Karen McAulay has, until this summer, been a librarian at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, and she brings her skills as a bibliographer and extensive knowledge of the music printing industry to this, her second monograph.
Her first book – Our Ancient National Airs (Ashgate, 2013) – examined the collecting and printing of Scottish traditional music from the Enlightenment to the early Romantic period, when this repertoire first emerged as a touchstone of Scottish national identity. This second book takes up the story from the later Victorian period, when the expansion of the Scottish middle classes had firmly established a robust market for both domestic and community music-making as a leisure pastime. The endpoint – 1951 – is the year of the Festival of Britain, a high-point for considering a ‘Scottish’ identity that was tucked up tightly within that larger, regional, imperial, identity, just before the Scottish ‘folk revival’ refocussed Scots’ understanding of their musical national identity. As McAulay’s preface reminds us, the Edinburgh ‘People’s Ceilidh’ in 1951 was a pivotal moment, one that has complicated the historiography of those who lived before it. A Social History is a timely reminder of the world before modern ideas about ‘folk’ music.
The book focuses on book sellers who capitalised on the new markets both at home and in the wider overseas diaspora for whom music from home remained a strong marker of “roots” identity. McAulay has a profound understanding of the underpinning data sources, although occasionally the detail and subdivision of chapters makes the wider lens view less evident. Final chapter summaries are helpful points of orientation.
Chapters 1 to 3 are particularly focussed on the commercial print infrastructure and track the leading operators and their outputs. Scottish music publishers were able to position themselves in very particular niches during the decades under discussion. While Edinburgh retained some claims to “high” culture publications, increasingly the industrial and imperial power-house city of Glasgow dominated printing and publishing, sending out a steady stream to amateur musicians both at home and overseas. Trades indexes, and sales and library catalogues, show a rapid growth in west of Scotland firms operating as both makers and sellers of instruments and music. McAulay’s data demonstrates that these Scottish businesses, operating in a wider British and Empire context, concentrated on Scottish repertoire and knew how to package and sell it in high volumes. Chapter 5 looks at how these domestic businesses reached out into global markets.
The company names whose output steers Scottish music publishing shows this west of Scotland dominance: Paterson, Roy & Co (initially of Edinburgh, latterly in Glasgow and Ayr); Wood & Son (again, initially a family business in Edinburgh, latterly in Glasgow with branches in Paisley, Aberdeen, Inverness and a family spin-off in London); James S Kerr (Glasgow); Mozart Allan (Glasgow) and Bayley & Ferguson (also Glasgow). The most successful of these businesses opened retail operations in London as well, thereby marketing ‘Scottish’ music not just to Scots, but to Scots in London, and to those for whom Scots were another kind of ‘exotic’ presence within an anglophone print culture (e.g. the cover image to this post, which shows Paterson’s Scottish Orpheus sold in London but ‘printed’ in Scotland).
The data also shows how particular cultural changes drove music printing. The Education Acts of the 1870s that expanded and consolidated national schooling generated new kinds of educational printing for children, and the growth of choral singing using the same educational solfège systems expanded this easy-to-sing repertoire for adults. Adult community singing gained further impetus, not just in Scotland but around Britain, in the 1920s, thanks to a campaign by the Daily Express Newspaper who sponsored both events and publications, no doubt filling the post-war ‘victory memorial’ halls in British towns and villages with vigorous singing opportunities (McAulay, p.5, 79).
This first third of her book allows McAulay space to highlight publications that had huge print runs and lasting impact in the national consciousness, cornerstone collections that defined the Scottish ‘national’ repertoire, such as Kerr’s Collection of Reels and Strathspeys for the Pianoforte, and Merry Melodies for fiddle. There is also in these chapters necessarily caveat-driven discussion of blackface minstrelsy in Scotland, an area that is properly acknowledged as grossly offensive to any modern reader, but which was a long-running participatory reality in many working-class communities, and which responded in complex ways to the growing awareness of musical traditions associated with the formerly enslaved communities of North America. While McAulay is rightly appalled by much of this, there remains more work to be done to explore why this strand of entertainment was so popular, for so long. While the fetishisation of African-Americans may reflect Scotland’s own dubious role in overseas empire-building and slave-based trading, there seems to be unexplored ideas about affinities at work, however inappropriate to modern sensibility, possibly connecting working class identity with these “Othered” performances, which is not amenable to publication lists proving the bare fact of its presence and ubiquity.
Scotland’s complicated relationship with the more proximate ‘Other’ of Ireland is also reflected in the music print world. Examination of song lists in this monograph finds that ‘Scottish’ and ‘Irish’ songs are often to be found in the same anthologies, carving out a kind of shared “Celtic” folk-space that was marketed as distinct from English repertoires. The additionally complicated nature of Scots-Ulster identity, which shares an interest in the songs of Robert Burns, featured in books destined for the domestic market and for the overseas communities in places such as Australia and New Zealand. Scottish sectarian identities might be seeded by publications such as The Orange Songster (Kerr, 1914) or the more apparently Fenian content of Mozart Allan’s Ireland’s Own Songbook (Allan, 1940) (MacAulay, pp.80-81).
For this reviewer, the section on the contexts and contents of the Scottish Students and British Students’ Song Books (McAulay, pp.67-79) reminds us of a venture originating in St Andrews that went on to connect across the 4 ‘ancient’ Scottish universities. A loud homosocial “hurrah” from the era before women students were commonplace, the songs to be found in these publications celebrate Victorian male values and promote the kind of militaristic masculinity that made graduates of these institutions enthusiastic contributors to British empire-building.
The 1872 Education Act for Scotland did not transform the music syllabus in schools fundamentally but did create a situation in which access to more standardised early-stages schooling throughout Britain expanded, creating new opportunities for ‘folk song’ collections representing all corners of the ‘British’ nations (Chapter 4). One publisher who leaned into this new market was Parlane of Paisley, who published a series of classroom singing books edited by Alan Reid, between 1893 and 1910. In Edinburgh from the 1890s, with a wider educational remit than simply musical, McDougall’s Educational Company began business in the 1890s with educational classroom music books in its catalogue and was still trading as Holmes McDougall when the writer of this review was in primary school in the 1970s.
Formal adult societies grew up to take this beyond the classroom, in particular the Scottish National Song Society, led initially by Alan Reid, serviced by printer and publisher John Wilson of Dundee and Glasgow, When the immensely wealthy industrialist and patron of libraries and literacy, Andrew Carnegie, took over as president in 1909, they must have felt all their Christmases had come at once. Aspirational middle-class singers might also enjoy Scottish songs printing to support the short-lived Edinburgh Dunedin Association’s portfolio of activities. Interest in the educational improvement of working-class people led to the foundation of night-classes in establishments such as the Glasgow Athenaeum (later to become the RSCM and then the RCS), and through involvement with choirs such as Roberton’s Glasgow Orpheus Choir. These benefited from publications such as the Scottish Orpheus songbooks from Glasgow publisher Paterson, as MacAulay explains in chapter 4 (Education, Preservation, Organisation).
After the war, new forms of media and entertainment gradually expanded. Chapter 6 takes a look at how music was programmed in this period, and is particularly interesting on the impact of the early years of the BBC (pp.154-157) The BBC’s charter-defined responsibility to educate and inform as well as to entertain led to the introduction of national radio programmes for schools (famously, from the 1940s, Singing Together) that familiarised school children with Scottish and other “folk” songs, often performed by trained RP voices. McAulay points out that by the 1950s and 60s, there was a growing tension between the BBC’s approach to “folk” music and the leftist approach led by Hamish Henderson and Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies, which redefined what was felt to be authentic performance of “folk” songs.
The Scots – particularly but not exclusively the middle-class Scots – were intellectually and musically ambitious, and while traditional Scottish material was popular across all sectors of the market, there was also interest in “art” music. However, as McAulay’s final chapter 7 discusses, ambitious Scots interested in composing ‘art’ music found there was little interest in this kind of repertoire from Scottish music publishers. More often than not, “art” music composers left Scotland for the performance and publication opportunities afforded by London and further afield. Scottish music publishers “scarcely considered orchestral music” (pp,163) and neglected larger scale classical music more generally, although chamber music for small ensembles occasionally appeared from e.g. Kerr and Mozart Allan, particularly if associated with “Scottish” tunes or themes, and abridged for amateur performance. Bayley & Ferguson were to some extent interested in choral music and included some works by Scottish composers (p.164-5). Paterson, with Diack as editor, produced some abridged school- or amateur ensemble sets by popular ‘classical’ composers such as Bach, Handel or Mozart.
The lack of interest from Scottish publishers in indigenous “art” music composition provoked strong criticism from Hugh MacDiarmid in the 1920s (McAulay, pp.165-67). MacDiarmid was not particularly musically-skilled himself, but McAulay’s data proves that he was right to point out that it was very hard for a Scottish composer with serious ambitious to find a place in Scotland’s music industry in this period. The country genuinely needed musical leadership for its composition culture, and the gap was gradually filled by the Glasgow establishment that began as the Glasgow Athenaeum (1890), became the Scottish National Academy of Music, then the Royal Scottish Academy of Music, and finally today the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
In her final pages, McAulay concludes that the conservative ‘Scottish’ choices that were so important to making the fortunes of Scottish music publishers between 1880 and 1951 were also a long-term weakness, as these fell out of fashion after the folk revival transformed national tastes and ideas about national repertoire. She concludes that the surviving sheet music is a fair reflection of what our older folk remember from school, but the disappearance of many of the named companies from trading proves their output had outlived its usefulness to the national self-narrative.
Overall, this book like a fruit cake packed full of fruit – say, a decent Dundee cake. Its strength lies in the conglomeration of data (raisins and sultanas and chopped nuts). It isn’t necessarily always a smooth linear ride (there isn’t as much spongey, easy-to-digest narrative as you might get in a wider social history), but it does offer an evidence-based window into a recent past that needed to be better understood, and provides super-charged fuel for future research investigation.
Further Reading
- Karen E. McAulay, A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland’s Printed Music 1880-1951 (London: Routledge, 2025)