Dr Karen McAulay

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Research history

My thesis explores the influence of cultural nationalism on Scottish song-collecting between the years c.1760 and 1888, focusing on musical as opposed to verse collections. The collections also reflect the more general cultural influences at play on their compilers, starting with the trends emerging during the period now commonly known as the Scottish Enlightenment, and continuing throughout the early Romantic period into the later nineteenth century. I suggest that the sub-title of James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, ‘Our Ancient National Airs’, has implications which can be traced throughout this period. The nature of the finished collections tells us much about editorial decisions, value-judgements, and intended audiences, and the prefaces, other published writings and surviving correspondence have also been particularly informative. Parallels can be traced between Joseph and Patrick MacDonald’s A Collection of Highland Vocal Airs, and the Ossian works of James Macpherson, embodying an urge to record and preserve the heritage of Highland Scotland’s primitive past. The collaborations of Robert Burns with James Johnson and George Thomson, and the English Joseph Ritson’s Scotish Song, similarly reflect the antiquarian ‘museum’ mentality, but the drive to record and codify is tempered by Burns’s and Thomson’s wish simultaneously to improve and polish. The ‘discovery’ of the Highlands as a tourist destination, and the appeal of its primitive history, gave rise to a substantial body of literature, and Alexander Campbell’s output particularly exemplifies this, but the sense of place was as much a motivator for private collectors. It can also be demonstrated that urges to create and improve the repertoire, continued to motivate song-collectors such as Robert Archibald Smith as much as they did James Hogg and his literary peers. A passion for domestic music-making, and an increased wish to educate and inform, is evidenced in song-collections by George Farquhar Graham, Finlay Dun and John Thomson, but most significantly, this thesis demonstrates a resurgence of cultural nationalism, driven as much by William Chappell’s anxiety to define and defend the English repertoire, as by Andrew Wighton’s and James Davies’ passion for the Scottish, with Graham and Laing caught in the crossfire. Thus, even if the common thread of ‘Our Ancient National Airs’ was at different times woven into fabrics of differing appearances and functions, published Scottish song-collections of this period can, indeed, be taken to reflect and encapsulate a wider range of contemporary cultural trends than has hitherto been recognised.