WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

In the Baroque and early Classical eras a succession of Scottish and Italian composers took an interest in fusing Scots fiddle and song melodies with Italian art music structures. Kevin MacDonald investigates the trend

The Scottish fiddle and its associated melodies have long trodden a narrow line between the classical concert hall and their rural roots. The lives of iconic Scots fiddler-composers like Niel Gow (1727–1807) ran parallel with the early publishing of folk melodies for the drawing rooms of Edinburgh and London.

However, the present article is not concerned with Gow and his brethren, nor is it concerned with Scottish compositions in the conventional 18th-century Baroque and galant idioms. Rather, the focus here is on the fusion of Scots fiddle and song melodies with Italianate art music structures in the 18th century by a succession of Scottish and Italian composers.

Some 20 years ago, inspired by the pioneering research of David Johnson, George S. Emmerson and John Purser, I became interested in playing and researching the violin music of 18thcentury Scotland. I subsequently corresponded regularly with Scottish composer and musicologist Johnson and shared regular visits and telephone calls with him until his untimely death in 2009 at the age of 66. Here I hope to highlight some aspects of Johnson’s scholarly passion and provide a broad introduction to this rich repertoire and its historical setting.

THE ART MUSIC SCENE IN 18TH-CENTURY SCOTLAND

The gravitation of the Scottish musical sphere towards that of Italy occurred in a concentrated period, roughly dating to between the 1720s and the 1790s. Not surprisingly, this coincides with the active period of the Edinburgh Musical Society (EMS) from its constitution in 1727 until its last concert in 1798, newly prospering concert life in the Lowlands, and the proliferation of music publishing in Edinburgh. Broadly speaking, this was all part of a process of legitimation of Scotland as an integral part of broader European Enlightenment culture, and a validation of its own artistic traditions.

While other Scottish societies subsequently formed for the regular performance of instrumental and vocal art music (Aberdeen in 1748 and Dundee in 1757, for example), Edinburgh remained very much at the centre of things. There were regular weekly concerts, as well as annual festival events. For its concerts, the EMS attracted talent from across Britain, but also from Italy, whence a steady stream of string (and vocal) soloists were drawn. The first of these was Francesco Barsanti, a native of Lucca living in London, who came to the EMS in 1735 as a multiinstrumentalist (including the violin). He returned to London in 1743 after composing sets of concerti grossi and overtures (the latter including themes from country dances), as well as publishing A Collection of Old Scots Tunes (1742). Next was Nicolò Pasquali (violinist and cellist), who joined the EMS in 1752 and led the orchestra until he died suddenly in 1757. His legacy includes an opus of violin sonatas (one of which, in A minor, is still in print) and a popular volume on Thorough-Bass Made Easy (1757). From 1775 to 1782, Giuseppe Puppo – famously lampooned as ‘Signor Puppy, First Catgut Scraper’ by caricaturist James Gillray in 1781 – served with the EMS as principal violinist from 1775 to 1782. Like Barsanti, he hailed from Lucca and was an itinerant composer and soloist. Low pay and creditors ultimately chased him and his wife (a singer) from Edinburgh.

The last Italian violin leader of the EMS was Girolamo Stabilini, from Rome, who joined the EMS in 1783 and wrote several violin concertos which he premiered with the society. One of these, sadly lost, featured a rondo with its theme deriving from the folk song We’ll Gang Nae Mair to Yon Town. Stabilini was ultimately to die in Edinburgh from alcoholism in 1815.

Despite drawing international soloists such as pianist Jan Ladislav Dussek and violinist Giovanni Giornovichi in the 1790s, the EMS, and the Scottish music scene more generally, began to decline in that decade. The last concert series of the EMS was in 1798. Johnson attributed this decline both to general changes of fashion in upper-class leisure activities and to the dwindling number of enthusiastic gentlemen musical amateurs, put off by the difficulties found in the music of Haydn and other new composers. Country dance music continued to prosper, but interest in art music and its virtuosity took a temporary downturn. The great Scottish music collector and publisher George Thomson (1757– 1851) wrote to Beethoven in 1813 in praise of his ‘Rasumovsky’ Quartets: ‘But alas! My friend we have not in Scotland a dozen persons (professionals included) who could take a part in these quatuors’ (Johnson 1972, index 1, page 60).

THE PUBLICATION OF ‘TR ADITIONAL’ SCOTTISH TUNES WAS A PROFITABLE ENDEAVOUR IN THE EARLY 18TH CENTURY

FIGURE 1 A 1768 Joseph Ruddiman violin

COURTESY TARISIO

Professional lutherie in Scotland was surprisingly out of sync with these trends, and instruments made prior to the time of Matthew Hardie and his peers (from c.1785 onwards) are scarce. In Violin Making in Scotland 1750–1950 (2006), David Rattray speculates that John Grice, the first major luthier in Edinburgh, came to the town at the invitation of the EMS. Grice made instruments from the 1730s into the 1750s, his style resembling that of the London school of Nathaniel Cross and John Barrett, but very little of his work survives. Indeed, on the basis of extant instruments, violin making in Aberdeen appears to have been comparatively active, with two early professional makers, Robert Duncan (fl. c.1740–60) and Joseph Ruddiman (1733–1810).

Ruddiman, renowned as the luthier that Gow sought out to repair his broken fiddle, shifted over time from producing highly arched Stainer models to flatter Stradivarian forms. While many were only ink-purfled and relatively basic, he was also quite capable of producing finer work (figure 1).

VARIATION SETS AND SCOTTISH SONATAS

In 1721, the Scottish poet Allan Ramsay, who was to compile (and write) the famous Tea-Table Miscellany, a four-volume set of Scottish lyrical verse (published 1723 onwards), set down a poem called To the Music Club, which includes the following lines:

And with Correlli’s soft Italian song Mix Cowden Knows and Winter nights are long. Nor should the martial Pibrough be despis’d;

Own’d and refin’d by you, these shall the more be priz’d.

In essence a mission statement for a formative EMS, this encapsulates the very premise of the range of works here considered: the mixing of Scots melodic themes, such as the Broom of the Cowdenknowes, with the Italianate Baroque styles of Corelli’s variations on La folia.

The collection and publication of ‘traditional’ Scottish songs and tunes, many of them in fact quite new, was a popular and profitable endeavour in the early 18th century. Early entries into this cavalcade include William Thomson’s Orpheus Caledonius (published in London, 1725), Adam Craig’s Collection of the Choicest Scots Tunes (1730) and the previously mentioned Collection of Old Scots Tunes (1742) by Barsanti. Many of these compilations simply feature melodies and accompanying lyrics with harmonised accompaniments. From an instrumentalist’s perspective, the more interesting development is the appearance of variation sets for the violin stemming from original melodies and flavoured with Scots fiddle style.

Before describing these, it is important to consider the essential elements of 18th-century Scottish fiddle music. Of course, there is an earlier history of pastiches or (mis) approximations of ‘Scotch tunes’ in the literature, many of which are merely rustic dances. Two apt examples would be Ground after the Scotch Humour (1685) by Nicola Matteis or Solomon Eccles’s Scotch Tune in the second volume of The Division Violin (c.1685). The definition of what really constitutes ‘Scottishness’ in historic folk and art music has been well evaluated by James Hunter (index 1) and in Aaron McGregor’s 2020 doctoral thesis, ‘Violinists and Violin Music in Scotland, 1550–1750’ (University of Glasgow). Broadly speaking, the key elements comprise strong melodies initially developed in one or (more normally) two strains; gapped scales (pentatonic or hexatonic); ornamental ‘cuts’ (rapid grace notes in imitation of the pipes); and distinctive bowing patterns including the birl (three rapidly repeated notes of the same pitch) and dotted rhythms, among which the Scotch snap is the most distinctive –a semiquaver (s) followed by a dotted quaver (i).

The first instrumental enhancements of Scottish melodies were variation sets. Effectively, these are akin to what would previously have been termed ‘Divisions upon a ground’, such as the variations on the popular melody John, Come Kiss Me Now by Mell or Baltzar in the previous century. They are thus part of European art music and virtuosic traditions while at the same time proximate to Scottish forms. The earliest innovative move in this direction was by the enigmatic ‘A. Munro’, who in 1732 published A Collection of the Best Scots Tunes in Paris, then a hotbed of Jacobite exiles. He assembled his variation sets with unfigured bass lines into Corelliesque sonatas. Bonny Jean of Aberdeen, for example, was rendered into a five-movement Allegro–Grazioso–Vivace–Tempo di Gavotta–Giga allegro format. Johnson termed this set ‘ambitious but erratic’, and thought it just at the edge of the composer’s capabilities. Interestingly, Johnson also speculated on Munro’s true identity, which he claimed to have nearly proven beyond doubt shortly before his death: a well-to-do amateur whose other activities usually took him away from music was hypothesised, with the character of Alexander Monro primus (1697–1767), Frenchtrained first professor of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh and musician, strongly suggested. There are other possibilities, however, and this conundrum might run and run.

A number of other composers, too diverse to discuss here, also produced variation sets in manuscript and published forms. James Oswald (of whom more below) published A Curious Collection of Scots Tunes in Edinburgh (1740) and again in London (1742).

These mixed a large number of simple harmonised melodies with relatively brief variation sets and saw popular success. However, it is William McGibbon’s A Collection of Scots Tunes in three volumes (1742, 1746, 1755) which is considered the pinnacle of this art form: a streamlined assemblage of elegant and well-crafted variation sets, not demarcated into movements. Of these, Johnson wrote: ‘Up to 1742 McGibbon had been a second-rate composer of Italian music who happened to live in Scotland; suddenly he emerged as a first-rate – indeed the finest living – composer of Scottish music’ (Johnson 2005, index 1). A fairly harsh assessment – some of McGibbon’s purely Italianate sonatas such as no.2 in D major are outstanding – but Johnson was a demanding critic.

The last great hurrah of the variation set was published in 1772 and overtly credited (in part) to the then deceased violinist– composer Charles McLean (c.1712–70). But Johnson’s research revealed it to be a palimpsest edited and augmented by Robert Mackintosh (c.1745–1807), compiled primarily from the earlier works of Munro and McLean with considerable modernisations.

Its version of Bonny Jean of Aberdeen (figure 2) derives from a manuscript version of Munro’s work, with a new bass-line, some deletions, a slowing of the first movement and the addition of a minuet movement. Although uneven, this Collection of Favourite Scots Tunes with Variations for the Violin has become a classic of the Scottish ‘drawing room’ fiddle tradition.

JAMES OSWALD: FROM A COASTAL FIFE VILLAGE TO KNEBWORTH HOUSE

In history, one sometimes encounters individuals whose lives seem so improbable that they seem better suited to a novel, and Oswald is such a man. Born in 1710 in Crail, Fife, the son of the town drummer, he spent his young adulthood in Dunfermline and Edinburgh as a cellist, dancing master and popular composer, with some of his tunes being presented to the public under the Italian pseudonyms ‘Dottel Figlio’ and ‘David Rizzio’ (the latter the name of a legendary Tudor-era Italian musician of the Scottish court).

In 1741 Oswald shifted his activities to London, opening a music shop and becoming a successful music publisher. Soon after, he became the focal point of the Temple of Apollo (1740s–1750s), a small musical consortium that provided scores and songs for the London stage, among other activities. In 1761, now a minor London celebrity, he was appointed chamber composer to George III. The following year he married Leonora Robinson Lytton and became in effect the master of Knebworth House, Hertfordshire, where he died a wealthy man in 1769. This is a thumbnail sketch of his life, but his musical accomplishments are similarly incredible.

Shortly after arriving in London, Oswald began an association with the pioneering musicologist Charles Burney, who described Oswald’s shop ‘on the pavement of St Martin’s church-yard’ as a gathering place of composers, writers and music lovers (figure 3). Oswald was to write a moving and evocative solo fiddle sonata about this melancholy viewpoint, simply called St Martin’s Church Yd and published in his Caledonian Pocket Companion, Book III (1748). Burney and Oswald were central to the Temple of Apollo, whose works Oswald published. Contemporary memoirists such as Burney and his novelist daughter Fanny would claim that this ‘pretended society’ was a promotional cover only for Oswald’s own works and those he commissioned from Burney (see Roger Lonsdale, Dr Charles Burney: A Literary Biography, 1965). Others, such as Purser, view it as an Oswald-led corporation of expatriate Scottish musicians then in London, including John Reid and Thomas Erskine (sixth Earl of Kelly). Its nature may have changed over time.

FIGURE 2 The first page of Bonny Jean of Aberdeen from A Collection of Favourite Scots Tunes with Variations for the Violin (1772)

Although relocated to London, Oswald was the most dynamic Scottish composer of his era. In addition to several substantial collections of Scottish songs and variation sets, he created ‘traditional’ and popular melodies himself. His works include a 1740 trio sonata with each movement based on a different Scots tune, socially satirical cantatas (for example, The Dust Cart), songs and music for the stage, and a set of 12 Serenatas (trio sonatas) published during his employment at the royal court.

FIGURE 3 St Martin’s Churchyard (walled area to the right) and St Martin’s Lane, before the building of Trafalgar Square in the 1820s and other clearances (c.1810 engraving by T. Bonner after J.B. Thompson)

MANUSCRIPT AND ILLUSTRATION KEVIN MACDONALD

However, Oswald’s most monumental works are his two sets (1755 and 1761) of Airs for the Seasons, a total of 96 sonatas (48 to a set) grouped by season, each devoted to a different flower, shrub or tree (figure 4). Although the whole was intended for solo violin with figured bass, the first set had an optional second violin/flute part available as a supplement. These works are perfect, individual, single-page miniatures, each with two to four Italianate movements. Thematically, many feature pastoral Scottish melodies and jigs. More generally, however, they are impressionistic fusions of Scots and galant chamber music. Purser attributed background logics to these pieces, whether botanical features or physical and cultural associations: ‘The Narcissus’ (echoes), ‘The Nightshade’ (aka belladonna – prostitution and sailors), ‘The Sneez-wort’ (anticipatory and violent sneezing episodes) and ‘The Marvel of Peru’ (three flowers of different colours with three sharply contrasting movements: Scortese, Comic and Musette), and so on. It is unclear whether they can all be so interpreted; Johnson was sceptical, but all these ideas provide food for thought. A favourite of mine is ‘The Lilac’ (from the second set) –a plant reputedly of astringent and fever-reducing medicinal properties. Oswald provides an uncanny Tartini pastiche in the Languido first movement (a delirious fever), followed by a rapid crisis in third position (Brilliante), all resolved with a Giga of recovery.

Oswald is credited with inventing so many melodies that are now considered ‘traditional’ that one may be forgiven for wondering whether some of his tunes were already in the folk ether before he wrote them down. One example is the March from his Air for the Seasons (Set 1) sonata ‘The Tulip’ (figure 5). Its publication in 1755 is the first record of this melody, and in 1757 Oswald set the tune to words by Tobias Smollett as ‘Ballance a Straw’, a song performed in Smollett’s farce The Reprisal at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Yet in 1770 Balance a Straw appears in a Lincolnshire country dance manuscript as a traditional melody.

In 1798 the march morphs into the Irish nationalist ballad The Wearing of the Green, and subsequently provides the tune for the popular American Civil War-era song The Captain with His Whiskers. Oswald was at the back of several such traditional melodies and many tuneful mysteries still await resolution.

FIGURE 4 Frontispiece of Airs for the Spring from the 1755 First Set of Oswald’s Airs for the Seasons

AIRS FOR THE SPRING IMAGE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW LIBRARY

GEMINIANI AND OTHERS: AN ABIDING FASCINATION WITH SCOTTISH MELODIES

In 1744, such was the popularity of the Scots-Italian drawing room style that the great Veracini incorporated variations on the Scots tune Tweed Side in the Ninth Sonata of his op.2 Sonate accademiche. As if to prove that this was not an aberration, he also adapted The Lass of Peaty’s Mill for his opera Rosalinda in the same year.

FIGURE 5 Excerpt from Oswald’s ‘The Tulip’ from the First Set of Airs for the Seasons (1755)

Indeed, despite the menacing Jacobite army of Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745–6, the fashion for things Scottish did not abate. In 1746, Geminiani (figure 6) published a five-part variation set on Ann Thou Were My Ain Thing in his op.8 Rules for Playing in a True Taste –a notion he would soon develop further. In the preface to his 1749 Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick, he unexpectedly names the previously mentioned David Rizzio (Italian musician, and notional lover of Mary, Queen of Scots) and Lully as the two composers who have most ‘rais’d my Admiration’. Of course, no authentic works by Rizzio are known today. Such music as Geminiani might have known under this name would have been by light-hearted impostors such as Oswald and William Thomson. Pieces said to be by Rizzio were actually published by Thomson in his Orpheus Caledonius (1725) and then embellished by Geminiani in both his Treatise and his Rules for Playing. Was Geminiani really in earnest, or was he just playing to the gallery of fashion? It should be noted that he contributed to the XII Duettos for Two German Flutes or Two Violins published by Oswald as part of his Apollo’s Collection around 1750. They would thus have likely been acquainted, making Geminiani’s ignorance concerning ‘Rizzio’ even more improbable.

FIGURE 6 Portrait of Francesco Geminiani by Andrea Soldi c.1735

GEMINIANI PORTRAIT GERALD COKE HANDEL COLLECTION, THE FOUNDLING MUSEUM, LONDON

In any event, Geminiani’s Treatise, whose intention was to teach expressive ornamentation, features variations on songs such as The Lass of Peaty’s Mill and O Bessy Bell, notionally by Rizzio but in fact by Thomson or a collaborator. The Treatise also contains three trio sonatas based on Scottish melodies, much in the same form as Oswald’s own 1740 trio. The first of these begins with ‘The Broom of Cowdenowes’ (Grave), before proceeding to ‘Bonny Christy’ (Andante), and then varied Grave and Presto movements (figure 7).

Peter Holman (index 1) has suggested that Robert Bremner (c.1713–1789), a student of Geminiani and subsequent publisher of Scottish music, could have played a role in introducing him to the melodies of ‘Rizzio’ or Scottish song more generally. But, as Holman admits, and as this article relates, Italian musicians already had a long relationship with the Scottish music scene. Whether the fusion which resulted in the mid-18th-century Scots–Italian drawing room style was based on an increasing European passion for the exotic (as Holman proposes) or was the accidental collision of traditions impelled by socio-economic forces and freedom of movement is difficult to untangle. Regardless, the resulting melding of Scots melodic beauty with Italianate harmonic artistry provides a corpus worthy of wider exploration.

FIGURE 7 The first page of Geminiani’s Sonata I from his Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick (1749)

In the 1790s William Napier (1741–1812) and George Thomson (1757–1851) began to commission harmonisations and ‘symphonies’ (ritornellos) for Scottish songs from Austrian composers including Haydn, Pleyel, Kozeluch and – ultimately – Beethoven. But that is another story.