Libraries, Digital Collections, Real Musical Instruments, REALLY Happy Singers

In the past couple of weeks, we've come across several interesting news alerts, that might interest our readers.  Here are three of them!

The Horniman Library and Museum

The Horniman Library is, not surprisingly, linked with the Horniman Museum - which contains a collection of historical musical instruments.  They are in London.  The Horniman's Library is now available on Copac, and that means more places to find books if we don't have them in our own collections!
 
If you're a musician, you might like to know more about the musical instrument collection too, so let's share the 'blurb' that we received in our email:-

"The Horniman Library collection contains books from the 16th century through to the present day, and covers a wide spectrum of subject areas related to the remit of the Horniman Museum, with a focus on natural history, anthropology and musical instruments. The collection, which originated with Frederick Horniman’s own book collection, has been added to by subsequent directors, curators and librarians and now amounts to some 30,000 volumes. The development of the library collections has been closely linked to object acquisition and curatorial practice in the museum and there is thus a strong connection between the book and object collections.

"You can read more on the Copac blog here: http://blog.copac.jisc.ac.uk/2017/04/19/horniman-library-catalogue-loaded/.

 

"Or, to browse the Horniman Library’s records, select the Main Search tab at http://copac.jisc.ac.uk and choose ‘Horniman Library’ from the list of libraries." 

RNCM Archives shared the next news item with us:-

New project brings major folk song collection to UK 

There's an article in the online M-Magazine which tells you more about the news.  Here's a taster:-

"The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library Digital Archive has launched a new project to incorporate a pivotal early 20th century collection of British songs into its folk music database.The digitised collection of James Madison Carpenter (pictured above), which has previously only been accessible by visiting the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, will become free to access online for the first time ..." Read the whole article here

The Neuroscience of Singing 

Okay, every so often, more research appears which proves what everyone here knows to be true - singing is good for you!  But this research is particularly authoritative, so we'd like to share it with anyone who sings or teaches or conducts singers!  It's by Cassandra Sheppard and was published on a website called Uplift Connect on Sunday 11th December 2016.  
Singing Together Brings Heartbeats Into Harmony
 

BBC Radio 2's Cecil Sharp Collection

True, we are the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.  But Cecil Sharp was one of England's foremost folklorists, and founded the English Folk Song and Dance Society - his approach to folk music was influential upon many of his peers in the early twentieth century, so it must be of interest to folklorists everywhere - it's part of the history of song collecting.

Radio 2 wants listeners' submissions of their recordings of music that Cecil Sharp collected.  So if a Cecil Sharp specimen is now part of your repertoire, that's what Radio 2 wants to hear about.  Read more here.

Scottish Cultural History as illustrated by Musical Song Collections

'Whittaker' (aka Music and Academic Services Librarian Karen McAulay) gave an illustrated talk to visiting librarians from the Library and Information History Group, a couple of weeks ago.  There was no PowerPoint, but the talk is available via Karen's Academia.edu pages. Click here.

Scottish Saxophones and Spanish Cellos: Arranging National Tunes for Small Ensembles

Sax Ecosse at Buchanan Bus Station

A veritable blogfest about song-arranging can be found here on the True Imaginary Friends blog.  Take a handful of old national songbooks, and pick an ensemble to write for.  Are you ready?  

Here are some of the results!

Artists' Development Conference - and we MISSED it!

Whittaker is kicking himself.

He missed all mention of the EFDSS 2013 Artists' Development Conference.  It might be the English Folk Dance and Song Society, but artist development is what we're all about, here at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland!

Read the conference report, and see if you don't agree with me?  It must have been epic!

efdss homepage

Today's Featured Website - The Folktrax Archive

Folktrax.org

 

Beryl and Peter Kennedy
image from Folktrax.org

Folk music specialists Peter and Beryl Kennedy were prominent figures in the folk music world for a very long time.  Indeed, Peter was a descendant of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser.  They died in 2006 and 2007 respectively, but the Folktrax Archive website lives on here:-

http://folktrax-archive.org/index.htm
 
Browse the index for customs, songs, tunes, stories and more.  The website is also a retail outlet for audio and video recordings that the couple made or were involved with. 
 
There's a wealth of useful info here.  Recommended to our Scottish Music students!

On this day ... 16th November 1780

What is folk music?  Is it really music "of the folk"?  Which folk?  Country folk? (See Bibliolore's blogpost today about Charles Seeger and folkness.)

Okay, what about music written by someone, published as "trad", and then becoming part of the oral tradition?

What about someone having a laugh at his compatriots expense?  (Just a bit of mischief, you might say.)  What kind of words would you use to promote your "national" collection?

Today is the birthday of Robert Archibald Smith, compiler of six books called The Scotish Minstrel (yes, the spelling is right) and a smaller Irish Minstrel (which got him into copyright trouble with the Irish songsmith Thomas Moore).

R. A. Smith, 16th Nov,1780 - 3rd Jan, 1829

He was born a Scottish weaver's son in London, came back to Scotland and abandoned the weaving trade to become an organist and music teacher first in Paisley and later in Edinburgh.

Much, much more could be said about his use of metaphors to characterise his collection and place it historically. (But maybe not on this blog posting! Visit our Minstrels and Metaphors page.)  Ask to see his Scotish Minstrel - the Whittaker Library has a couple of volumes.  University Library and national collections have lots more.

Tobar an Dualchais

• Tobar an Dualchais
  'This website contains thousands of oral recordings recorded in Scotland and further afield, from the 1930s onwards. The items you can listen to include stories, songs, music, poetry and factual information.'
  tags:
• oral-recordings 
• Scotland culture 
• stories 
• songs 
• poetry

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Hebridean Celtic Festival - Feis Cheilteach Innse Gall

13-16 July 2011, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, Scotland

Website

George Ewart Evans - oral history at the British Library Sound Archive

RSAMD staff and students have access to the British Library Sound Archive via the British Library's Archival Sound Recordings website http://sounds.bl.uk/. Just one of the interesting collections at the Sound Archive is the George Ewart Evans oral history collection, and the BL is working on adding these recordings to the Archival Sound Recordings website . Find out more about it here. Read the Sound Archive's description of the collection:-

Around 200 recordings of interviews and songs made by George Ewart Evans, with about 170 interviewees, between 1956 and 1977. Also includes a small number of recordings by John Ridguard, Ginette Dunn and an unidentified male interviewer, with some self-recorded audio-letters to George Ewart Evans by Charles Kindred. Most recordings made in Suffolk, but a number in Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Principal subjects are rural life and agricultural work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, folk beliefs about animals, medicine and witchcraft, folk and popular songs, entertainment and education in rural communities (with some material on domestic service, transport and mining).

Whittaker Live will alert patrons when the recordings become available online via the Archival Sound website: http://sounds.bl.uk/.