Dr Karen McAulay
Heritage Collections Research Fellow, January - June 2025
Home institution: Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
Until recently, Dr Karen McAulay was a performing arts librarian at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, combining this with part-time secondment as a postdoctoral researcher. She now has a new part-time role as postdoctoral research fellow. She has a PGCert in Learning and Teaching in Higher Arts Education, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Karen researched late-eighteenth century and Victorian Scottish song-collecting for her PhD from the University of Glasgow, graduating in 2009. Her research combines musicology with cultural, library and book history. Karen worked on the AHRC-funded HMS.scot; was Principal Investigator for the ‘Claimed From Stationers’ Hall’ network; and has been on the steering groups of the Eighteenth-Century Arts Education Research Network and Romantic National Song Network.
Karen was awarded the first Honorary Ketelbey Fellowship in Late Modern History, at the University of St Andrews' School of History, in 2023. She was awarded honorary Fellowships of IAML(UK & Ireland) and of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, in 2024.
Her Routledge book, Our Ancient National Airs: Scottish Song Collecting from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Era (2013), was followed by chapters in Understanding Scotland Musically (2018) and Music by Subscription (2022), and a second monograph, A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland's Printed Music, 1880-1951 (Routledge, 2024).
Project title: From National Songs to Nursery Rhymes, and Discussion Books to Dance Bands: investigating Thomas Nelson’s Musical Middle Ground
My recently-published monograph focused mainly on specialist music publishers, but I also made some comparisons with output by contemporary Scottish book publishers, including Thomas Nelson’s. Exploring the extensive Nelson archive will offer me the opportunity to investigate Nelson’s modest music-related output in depth.
The Edinburgh publisher Thomas Nelson’s historical output can be broadly characterised into four categories:- religious; educational; attractive reprints of literary classics; or series for the intelligent layman. In this project, I shall explore the publishing histories of Nelson’s comparatively limited catalogue of music books and scores, to determine how these titles justified their existence in predominantly non-musical lists. I’m curious about the publishing histories of all Nelson’s music titles, whether notation or text; and the relative success of different titles. I’m also interested in the working relationships with compilers and authors.
I’ll be exploring the background to Nelson’s national song collections, also contemplating their educational music materials in the era ca. 1927-40; books specifically aimed at the layman; and music publications for the Commonwealth.