Musicology, and a Nerdy but Meaningful Spreadsheet

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Musical notes cut out of old sheet music

How to Assess whether a Song Book was Aligned with Contemporary Tastes

There were once four books of Scottish songs in a mini-series: just under 100 songs, all told. They weren’t much advertised, and few copies are now extant.  If they were intended mainly for school use, then I need to know to what extent their contents were standard Scottish song repertoire for their day. (Each generation has its favourites, noticeably different from the previous ones.)

Now then, I spent a very long time indexing song books as a librarian; that library catalogue is now a reference resource in its own right.  Last night, I listed the contents of those four books, and next, I shall look each song up in our RCS library catalogue.  I’ll end up with two figures for each song:-

  1. How many times the song is listed altogether: a high figure means popularity over a long period.
  2. How many times the song is listed between 1930-1970: this will be a shorter range of numbers. If it’s as high as, say, five hits, then it was popular amongst quite a few compilers over that 40 years.  If it’s not in any other books between 1930-1970, then it’s either old-fashioned, or a more obscure ‘rarity’ from less well-known or very old collections. 

And THEN, I can look up the rare ones in the National Library of Scotland’s Digital Gallery. 

This is the only accurate way of ascertaining whether the contents themselves might have been off-putting to the very audiences that they were meant to attract. I hope that’s not the case, because the compilers were well-placed, indeed ideally-placed to know exactly what went down well with school children. Nonetheless, I want hard evidence, and comparing the repertoire with two significant sets of data – the RCS more standard books, and NLS rare books – seems to me a pretty good way of doing it.

Blogging Helps Clarify the Question

I enjoy writing this blog, because it helps me clarify in my mind what the big issues are that I am addressing. Writing for a wide audience, which may or may not have exactly the same scholarly interest in the topic as I do, is a good way of reminding myself to write accessibly, and hopefully interestingly, about the things which occupy my thoughts as I pursue my research. Do I succeed? You tell me!