Featured image: Edinburgh in 1769, from G H Millar, The New and Universal System of Geography c1782 (Morris, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Well, here we are, deep in summer. Maybe you have a few spare hours on your hands; maybe you are thinking, I just need a wee project to fill the time, and so, you start to pull bits of loose string, and suddenly it’s 6 months later and the floor is knee deep in loose string…. you have been warned. Nevertheless, if, leaning back in your deckchairs, you still want to research historic music publishing in Scotland, where would you go? Below, signposting two contrasting databases that might get you started.
18th and 19th centuries
The National Library of Scotland has many brilliant resources for online researchers, including this one: the Scottish Book Trade Index, which covers Scottish printing and associated industries in the long 19th century (i.e. also flagging businesses whose operations extend back and forward beyond these dates).
To get an overview of the activity, type ‘music’ into the search engine and have a trawl. The image below is typical of the displayed data for a basic record, which returns entries for individuals involved in the book trade (and specifically, music, using this particular search).
However, some entries provide more detailed information about operating addresses, allowing one to see, for example, which areas of the city had concentrations of musical activity over a period of time. Still others contain short biographical essays, which might flag significant works associated with the named person. The record for James Oswald, for example, notes that his main years of music publishing (1747-1761) were in London, initially in association with John Simpson near the Royal Exchange, with Edinburgh featuring briefly in 1736-1741, and further highlights key works published in both Edinburgh and London.
The top-level search also allows multiple keywords. If you wanted to survey, for example, what kind of music businesses were working specifically out of Edinburgh, the search would allow Music AND Edinburgh. For me, this brought up 19 hits including booksellers, printers, engravers, editors, instrument and music sellers, tuners, music teachers who also sold music, etc. Once you have your list, the list display also shows keyword alongside the search return list (places, activities, and centuries), which you can use to further refine your search.
Amongst my 19 hits, some were known to me, like Natale Corri (here spelled “Corrie”, which may need correcting?) and Alexander Campbell (year active 1816-1824), editor of Albyn’s Anthology (1816-18). Others were new to me, like William Whyte (years active 1799-1858), the appointed bookseller to royalty at various times. Altogether, I was given a snapshot of the kinds of music businesses that operated out of the city, and which in aggregate suggested quite a lot of music publishing going on in Edinburgh during the later 18th and early 19th centuries.
Other cities might be similarly profiled. Heading off into smaller towns, and rather randomly settling on ‘Inverness AND music’ for a search, I found myself looking at Alexander Knowles, active c1813 as a piano maker, known through one reference in the Inverness Journal of 24 December 1813, who may have been more usually located in Aberdeen’s Dee Street.
Like all databases, the SBTI is only a start to research, and doubtless regular use would further clarify the data structures capabilities and limitations. The list isn’t exhaustive (I’m not sure how many library holdings have been included) or entirely watertight on only one particular keyword search combination. Knowing that James Johnson, publisher of The Scots Musical Museum, was an Edinburgh-based music engraver and seller who for some reason wasn’t generated in the original 19 despite being clearly listed in the wider NLS catalogue holdings, I found him by searching alternatively simply using “Johnson”. I also found myself a bit puzzled why the “century” keywords didn’t seem to include 18th century for people from this period who were returned. So, don’t assume it’s completely transparent; play with it and find different ways to navigate its paths, and you will find some interesting patterns and individuals.
For those wanting to read more about the music trade in Scotland in this period, Karen McAulay’s research work has done a great deal of heavy-duty machete-wielding amongst the thickets of many diverse libraries, with her 2013 monograph Our Ancient National Airs covering the mid-18th to mid-19th century, and a forthcoming work looking at Scottish music publishing in the period from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century (the eve of the folk revival) (see Further Reading).
16th and 17th centuries
If you are interested in Scottish music publishing before 1700, have a look at the USTC (Universal Short Title Catalogue). This is an ambitious tool that serves as a search engine and portal into many library catalogues in different countries, so is wider in reach than the SBTI, but also for that reason needs more sophisticated searching strategies. For example, the “country” field at the top level does not, perhaps surprisingly, differentiate between United Kingdom and ‘Scotland’, although putting a city or town name into the keyword search will generate local press data from the underlying imprint field. Helpfully, “Music” is one of the USTC ‘Classification’ keywords (see pull-down menu in the search form). Combining this with a town name gives the kind of place-based profile we have explored above, but with the data items returned in this case being books rather than people. If you were to combine information about the print output from a particular imprint, you could see how music printing fitted in a wider portfolio of work.
So, with ‘music’ classification turned on, and ‘Edinburgh’ selected, I generated a list of 92 books. Not unsurprisingly, many are religious (psalms abound), but in the mix of the earliest entries (1508) are ‘ballade’ texts by Dunbar and Henryson, from the presses of Walter Chepman and Andrew Miller: these will be poetry, rather than notated music. Changing the search to ‘Aberdeen’ pulls up music books by John Forbes, including his famous 1662 Cantus, Songs and Fancies, “with a briefe introduction of musick, as is taught in the musick-schole of Aberdeen”. Once at the bottom of the catalogue entry, you can find links forward to digital copies if links to these exist in any of the underlying library catalogues. (Caveat: at the time of writing this, the British Library catalogue is currently still out of action, following a malware attack late in 2023 which continues to impact retrieval of digital copies held there).
For those who like their catalogues in book form, bibliographer Harry Aldis published a summary of Scottish books in 1904, and at least one site has a digital copy of this (see below). Be aware that a 1970 revised edition of this added in about 5,600 more books than Aldis knew about, since when at least 500 more have been identified. The National Library of Scotland have developed an enhanced version of Aldis on their website, which adds in books discovered since Aldis wrote. Finding music in this publication just needs patience as key-word searching is not available; but, Aldis, or Aldis enhanced, could generate keyword search data for a targeted USTC search.
Resources
17th/18th centuries
- Harry Gidney Aldis, A List of Books printed in Scotland before 1700: including those printed furth of the realm of Scottish booksellers, with brief notes on the printers and stationers (Edinburgh, for the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 1904) – now dated but also provides some leads.
- Scottish Books 1500-1700 (Aldis Updated), National Library of Scotland
- Alastair J Mann, The Scottish Book Trade, 1500-1720: Print Commerce and Print Control in Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2000) – not specifically about music but provides general context.
- Claire Nelson, “Tea-Table Miscellanies: The Development of Scotland’s Song Culture, 1720-1800“, Early Music 28(4) (2000), pp.597–618.
18th/19th centuries
- Karen McAulay, Our Ancient National Airs: Scottish Song Collecting from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Era, Routledge, 2013.
- Karen McAulay, A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland’s Printed Music, 1880-1951 (forthcoming from Routledge, October 2024)
- Karen McAulay’s Blog has a lot of links and mentions of her writing on Scottish music publishing
- June C. Ottenberg, “Musical Currents of the Scottish Enlightenment.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 9(1), (1978), pp.99–109.