Out we went into deepest Lanarkshire earlier this week, in search of the birthplace of one of the two women I’ll be talking about at the conference in a couple of weeks.* No particular reason – I just like to visualise where they lived. We couldn’t stop for a photo, in a busy street, but I’d seen it on Google maps in any case. We had a coffee just round the corner in the main street. (I believe it’s under Turkish ownership, which might explain the intriguing illustrations of quadrilles in different national costumes, on the walls! Look carefully – there’s a Marcia Persiana amongst them.)
But I didn’t expect, a couple of days later, to find myself looking across at one of the addresses that our budding composer occupied in Glasgow. Buildings change, and it looks as though this one has been reduced to two storeys since our heroine lived there with her mother and a couple of siblings in the 1890s. So … you may or may not be looking at the tenement flat where they lived, but you’re definitely looking at the tenement!
It’s just along from the Fabric Bazaar and the famous Barras market. Since Piping Live has been on, and yesterday it was the second day of the World Pipe Bands Championships at Glasgow Green, there was a distant, constant sound of drones, and people in swaying kilts round every corner.
Yes, even in the fabric shop, the reason for my outing in the first place. No kidding.
*The Royal Academy of Music’s September conference, Women and Musical Histories, 1789-1914. My paper has possibly my longest ever title-
‘The Trumpet Major’s ‘Poetess’ Widow; the Scottish Shipping Magnate’s Daughter and the Retired Barrister: The Importance of Parental Support to Musically Gifted Girls in the Late Victorian and Edwardian Eras’.
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 