Musica Scotica Eleventh Annual Conference

Musica Scotica Eleventh Annual Conference

Saturday 23—Sunday 24 April 2016 Stirling Court Hotel, University of Stirling

www.musicascotica.org.uk Twitter: @MusicaScotica

#MusScot2016

Programme Saturday, 23 April

10:00-10:30 Registration

10:30-12:00 Session 1 Moira Harris Learmont Drysdale (1866—1909): An anniversary appreciation

Chair: Gordon Munro

John Purser The Scottishness of A. C. MacKenzie

George Kennaway

A dried larynx, singing seals, and the cello: aspects of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’s and Ruth Waddell’s performance practices

12:00-13:00 Lunch

13:00-15:00 Session 2Chair: Karen McAulay

Greta-Mary Hair The Signet Fragment: A search for an approximate dating and likely provenance for one of the earliest fragments of western liturgical music to be found in Scotland

Alan Henderson Hail, Glorious Bishop: First vespers for St. Cuthbert from the Herdmanston Antiphonal, Edinburgh, NLS, Adv. MS 18.2.13A

Gordon Munro ‘Informed weel expert in musick’: professional musicians in Scottish song and music schools, 1560—1700’

Elaine Moohan Update on the Musica Scotica edition of Robert Johnson

15:00-15:30 Coffee Break

15:30-17:30 Session 3 Karen McAulay Ghosts of borrowers past: Music claimed from Stationers’ Hall

Chair: M. J. Grant

Pam Barrowman Laying the foundations: The repertoire of Thomas Collinson, first Organist of St Mary's Scottish Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh

Richard McGregor

Balancing dualities: MacMillan’s approach to text in Seven Last Words

Graham Hair Negotiating the nirvana fallacy in the twenty-first century: Big History and the Goldilocks Principle

17:30-18:00 Coffee break

18:00-19:00 Eddie McGuire in conversation with Richard MacGregor

MUSICA SCOTICA 11th ANNUAL CONFERENCE !1

09:45-10:00 Registration

10:00-11:30 Session 4 Aaron McGregor ‘Anyone’s guess?’ A reappraisal of the late arrival and early history of the violin in Scotland

Richard McGregor

Andrew Bull Binary bass sequences in Scottish fiddle tunes 1757—1784

Ronnie Gibson After the Golden Age: Scottish fiddle music in the nineteenth century

11:30-12:00 Coffee break

12:00-13:30 Session 5 Ellen Beard Rob Donn MacKay: Finding the music in the songs

Chair: Margaret Mackay

Gill French The development of community brass bands in the Scottish Borders

Peter Cooke The Whalsay Song Project

13:30-14:30 Lunch

14:30-15:30 Session 6 Keziah Milligan Tools for empirical musicology

Chair: Graham Hair

Nick Bailey Notating, storing and processing music which isn't 12EDO using a Computer

15:30-16:30 Launch of the Musica Scotica volume of the “Original Highland Airs” collected by Elizabeth Jane Ross (1812), with an introduction by the editors and live performance of music from the collection


Sunday, 24 April

Musica ScoticaE D I T I O N S O F E A R L Y S C O T T I S H M U S I C

Musica Scotica

Original Highland A

irs Collected by Elizabeth Jane Ross

ISBN 0 9548865 5 0

Musica Scotica is a series of scholarly editions of Early Scottish Music,published under the general editorship of Dr Gordon Munro.

Volume VII contains a repertory of Gaelic melodies - 96 song airs and 54 instrumental pieces - notated for keyboard in 1812 by Elizabeth Ross, the niece of the Laird of the Island of Raasay, James MacLeod. The editors have provided

detailed commentaries on all of the pieces as well as texts and translations for the songs. These distinctive settings comprise a unique and rich view of the musical

tastes of MacLeod’s highland home and his island community.

Original Highland Airs Collected at Raasay in 1812 by ELIZABETH JANE ROSS

edited byPeter Cooke, Morag MacLeod and Colm Ó Baoill

Published by The Musica Scotica Trust2016

VII

VII

We are proud to take this opportunity to present the latest Musica Scotica volume, containing a repertory of Gaelic melodies — 96 song airs and 54 instrumental pieces — notated for keyboard in 1812 by Elizabeth Ross, the niece of the Laird of the Island of Raasay, James MacLeod. The editors have provided detailed commentaries on all of the pieces as well as texts and translations for the songs. These distinctive settings comprise a unique and rich view of the musical tastes of MacLeod’s highland home and his island community.

Abstracts (in alphabetical order)

Nick Bailey (University of Glasgow) Notating, storing and processing music which isn't 12EDO using a Computer Computer technology provides mature and potentially powerful tools to store, retrieve, analyse and organise textual information, but its application to music (as opposed to audio) data storage is an area where much remains to be achieved, even in 12EDO. This presentation summarises the tools developed at the Science and Music Research Group at the University of Glasgow to assist in the empirical study of 19EDO performaces. Lilypond and the Scordaturizer permit the rapid preparation of performance parts. An extended data type, SPOFF (Spiral of Fifths), permits the storage and query of diatonic music in SQL databases. The Webboard permits embedding of musical examples in on-line resources. Together with high-precision digital signal processing techniques (Milligan et al) and appropriate formulations of harmonic theory (Hair), these tools constitute a starting point for the applicaion of computers in musicology of emerging "non standard" repertoire.

Pam Barrowman Laying the foundations: The repertoire of Thomas Collinson, first Organist of St Mary's Scottish Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh In this study the service music sung in St Mary's Scottish Episcopal Cathedral, during the tenure of Dr Thomas Collinson, the first to hold the post of Organist and Choirmaster there, is considered by means of sampling three years' music lists. The first example is from 1899, the earliest surviving lists, by which time Dr Collinson had been in post some 20 years, and might be thought well established in the role. The second is from 1919, and inter alia considers the changes, if any, brought about by the changing context of secular music, and the occurrence of the First World War. The third sample looks at music lists of 1927, the final year of Dr Collinson's tenure, during which he became too ill to work. The influences upon this late period include the changing context of worship both in the Scottish Episcopal Church as a whole, and in St Mary's in particular. Thomas Collinson was the father of Francis Collinson the noted ethnomusicologist, who may have been known to some members of the Society.

Ellen Beard (University of Edinburgh) Rob Donn Mackay: Finding the music in the songs This paper will summarise the results of my recent PhD research at the University of Edinburgh exploring the musical aspects of the work of Sutherland bard Rob Donn MacKay (1714–1778). The project had three aims: (1) to describe the musical world of Rob Donn; (2) to reconstruct 100 of his poems as Gaelic songs with music in staff notation; and (3) to analyse the way he worked as a composer in the oral tradition. After introducing the research questions, the scope and methodology of the study, and the subject matter of the poetry, the paper will present several charts illustrating the kinds of music that Rob Donn used for his songs, including sources for borrowed tunes, original melodies, and musical characteristics such as range, meter, scales and tonality. This will be followed by examples of three methods of musical composition: (1) recomposing a melody using an identifiable model; (2) borrowing an existing melody; and (3) composing a new melody. All examples will be illustrated both visually and aurally.


Andrew Bull (University of Glasgow) Binary bass sequences in Scottish fiddle tunes 1757-1784 The Scottish fiddle music printed between 1757 to 1784 contains remarkably simple bass lines, which, when subjected to close scrutiny, show similarities in their harmonic frameworks. This suggests that there was at the very least a subconscious method of creating a fiddle tune’s harmonic groundwork, if not accepted standard sequences used and shared amongst tune makers through oral transmission and tune books. This paper analyses these bass sequences in terms of the ‘binary’ approach used by Barnaby Brown in his analysis of piping forms, representing harmonic consonance and dissonance as a series of 1s and Os, to show some of the most common sequences. I will be considering their appearance in five key sources: Robert Bremner’s two Collections of Scots Reels or Country Dances, dating from 1757-61 and 1761; Alexander McGlashan’s Collection of Strathspey Reels of 1778; Robert Mackintosh’s Airs, Minuets, Gavotts and Reels of 1783; and Niel Gow’s Collection of Strathspey Reels of 1784. This period is notable for the great changes happening within Scotland due to the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, which this author suggests played a part in the prevalence of these binary sequences. The interest in ordinary life amongst some Enlightenment thinkers gives a clue as to why this music was published – they were part of regular life, included in the dances enjoyed by all levels of society. The bass line is fundamental to this, providing the impetus for these dances in its constant crotchet pulse.

Peter Cooke The Whalsay Song Project. This is a brief report on a venture into what might be called ‘sustainable’ or ‘applied’ ethnomusicology or “fieldback” and concerns a new website featuring recordings of the singing tradition of the Shetland island of Whalsay as I found it during fieldwork there in the period 1970-1985. The report will look briefly at the content and style of the website, at the level of local engagement that has occurred some 40 years after the actual fieldwork and will end with a few comments on some intriguing rhythmic and melodic features of the repertory and on further insights that can be gained not just from engagement with the performers but with their children and grandchildren decades later.

Gill French The development of community brass bands in the Scottish Borders One of the neglected areas for the study of popular music-making in Scotland is brass bands. This paper will outline the origins of brass bands in the Scottish Borders and discuss the factors that influenced their development in the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century many of the towns in the Scottish Borders boasted town bands. These were brass and reed bands usually with military origins. The invention of valves for brass instruments in the 1840s made them more reliable and easier to play for the working man. This, together with the invention of a family of brass instruments known as saxhorns, laid the foundation for the growth of brass bands in the 1850s. The Scottish Borders towns were quick to embrace this new technology and town brass bands were formed. These brass bands were community bands, founded and funded by their local communities. They were never directly sponsored by industry, although there were strong links to the mill towns of the North of England and many of the band conductors came from there. The newly built railways linked the Scottish Borders to the rest of Scotland enabling bands to travel to contests both locally and further away. However, the primary purpose of the brass bands in the Scottish Borders was, and still is, to provide entertainment for their communities and mark civic events and the repertoire they played reflected this. This aspect will also be considered in the paper.


Ronnie Gibson (University of Aberdeen) After the Golden Age: Scottish Fiddle Music in the Nineteenth Century Histories of Scottish fiddle music privilege the long eighteenth century as the cradle of the modern tradition, with the so-called ‘golden age’ from c.1780 to c.1820 widely acknowledged as a highpoint in the composition of national dance music. In contrast, the succeeding period is portrayed as a time of dearth in which the quantity and quality of composition was less than before. However, the pejorative representation of fiddle music after c.1820 obscures the significance of many individuals, and does a disservice to the innovations of the period that shaped the modern tradition. Ultimately, the prevailing theme in most histories of Scottish fiddle music, that of the fiddler-composer who collects and composes national tunes most usually for publication in eponymous collections, is less well suited to the music’s history in the nineteenth century, a time in which the economic basis of music publication and ideas about the repertoire, instrument, and performer were changing. This paper will combine historiography and a re-evaluation of primary sources to present a revised history of Scottish fiddle music in the nineteenth century. Changes in the reception of repertoire will be charted and the practices of fiddle players outlined in an attempt to present a more balanced account of the period and highlight its centrality in the process of musical transmission from the eighteenth to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Graham Hair Negotiating the Nirvana Fallacy in the Twenty-first Century: Big History and the Goldilocks Principle David Christian's "Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History" (2005) explores the effect upon history of the long-term forces within which human life in the 20th century (and all centuries) has been constrained — just as much as (for example) the conventional idea that history is made by human agency of individuals and social groups. For Professor Christian, such forces include large population shifts, urbanisation, the rise and fall of industrialisation, the role of ecological balance, the preservation of biodiversity, and so on. In many cases, the effect of such factors may depend on the consequences of the preservation or transgression of boundary conditions of one kind or another. For example:under- or over-population may be a factor in the stability or the breakdown of cultures or civilizations. The influence of these "boundary conditions" constitutes the so-called "Goldilocks Principle". Several interpretations of the contemporary humanities resonate with this idea of the importance of boundary conditions at different levels of specificity. Tim Vermeulen has proposed (eg at Strathclyde University's Conference on "Metamodernism" in September 2014) that oscillation is a central feature of what several authors have called metamodern artistic practice, in architecture, painting and film. Such oscillation recalls Leonard Meyer's prediction (way back in 1964, in Music, the Arts and Ideas) that "fluctuation within stasis" (resulting in co-existing"coterie cultures") would characterise the coming era in music. Meyer's corollary was that the then-current ideology (that the trajectory of the future would be the outcome of the emulation and incremental amendment of the innovative forces of the present) would gradually decay into anachronisn: a notion explored in further detail by Peter Burkholder a generation after Meyer in the 1980s. Finally, in 2014, John Hall (in "The Importance of being Civil") proposed that the Goldilocks Principle is built into the very core of post-Enlightenment culture, as into contemporary politics — as indeed into planetary life :-) — and that such a stalemate can be expected to be a permanent feature of the cultural landscape for the foreseeable future, and that we had all better get accustomed to the situation. My paper contextualises several recent and current performance and recording projects of music made in Scotland or in the diaspora in terms of such perspectives on the cultural climate of 2016.


Greta-Mary Hair The Signet Fragment: A search for an approximate dating and likely provenance for one of the earliest fragments of western liturgical music to be found in Scotland. A fragment containing most of the proper chants and readings for the Third Mass for Christmas Day was recently discovered in the Signet Library in Edinburgh. The capital 'I' for the Gospel incipit, 'In Principium', is decorated in a Celtic knot-work design that suggests a possible Scottish connection: but a Fraction Antiphon, Emitte angelum tuum –a remnant from early Ambrosian, Mozarabic, or Gallican repertoires from Italy, Spain or France – rules out a Scottish provenance. By communicating with other scholars and consulting relevant research publications, the search for an approximate date and provenance for the fragment resulted in a cautious conclusion.

Moira Harris (University of Glasgow) Learmont Drysdale (1866–1909): An Anniversary Appreciation George John Learmont Drysdale was a prolific composer who enjoyed considerable success in his time. Born and brought up in Edinburgh, he studied at Royal Academy of Music in London before returning to Scotland to earn his living as a composer, conductor and teacher. His sudden death in 1909, at the age of 42, occurred just as he was reaching the peak of his creativity. Although known and respected by many leading musical figures of his time, poor self-promotion and a corresponding lack of published work led to his music falling into obscurity. Today, Drysdale and his works are virtually unknown. Drysdale was one of the few Scottish musicians of his generation to return to Scotland following training. This paper will provide a brief overview of Drysdale’s life and work on the 150th anniversary of his birth. Sound examples will illuminate his compositional style, while insight into the reception of his music will be drawn from contemporary press reports to provide an objective evaluation of the character and worth of this forgotten Scottish composer.

Alan G. Henderson (University of Edinburgh) Hail, Glorious Bishop: First vespers for St Cuthbert from the Herdmanston Antiphonal, Edinburgh, NLS, Adv. MS 18.2.13A. The Herdmanston Manuscript, which dates from about the year 1300, has recently been re-categorised as an antiphonal, having been described until now in the Manuscripts Catalogue of the National Library of Scotland as a breviary. Of particular interest in the manuscript is an Office for St Cuthbert, possibly the earliest surviving example of a complete secular Office. This paper will examine First Vespers from a textual and musical standpoint. While the texts of the complete Office are predominantly in rhyming metre, almost all those of First Vespers are in prose. Unlike the offices of Matins and Lauds, the chants of First Vespers follow no modal order. This possibly indicates that the office of First Vespers was a later addition. A comparison with other manuscripts produced in the Durham scriptorium will demonstrate how the monastic Office for St Cuthbert was modified to conform to secular (Sarum) use.

George Kennaway A dried larynx, singing seals, and the cello: aspects of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser's and Ruth Waddell's performance practices Marjory Kennedy-Fraser (1857-1930) is well-known as a collector and arranger of folk songs from the Hebrides. These arrangements now arouse mixed feelings among traditional singers and scholars, heavily edited and packaged for an art-song audience yet still not quite accepted on those terms. But there are other aspects of her work which deserve closer attention, such as performance practices and wider aspects of concert presentation. This paper will look at two topics. Firstly, the remarks


Kennedy-Fraser makes in the course of her autobiography A Life of Song regarding vocal technique and aspects of singing teaching in France and Italy in the later nineteenth century. Secondly, the arrangements she made for cello and piano of some Hebridean songs, for the Edinburgh cellist Ruth Waddell (1891-1981), and the arrangements for string orchestra made by Ruth's sister Mamie (1888-1967). Proof copies of the cello arrangements show Ruth Waddell's fingerings which replicate early 20th-century portamento practice, as well as other revisions and performance markings. This paper will consider aspects of performance practice for this repertoire, drawing on archival collections at Ednubhrgh University Library and the National Library of Scotland.

Karen McAulay (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) Ghosts of borrowers past: Music claimed from Stationers’ Hall In the early days of copyright, Stationers' Hall in London received copyright books and music, and sent out legal deposit copies to (initially) nine and later eleven libraries. The Scottish libraries received less, because they had more of a struggle getting it sent to them. I’ve been looking at the historic copyright music at the University of St Andrews: most of the material dates from the 1780s (when case-law established that music deserved copyright protection) to the early 1830s (legal deposit arrangements changed in 1836). About two-thirds of it has been catalogued online. Although the collection was described in an article predating the era of grant-funded retrospective online cataloguing, I felt that the collection deserved a closer look, and I’ve been contemplating archival as well as digital resources to form an impression of what the University really thought of their music collection, and who used it. The evidence is scanty, but it raises a bigger question: taken as a whole, what really happened to the Stationers’ Hall legal deposit music? Different libraries took differing views. This isn’t their story, but it may be the introductory chapter.

Aaron McGregor (University of Glasgow) “Anyone’s guess”? A reappraisal of the late arrival and early history of the violin in Scotland. David Johnson’s suggestion that the violin arrived in Scotland around 1670 has been generally accepted, both in scholarly studies and more general writing. A lack of clarity in archival terminology and relative dearth of musical sources before the late-17th century has led to the assumption that a non-literate medieval fiddle tradition existed up until that point, replaced by the new Italian violin introduced by the Scottish upper classes after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. The ubiquity of this narrative has affected the scope of further study, and the manner in which later repertoire and musical practices are treated. However, more recent research on the violin’s place in 16th-century European centres has highlighted that the instrument was active in the English and French courts from around 1540, spreading to outlying regions in both countries in the following decades. Is it credible that Scotland was some 130 years behind its two closest cultural partners, with whom it shared close political, trade and family links, and common musical repertoire? This paper will include a reappraisal of the archival, musical and iconographical evidence of bowed string instruments in the 16th and 17th centuries, highlighting newly available evidence which points to an earlier history of the violin in Scotland than has previously been explored.

Richard E. McGregor Balancing dualities: MacMillan’s approach to text in Seven Last Words Interviewed in 2007 James MacMillan suggested that, in setting the texts of Seven Last Words, the ‘emotional detachment … required for liturgy’ was the ‘most important thing throughout’, although occasionally in the work this objectivity ‘broke down’ in favour of the subjective.


MacMillan’s compositional aesthetic frequently makes use of balancing theological and musical dualities; thus, for example, theologically between God and Man(kind), Heaven and Earth, Body and Soul, and musically, between consonance and dissonance, complexity and simplicity, tension and resolution, and so on. It is the way these ideas interact in his music that produces MacMillan's particular sound world. This paper explores some of the dualities found in Seven last Words, and in particular how MacMillan’s setting of the liturgical texts on the one hand, and the words of Jesus on the other, creates a balanced tension of the objective and the subjective across the work as a whole.

Keziah Milligan (University of Glasgow) Tools for empirical musicology An empirical approach to the study of performance practice requires rigorous data acquisition and the more data collected and analysed, the stronger the conclusions and theories. For example, the Science and Music Research Group's analysis of 19 EDO music entailed manually marking note onsets and offsets in audio files, a process which is extremely time-consuming and can be unreliable. An automatic note segmenter would, therefore, be a very useful tool for empirical musicology. However, currently available software for note onset detection does not produce sufficiently accurate or reliable results to be of much practical use. The inherent nonlinearity of the human auditory system suggests the existing methods, based on linear signal processing techniques, may not be the most appropriate way forward. Indeed, initial results of frequency resolution and response time from our nonlinear detector show a great improvement on existing software.

Elaine Moohan (Open University) The Collected Works of Robert Johnson - a project update A short summary of the state of the edition as received from Kenneth’s papers, together with an update regarding the award of Small Research Grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, library visits undertaken so far, and the resulting progress of the edition towards completion.

Gordon Munro (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) ‘Informed weel expert in musick’: professional musicians in Scottish song and music schools, 1560—1700’ Drawing on case study evidence from burgh council and church records, this paper traces the rise of professional musicians in the context of song and music schools through the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Detailing approaches to selecting individuals for these positions, their duties, and their terms and conditions, we can assess the contribution they made to burgh life, and chart their rising status in early modern Scotland.

John Purser The Scottishness of A.C.MacKenzie In the paper I gave last year on the Scottishness of J.B.McEwen I referred to MacKenzie’s “late romanticism” without elaborating on the subtlety and refinement with which he absorbed the Scottish idiom. Nurtured though he was from childhood in the works of Wagner and Liszt, MacKenzie’s understanding of his own musical culture was sophisticated as well as knowledgeable. He was the son and grandson of fiddlers, and knew more than most about the style of the music and was well aware


of the meanings of accompanying lyrics. The Scottish Concerto, premiered by Padarewski, is a strong, assertive piece with (I believe) a fascinating personal agenda dependent upon the lyrics of the tunes he uses. The Burns Rhapsodies are in similar vein. But MacKenzie was no mere arranger. In the piano piece On The Loch it is hard to analyse why it is so utterly Scottish, though I shall make the attempt, and in his stunning Pibroch Suite for violin and orchestra, composed for Sarasate, his virtuosic understanding of the violin and of classical variation technique serves Scots tunes with a beauty and knowingness that easily matches Bruch. It is time this great composer, so rich in lyricism, so skilled in orchestration, so giving in spirit, be accorded the fame and performance time that his music merits, for he represents for our nation, one of our highest musical achievements.


Documents

Musica Scotica Eleventh Annual Conference