Tag Archives: Bibliography

A Flurry of Activity

Posted on by
Reply

The Bass Culture team has adopted a serious, studious demeanour as the project rolls towards its October web-launch. Not that we weren’t serious and studious before, but we’re even more so now, which goes some way to explaining why there are fewer blogposts these days.

David and Karen are editing the spreadsheet (consistency is our middle name, and qualitative judgements are very carefully weighed up, if they’re allowed to remain at all!).  Luca is building the website.

It’s all the extra things that Karen’s afraid of forgetting!  There is going to be a bibliography of key sources: the following are some of them, but we’ll provide the full bibliographic details on the website itself!

  • Baptie’s Musical Scotland
  • The British Union-Catalogue of early music printed before the year 1801 : a record of the holdings of over one hundred libraries throughout the British Isles (in our database, abbreviated as BUCEM)
  • Douglas, Sheila – The Atholl Collection catalogue: 300 years of Scottish music and poetry (Perth, UK: Perth & Kinross Libraries, 1999)
  • Glen, John – The Glen collection of Scottish dance music : strathspeys, reels, and jigs, selected from the earliest printed sources, or from the composer’s works [2 vols, 1891 and 1895](In our database, in the format: Glen, Collection of Scottish Dance Music)
  • Gore, Charles – Scottish Music Index http://www.scottishmusicindex.org/
  • Johnson, David – Music and Society
  • Kidson, Frank – British music publishers, printers and engravers : London, provincial, Scottish and Irish. From Queen Elizabeth’s reign to George the Fourth’s, with select bibliographical lists of musical works printed and published within that period (1900) (In our database, in the format, Kidson, British Music Publishers
  • National Library of Scotland, Digital Gallery
  • Oxford Music
  •  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  • RISM (Repertoire Internationale des Sources Musicales)
  • Scottish Book Trade Index (In our database, SBTI)
  • Smith and Humphries’ Music Publishing in the British Isles

All the information is there in Karen’s Mendeley and Diigo accounts, but it still needs to be collated and double, treble-checked!

Hold onto your hats, folks – it’s going to be quite a ride!

But Who Were They? Bass Culture Goes Biographical

Posted on by
Reply

We’ll be giving some biographical information about “our” fiddle tune composers and compilers, but we’re not biographers per se.  Therefore, we’re just noting where our information was drawn from.  It’s mainly from some very obvious places!  Here’s the beginning of a list …

  • Baptie, David, Musical Scotland: Past and Present (1894)
  • Bulloch, John Malcolm, William Marshall: the Scots composer, 1748-1833 (1933)
  • Cowie, Moyra, William Marshall : the Scots composer, 1748-1833 (1999)
  • The Glen Collection of Scottish Dance Music (1891 and 1895 volumes)
  • Gore, Charles, The Scottish Fiddle Music Index (1994)
  • Gore, Charles, The Scottish Music Index [digitized reissue of the above] http://www.scottishmusicindex.org/
  • Murdoch, A, The fiddle in Scotland: comprising sketches of Scotch fiddlers and fiddle makers (1888)
  • Oxford Music Online oxfordmusiconline.com/

 

The Devil is in the Detail (or, A Rose by any other Name …)

Posted on by
Reply

At last week’s Bass Culture get-together, we got down to the minutiae of data entry – the mind-numbing but crucial detail determining how the website will ultimately look.  If James Aird is entered as “Aird, James” once, then all names will always be entered in indirect order.  “Jas. Aird” becomes an alternative in another column, and “N.Stewart” must be looked up to double-check if he’s “Neil” or “Niel”.

Enter the Scottish Book Trade Index – one of Karen’s favourite websites, hosted by the National Library of Scotland.  It’s fantastic for checking names and addresses of anyone connected with the Scottish Book Trade up to 1850 – ideal for our project.  It simply must feature in our website bibliography page!

The Librarian’s Instinct to Share

Posted on by
Reply

As mentioned already, we’ve reached the real nitty-gritty stage of entering the details of our works and sources onto a huge database.  Suddenly, the minutiae of different copies, printings and editions come into sharp focus, and library shelf-marks of individual copies become of crucial importance.  The inestimable Copac.ac.uk is fantastic, but it doesn’t include public libraries (Dundee and Perth are crucially important to us) or specialist collections like the Vaughan Williams Library at EFDSS (the English Folk Dance and Song Society).

So if we want to tell you about ALL the copies in existence, or even just those we’ve encountered so far, this becomes a bit tricky!  What’s more, Karen reminds us that we probably ought also to share useful bibliographical articles like the ones about Aberdeen University Library’s early music collections.  There’s an initial article by Barry Cooper in the RMA Research Chronicle vol.14 (1978) covering not only the university but also Aberdeen’s public library; another by Cooper and former Aberdeen librarian Richard Turbet (vol.23), and two further articles by Turbet in vols. 30 and 30 of the same journal.  Although these are accessible via the JSTOR or Taylor and Francis online databases, they’re sadly hidden behind subscription gateways, so it’s a bit more difficult for non-academic readers to gain access to them.

Yes, we really do need a place for a bibliography on our HmsScot website when it goes live!