Robert
Burns Lives!
Bringing The Jolly Beggars to
Life! By Dr Kirsteen McCue
Edited by Frank R. Shaw, FSA Scot, Greater Atlanta, GA, USA
Email: jurascot@earthlink.net
While visiting Glasgow several years ago to
speak at the annual Burns conference put on by the University’s Centre
for Robert Burns Studies, Susan and I were invited by Kirsteen McCue to
her lovely home on a snowy Sunday afternoon to enjoy some of the famous
chicken she is known to put on her dinner table. What a special treat!
This is the same Kirsteen who sings, writes, composes, teaches and who
is a top speaker on the Burns circuit. She is also devoted wife to David
(top-rated organist in Scotland) and loving mother of two very beautiful
and lively children, Dora and Gregor. Kirsteen’s mother, Pat, lives
nearby and is always a welcomed addition at mealtime. And, of course, I
can’t leave out their loving dog, Winnie, who captivates the whole
family. It was interesting to watch the two of them, mother and
daughter, interact while setting the table and serving the main Sunday
meal. Kirsteen is the first woman ever invited to attend a meeting at
the Bachelor’s Club in Tarbolton (Ayshire) and to give the Immortal
Memory, a treat only a few men have enjoyed over the years.
I hope you, our readers, enjoy yourselves reading and studying this
piece of work by one who is a Burns scholar and a tremendous friend.
Thanks, Kirsteen, for sharing another interesting article with us. (FRS:
2.22.17)
Bringing The Jolly Beggars to Life! By Dr Kirsteen McCue
Some of you will already be aware of the
exciting work of the ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century’ project
at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies. This
major project has been funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanties Research
Council of the UK) and our Prinicipal Investigator, Professor Gerard
Carruthers, has been leading a team of editors and research assistants
since 2011 on the first major research towards his new multi-volume
Oxford Works of Robert Burns. Even better, the AHRC recently announced
that it will fund the research on Burns’s poems and letters from the
Spring of this year.
The first ‘phase’ of the project has involved editing Burns’s prose
works and his contributions to the two major song collections with which
he was involved during his lifetime. The first volume, Commonplace
Books, Tour Journals and Miscellaneous Prose, edited by Nigel Leask, is
out, and Murray Pittock’s new ground-breaking edition of Burns’s and
James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum appears this spring. My own edition
of Burns’s songs for George Thomson is due to be completed this Fall and
will appear either late in 2018 or in 2019.
To complement the nitty-gritty work of volume editors, we’ve been
producing a number of additional resources on our project website –
where we can discuss things and share resources that we are not able to
include in a printed edition. Here we’ve been able to foreground some of
the additional work editorial teams do, when they are preparing for a
scholarly edition like the Oxford Burns. Thus, we have some wonderful
interactive maps of Burns’s tours and some readings from the Commonplace
books and tour journals to complement the first volume. And, throughout
the project, we’ve invited a range of performers to come in to the
studio and perform songs from the Scots Musical Museum and Thomson’s
Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs. These can be listened to or
downloaded by users, and we’re currently uploading a new ‘Song of the
Week’ (which you’ll find every week on the homepage of our website at:
http://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/).
Two of the elements I’ve been working on relate directly to the
contemporary publications of the Scots Musical Museum and Thomson’s
Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs, as the first printings of
these volumes are the basis of our new editions for the Oxford Burns.
Our ‘Performing Burns’s songs in his own day’ resource, launched last
Fall, included 25 songs from both collections performed on period
instruments by a group of 11 young Scottish musicians who have an
interest in the period of Burns. We brought them together and told them
all about our project and these early publications, about what they
would have learnt in an 18th century singing lesson, about what they
might have worn and how this might have affected their playing or
singing. And we had a series of workshops where they explored these
early printed editions of Burns’s songs and made performances of the
songs, helped by some specialists in the field. To end it all off, we
went to Glasgow’s 18th century Pollock House and recorded the
performances there, with a world-class recording engineer who
specialises in early music. It was an illuminating process for everyone
involved and we captured the thoughts of the young musicians as we
worked through each meeting – finding out what they had learnt about
Burns and about his songs and the tunes he used. These songs are now on
our website and you can find out more about the workshops too at:
http://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/performing-burnss-songs-in-his-own-day/
The resource we launched on Burns’s birthday – 25 January 2017 – ties
nicely with this period performance project. In tracking Burns’s songs
through the many different editions of Thomson’s Select Collection we
came across a musical setting of his cantata The Jolly Beggars. As our
web resource illustrates, this has not been found with any musical
notation before Thomson’s printing of 1818 – though the text of the
cantata appeared in print before this. It was never published in Burns’s
own day, and he was reluctant even to discuss it with Thomson when the
editor asked him about it in 1793. But Thomson, encouraged by Walter
Scott’s opinion of the work, decided it should be published with music.
Rather than asking one of his European composers (Beethoven was working
for him during this period), he opted for the London theatre composer
Henry Bishop, known for his incidental theatre music for operas based on
Walter Scott’s novels, and adaptations of major operas by Mozart or
Rossini. Bishop was interested in music from all corners of the British
Isles – along with John Stevenson, he furnished Thomas Moore’s Irish
Melodies with musical accompaniments, and he set Welsh and English songs
too. Working with a text by Burns was an exciting commission for him and
he responded enthusiastically. In the meantime, Thomson, who never
wanted to publish anything too coarse or vulgar, amended some of Burns’s
text, deleting or changing some of the elements which might offend.
I had first come across this setting of the
cantata when I was doing my doctoral studies years ago, and had always
wanted to know what it would have sounded like. So, I was thrilled when
the project enabled us to piece all the elements together and to put on
a performance of it. We used period instruments – a period fortepiano
and early stringed instruments with gut strings – and pulled together a
group of singers with a passion for this kind of material. Our Chapel
Choir at the University provided us with the choral singers required.
Thomson printed his collections in large folio format – rather beautiful
and expensive books, often with illustrations. But he never produced the
instrumental parts for violin, flute and violoncello along with the
large volumes. They were always printed separately and just sold to the
people who wished to buy them. Moreover, while Thomson was inclined to
produce multiple issues of each volume, he only published The Jolly
Beggars once, so we had a real problem tracking down the parts for
violin and ‘cello. But we did find them in Kilmarnock – at the Burns
Monument Centre there – thanks to them. We searched high and low for a
separate flute part, because Thomson advertises one on his title-page.
But I also managed to have a close look at Thomson’s and Bishop’s
letters at the British Library, and, although Bishop appears to have
agreed to write a separate flute part for Thomson, there is no
manuscript or fair copy of this anywhere. We have concluded that Thomson
perhaps decided not to print it separately after all.
Having made parts for all the performers and brought them together to
work through the piece, we performed the cantata on the evening of 12
October 2016 in our University Chapel with an audience present and
recorded the live performance to share on our website. The Oxford Burns
will include the original printing of the cantata with a detailed note
on the creation of the work and annotations to map the changes Thomson
made to Burns’s original. And hopefully users will then find the
performance on our website and listen along with their copy of the work.
In the 21st century we’re lucky as editors, not just to have generous
friends who are willing to share their special collections and Burns
materials with us, but having the technological foundation to be able to
enhance print edition with online resources which can literally bring
the work of Burns to life.
Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century.
(KM:2/22.17)]
or view it here...
The Jolly Beggars
The performance of Burns’s cantata ‘The Jolly Beggars’ that you can see
here is a live recording of a performance held in the Chapel at the
University of Glasgow on 12 October 2016. The performance used the first
edition of the piece to appear with both text and music in George
Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (volume 5)
published in 1818. Our new edition of this piece is part of the
forthcoming Oxford University Press Works of Robert Burns edited by
Kirsteen McCue.
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