Image: cartoon by Isaak Cruikshank of Jane, 2nd Duchess of Gordon as ‘A Tartan Belle’ (1792) (p.165)
Mary-Jannet Leith is a Scottish recorder player whose concerts with Thomas Allery on harpsichord, and the period-music group Ensemble Hesperi, have been notable for including 18th century Scottish compositions.
Leith is also a researcher, and her doctoral research on Scottish musicians’ activities in post-Jacobite London has been successfully defended and is now available open-access on the University of Southampton’s research depository webpage.
Historical accounts such as the History of Music in Scotland written by Henry Farmer in 1947 have long remarked on processes of immigration whereby European music came to and influenced Scottish music, but this study focusses on the impact of Scottish musicians’ networks as they took the journey south, and found themselves in a much larger urban environment. London by the later 18th century was a wealthy place that attracted cultural creatives from all over Europe. The Scots were particuarly effective in creating cultural networks and societies – such as the Highland Society of London – which helped to incubate, away from home and perhaps therefore more nostalgically, ideas about their home space. In London, the Scots were also able to experience a larger, more cosmopolitan mix of European musical cultures.
Particular focus is given to James Oswald (1710-1769), whose compositional and publishing successes in London brought Scottish melodies in trio sonata packages to keen amateur players through the subscription-gathering and other social activities of the Society of the ‘Tempo of Apollo’; Robert Bremner (c1713-1789), who also acted as a London-based agent for the Edinburgh Musical Society, but who was also a regular member of the Scottish Presbyterian community in London; and John Gow (1764-1826), whose dance band was the talk of the town.
Chapter 1 provides a broad period introduction, and chapter 2 focusses on Oswald, whose music publishing and compositional arrangements are perhaps the most familiar ground covered by the thesis, although Leith’s writing does much to tidy the narrative. Oswald was probably the most successful of the Scottish Londoners, enjoying court appointments and a successful marriage into money and status.
I was particularly struck by the chapters on Robert Bremner, which took this figure comprehensively out of the shadows and into the spotlight as a cultural agent of considerable inportance. Chapter 3 discusses Bremner’s interests in improving the quality of Scottish psalm singing, and describes how the tastes of the Scots in London in significant ways had become more conservative than those urging musical reform within Scotland (chapter 3). Bremner’s work on improving psalm singing predated his move south, inspired by other Scottish reformers, and expressed through his Rudiments of Music (1756), which in successive editions aimed to provide training material for precentors and those who led psalmody. Once in London, Bremner encountered Anglican church music sung by trained singers and accompanied by instruments – both trends that did not necessarily sit well with the Scots, and which may have provoked more fixed ideas of Scottish Presbyterian difference. Contemporaries remarked not only on the difference of the Anglicans, but also that French and Dutch protestant communities were much more musically capable than the Scots, and that the Scottish practice of precentor-led, unaccompanied psalm singing was recognised as a particular, Scottish, form of worship. Leith suggests that psalm-singing in the London Presbyterian churches may have given homesick Scots an emotional connection with home. Bremner was not a musical conservative: he also worked to keep his connections with the Edinburgh musical world alive, and the thesis examines the musical exchanges that formed this corresponding relationship linking Scotland with London, and also with Philadelphia in North America, where his brother James was based. Chapter 4 significantly extends what we can say about the entrepreneurial role played by Bremner as a cultural advocate of Scottish music on the wider European and Atlantic stage.
Chapter 5 discusses the importance of Scottish dance music as a fashionable craze in London, particularly promoted successfully by the Highland Society of London as part of the post-Jacobite rehabilitation – and also Romantic reimagining – of Scottish culture. Women are important here as society hostesses; the chapter highlights particularly Jane, 4th Duchess of Gordon, for whom Scottish dance may have been ‘an alternative performative mode of femininity and physicality otherwise unacceptable for women in London’s polite space’ (p.156). London’s taste for Scottish dance also enabled professinal musicians, such as John Gow, brother of Nathaniel Gow, to move south and establish a dance band of Scottish musicians who were much in demand. Dance masters followed, helping to train novices in the steps of the reels and strathspeys needed for society balls, and perhaps (p.179) even developing new choreographies for these dances in the context of the London diasporic performance alongside non-Scots. The Highland Fling, for example, may well have been invented in London by ex-pats. Scottish dancing events seem to have been very popular and these away-from-home projects may have helped to spread the fashion to British and European musicians more generally, and contributed to the appearance of new ‘fusion’ dances combining Scottish steps with ideas from France (e.g. the ‘Scotch quadrille’ associated with John Gow).
Chapter 6 deals with the Highland Society of London, whose social events were hugely influential in creating the calendar of annual dinners and dances, including the Caledonian Balls around St Andrew’s Day. Members interested in Scottish culture were active in preserving ideas about bagpiping, melodies, and dress that while they might have exaggerated some aspects of Highland culture, were undoubtedly important to the survival of traditional forms after the disruptive aftershocks of the Culloden defeat. Ideas about harping and the Ossian fragments may have contained both elements of truth and fantasy, but nevertheless did much to keep the playing of the wire-strung harp an imaginable possibility, combining Scottish interest with the co-imagined “Celtic” cultures of Welsh and Ireland. The HSL’s interest in the role of bagpipes in the context of the British military, and their promotion of competitions and publication of pipe music, turbo-charged that instrument’s cultural credit and transformed the domestic traditions. Beyond pipes and harp, however, the HSL was a powerful backer of Scottish musicians of all kinds, including singers, hosting regular concerts.
Leith concludes “through the constant flow of musicians, musical works, and patrons between Scotland and London, developments and innovations in London’s Scottish musical culture were transported from the capital back to Caledonia, where they continued to shape the musical history of Scotland itself” (p,214).
Appendices contain lists of Scots in London churches, publications by Oswald, newspaper reports of performance around London by the Gow family and of entertainments at the Highland Society of London in the period 1802 to 1839.
Currently this research is not a glossy published book, but it deserves to become one, and even in its format as a dissertation it is a lively and useful read.
Further Reading
- Mary-Jannet Nancy Christina Leith, From Caledonia to the Capital: Scottish Musicians, Music-Making and Culture in Eighteenth-Century London, 1741-1815 (Doctoral Dissertation, University of Southampton, 2024)
- Mary-Jannet Leith, homepage