Exchange Talk 2 - Karen McAulay

Scottish music publishers flourished in Glasgow and Edinburgh until the mid-twentieth century.  Publishing Scottish songs, fiddle tunes and other dance repertoire was core to their success.  Tartan covered song-books made ideal gifts at home or for the Scottish diaspora.

However, as Karen McAulay has suggested in her latest book, she believes that Mozart Allan’s then-owner Jack Fletcher was also capitalising on the fact that 1951 was the year of the Festival of Britain, when he published The Glories of Scotland.

Fletcher reached out to the Scottish Tourist Board and British Railways for illustrations to accompany his book.  In hardback format, printed front and back with twelve named tartans, Fletcher made a valiant attempt to link songs with photographs of their locality, and had the collection endorsed by popular Scottish comedian, Alec Finlay.  It seems likely that this collection was particularly aimed at visitors to Scotland in this special, Festival year.

Karen’s book, A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland’s Printed Music, 1880-1951, has just been published.  Her talk places some of the song repertoire in the context of contemporary Scottish culture and will be followed by a book launch event in the library.

Bio
Dr Karen McAulay was a librarian at RCS from 1988 until July 2024, and was seconded part-time as a postdoctoral researcher from 2012.  She now has a new part-time role as postdoctoral research fellow.
Karen studied for a PhD at the University of Glasgow.  Her research combines musicology with cultural, library and book history.

Karen was the first Honorary Ketelbey Fellow in Late Modern History at the University of St Andrews, between September-December 2023.  From January-June 2025 she will be an IASH (Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities) Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She is a newly-elected Fellow of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.