It’s a strange thing for folk like this writer to realise that stuff going on in our youth is now ‘history’, but there it is.
This post was inspired by coming across a publication by “Scottish Music Publishing” of Six Sonatas for Violin and Keyboard by David Foulis (1710-1773) edited by Muriel Brown, and while trying to find out more about David Foulis, finding out that Muriel Brown had also published a more extended essay on this minor Scottish composer in Stretto, the newsletter of the Scottish Music Information Centre (SMIC) and the Scottish Society of Composers, in 1986, and that the edition had been published by the then-publishing wing of the SMIC.
The Scottish Society of Composers doesn’t seem to be active today, although other organisations do currently exist to help composers network; the Scottish Music Information Centre (SMIC) is today called the Scottish Music Centre (SMC). However, that there ARE such networks, and that the archive survived, is down to the cussed determination of those who weathered the 1980s. Reading several editions of Stretto’s low-budget, basically typeset, volumes took me back to the 1980s when public spending cuts were slashing into music provision in Scotland. Editorials draw attention to the fragility of funding for professional music infrastructure more generally and prompted me to think about the work done by the SM(I)C in its various historical forms to curate Scottish ‘art music’ composition.
An archive for Scottish composition
A useful article by Morag Brooksbank in 2000 summarises the history and purpose of the SMIC. While older collections in Scottish libraries exist and ‘traditional’ music has specialist archives in e.g. the Wighton Collection (Dundee Central Library), the Scottish Music Centre archive exists to support emerging and ongoing compositional activity, as well as emerging research and performance of historic Scottish repertoire. The core collection is what in the 1980s was called ‘classical’ music, and what today might be more broadly called ‘art’ music, although its holdings are much wider than this.
The archive was originally set up within the University of Glasgow as the Scottish Music Archive by Fred Rimmer in 1969 (Brooksbank, p.10). Since then, it has been interested both in new composition and in making performance possible of work by a wide range of present and past Scottish composers. In addition to an extensive collection of original scores, the archive also holds recordings and ephemera associated with premieres and historic performances. An online shop also services demand for books and downloadable performance scores, while an enquiries service can help with specialized sleuthing. While “shop” products and services are provided at a charge, this is relatively modest. The latest figures from the accounts show a slight deficit on expenditure over income and several years of on-the-margins operating (see the summary accounts information on the Charities Commission website here.
Economic stress is common across many areas of public life today, but in the mid-1980s, provided a series of shocks to musicians in Scotland (as well as workers in many other sectors), as the government of the day pushed a market-based model of operation on many sectors. In the mid-1980s, government funding for music provision in Scotland saw the closure of music degree-awarding departments in several universities, and the withdrawal of Scottish Arts Council funding put the Scottish Music Archive under threat. This therefore moved out of its original University of Glasgow premises, and in 1985 became the Scottish Music Information Centre, operating with charitable status under the management of John Purser and with a young James MacMillan as Editor of its quarterly magazine, Stretto. The editorial of Stretto 5(2) summer 1985 is the first under this new arrangement and describes the funding crises that hit in 1984 “with the withdrawal of Scottish Arts Council support”. Funding for the new venture was precarious, as future Stretto editorials continued to observe.
Luckily, the SMIC survived even if Stretto did not, from 2003 with a revised Companies House listing as the “Scottish Music Centre”, sitting beside Glasgow’s City Halls on Candleriggs (see featured image). Its charitable status allows it to attract gifts and grant income, although the current financial profile looks as if it could do with more of both.
Rather puzzlingly – and I’m no accountant – the SMC annual accounts declare the Music Centre ‘Limited’ to be currently ‘dormant’ and not trading – although it may be needing to be fully self-reliant on commercial income these days (see here )
Stretto
Stretto was a quarterly newsletter on new composition written by and for Scottish composers, which began life as the newssheet of the Scottish Society of Composers, becoming part of the activities of the SMIC in 1985 as part of the creation of the re-organisation of the music centre archive (Stretto 5(2) Summer 1985). The NLS catalogue has Stretto running 1981 to 1988 (ISSN: 0263-5763), at which time it changed to become Music Current, the newssheet of the SMIC (ISSN: 0954-8122), existing in that format for several more years into the early 21st century.
The tone of the editorial writing in the fraught mid-1980s editions was conversational and newsy, occasionally punchy and polemical. Articles focussed on music analysis, including early discussion of “computer music” (Peter Nelson, in Autumn 1984), with features including sheet music of new work alongside exegesis (e.g. John Purser’s discussion of his String quartet in the same edition). Articles and short notes about new music performances dedicated to Scottish music provide a snapshot of where and when this could be heard, including BBC radio programming featuring Scottish work. Groups specialising in new music, such as the Paragon Ensemble and Capella Nova, were regularly profiled. Feature articles on particular composers helped to provide retrospective assessments of their contribution and catalogue highlights. All this will be useful to people researching mid to later 20th century composers.
From winter 1985, essays start to appear on older Scottish composers, with Warwick Edwards kicking off by writing on the Francophile court music of Mary Queen of Scots (research that eventually saw fruit in the album Mary’s Music: Songs and Dances from his Scottish Early Music Consort in 1992). Some content is rather eccentric: “Sean McSporran’s” jokey “Urlar” column is a kind of mashup of Schumannesque “drawing room banter” meets ‘Beyond the Fringe”. At times the “McSporran” end of the writing feels a wee bit (indulgently) insider-blokey, although perhaps humour like this was psychologically helpful in a decade where classical musicians felt (and were) seriously under threat.
The board of trustees of the Scottish Music Centre today is fairly well balanced with both women and men, but back in the 1980s, there were noticeably more men composing, writing about composing, and contributing to the contemporary music debate more generally. There was a sense, I think, of being under fire. A particularly punchy editorial in Stretto 5(3) Autumn 1985 laments the fragility of arts funding under the Conservative government of the day. Editor James Macmillan described this as “a dogmatic market-place ideology backed up by a total unwillingness to even listen to alternative advice” (p.1) which had left the creative sector exposed. Macmillan has, in the decades since, become both an internationally renowned composer and a robust continuing advocate for state support for classical music. Arguably, devolution has also, since then, helped to make an argument for a Scottish-based music archive service.
Scottish Music Publishing
For a short time, SMIC had its own music publisher – Scottish Music Publishing, which inter alia published the sonata I found on our shelves of David Foulis’s music (according to Brooksbank, p.11, this item was a relative best seller). The decision to publish ‘on demand’ has allowed a much more cost-effective operating method for new editions and original works. The Centre also serves as the point of contact for music publications associated with Musica Scotica, a charitable organisation founded in 1996 by Kenneth Elliot (1929-2011) to provide Scottish musicologists with a network, in-person research meetings (conferences and study days), and a publishing platform for new scholarly, performing editions of historic Scottish music.
Scottish Composers – Networks and Societies
One challenge for Scottish composers has been a rather disparate approach to professional networking. The Scottish Music Information Centre in the 1980s worked with the Scottish Society of Composers, whose first chairman was John Hearne (b.1937-) of Aberdeen College of Education, himself a composer, singer and conductor. Hearne also chaired the Scottish Music Advisory Committee of the BBC between 1986 to 1990, which put him in a key position to spot new compositions that might find their way into public broadcast programmes. The Scottish Society of Composers is no more – McSporran’s banter notwithstanding – but today contemporary composers are assisted by e.g.
- New Music Scotland
- Sound Scotland (based in NE Scotland)
Further Reading and Listening
- Morag Brooksband, ‘The Scottish Music Information Centre’, in Fontes Artis Musicae 47(1), 2000: pp.10-13. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23509033
- David Foulis, Six Sonatas for Violin and Keyboard by David Foulis 1710-1773, ed. Muriel Brown (Glasgow: Scottish Music Publishing, 1990)
- Muriel Brown, ‘An Eighteenth Century Scottish Composer – David Foulis’, in Stretto 6(3), 1986 ISSN-026103918
- Musica Scotica, website https://musicascotica.scot/
- Stretto: Journal of the Scottish Society of Composers and the Scottish Music Information Centre, 1982-1988, Vol 2(2) to 7(4), ISSN 0261-3018