We’re pleased to announce the next presenter for the Music History/Theory Workshop on January 10, 3:30pm, in the library seminar room, JRL 264. Andy Greenwood, PhD candidate in Music History and Theory at the University of Chicago, will be presenting work from his dissertation.The pre-circulated chapter will be available  under the download tab. Please contact marycaldwell@uchicago.edu or aasheehy@uchicago.edu for the password, or find it in the announcement email.

ABSTRACT: “Music and Human Improvement in the Scots Songs of Allan Ramsay to Joseph Haydn”

     Eighteenth-century music in Scotlandhas been largely studied in isolation from the Scottish Enlightenment as a whole, despite the coexistence of a flourishing musical culture.  This tendency is understandable given the prominent attention traditionally paid by scholars in other disciplines to the achievements of Scots in fields as moral philosophy, economics, and human history.  Notable among those achievements is the stadial theory of human societal development, which contended that societies progressed in successive “stages”—most commonly the following four: hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agrarian, and modern commercial.  Based on archival research recently undertaken in the summer at the National Library of Scotland, I argue that the historical development of pastoral Scots songs in the eighteenth-century was part of a musical and cultural network in which important aspects of Scottish Enlightenment stadial theory were traced out in the Scottish public imagination following the 1707 Treaty of Union—in particular, the “improvement” of human society from the pastoral and agrarian stages toward the commercial stage.  This network included oral and printed traditions of Scots songs, visual representations of songwriters, Scottish and Italian composers and performers in the Lowland cities, musical writings of Scottish Enlightenment literati (mainly lawyers, professors, and ministers), music printing, and national song publishing projects.

     I suggest that an important historical moment where this network emerges concretely in material form arrives with the publication of Scots songs in Allan Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany (Edinburgh, 1724), and his ballad-opera A Gentle Shepherd (Edinburgh, 1725).  These works were reissued in various editions and printings throughout the eighteenth-century, and eventually included printed music.  Ramsay’s songs were set musically by composers working in Scotland who were interested in “refining” folk music traditions through commercial publication and “fusing” them with “art music” in order to imagine Scotland musically for a new modern age where it would be taken seriously at home and abroad.  This historical process is represented most prominently by Scots such as George Thomson and William Whyte who from the 1790s onwards commissioned European art music composers—most prominently Joseph Haydn—for their national song projects such as A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice.  These collections contained hundreds of settings of Scots songs many of which were originally drawn from Ramsay above.  My approach also attempts to shed light on why Scottish Enlightenment thinkers had such prominent interests in music more generally.

Click here for Chapter and Examples

Those needing additional assistance to attend this event should contact one of the graduate coordinators, Mary Caldwell(marycaldwell@uchicago.edu) or August Sheehy (aasheehy@uchicago.edu)