Kilbarchan to Southport to Ottawa to Vancouver: Organist on the Move

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

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’ve 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. 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)

Reassessing an Impression

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

You’ll remember that I’m currently writing an article about some Scottish women whom I encountered during the research for my forthcoming book.  (Actually, I have quite a bit more detail, to the extent that it would be a shame not to share it.)

So of course, I can’t share it here, yet. However, I can reveal that one lady in particular worked as an entertainer, in a trio taking Scotland to emigrants in the diaspora.  (I had only traced her on one tour – I didn’t find evidence of her subsequent life – until today. But we’ll come to that in a minute!)

I did NOT expect to find her, as an even younger adult, performing what was then comparatively recent chamber music back home in Scotland.

So I looked for YouTube recordings, just to hear what exactly she had performed.  This was more highbrow, and more ambitious than I had given her credit for!

Anton Rubinstein – Piano Trio no.2, op.15, in G minor (1851)

Henryk Wieniawski – Legende, violin and piano (1860)

Henryk Wieniawski – Scherzo-Tarantelle, op.16, violin and piano (1885)

Today, I also found confirmation that this lady emigrated to Vancouver, got married (over there?) – and was a theatre musician for some years.  Given Vancouver’s penchant for vaudeville, that may have been her work, but this is pure conjecture.

I’m so pleased with these quick glimpses of another side of someone who I had previously imagined just as a purveyor of sentimental Scottish songs.  It doesn’t pay to pigeonhole people!