in mind that the Athenaeum was only established near the end of the nineteenth century, and to this day, RCS is nowhere near the size of a university.)

LINKS

Speaking as a librarian, I can say that the key to making use of the legacy that Scotland has, is in knowing how to access it.

For published resources, in the university and national library sphere, there is Jisc Library Hub Discover, which explores all their catalogues at once.  Individual universities will have pages via their own catalogue leading to other finding aids for manuscripts and other rare materials.  There’s also, of course, the Jisc Archives Hub, which facilitates exploring all British university archives. 

Another useful resource to know about is Cecilia-uk.org, which was compiled by the UK & Ireland branch of IAML – the International Association of Music Libraries.  This offers pointers as to where different music materials can be sourced.

And of course, there’s WorldCat.  This extraordinary resource facilitates searching 10,000 libraries worldwide – some British university and public libraries are listed here.  But what you find – whether in Jisc Library Hub Discover, or WorldCat – depends on what has been catalogued in an automated system.  When libraries opt to collaborate with these online union catalogues, it is dependent on their automated catalogue records being up to particular library cataloguing codes and standards, because different library catalogues can’t be interrogated simultaneously unless all the information is coded consistently.  Whilst I must admit I don’t know whether Dundee’s library catalogue is linked to WorldCat, the holdings of the Wighton Collection certainly won’t be, because they’re not catalogued into the City of Dundee’s online library catalogue in the first place.

I realise that I strayed away somewhat from my remit of talking about the Wighton Collection, but I think it’s important to be aware of both the Scottish music resources themselves, and their documentation. 

To quote the old song, “You can’t have one without the other.”