Monday 18 May 2009

Luton Airport
I made it to Cambridge in the end, for a very sociable meal, a trip to the pub, and some flying of remote control helicopters, then this morning I was on the 0730 X5 bus to Bedford. It’s the first time I’ve ever got a wifi signal on a bus. Matthew from the Edinburgh Festival met me at Bedford bus station and we drove to Boughton House to be the guests of the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch for a music symposium based around the contents of the remarkable Montagu Music Collection which currently resides there.

And what a collection. Besides the unrivalled bounty of English opera scores, and a very wide-ranging set of printed material, there’s the Scottish music collection of the antiquary Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, who published an edition of the Earl of Kellie’s music in the 1840s.So passing through my white-gloved hands this morning amongst other things were … Mrs Crockat’s music book of 1709 (which Grove’s Dictionary lists as ‘lost’), Anne Armstrong’s keyboard book from around the same time, and the engraver’s MS for the Scots Musical Museum volume 6, presumably in Stephen Clarke’s hand, which includes the following comment after song 509 As I Went O'er the Highland Hills: ‘these words are very very bad’! Burns had been dead for some years, and therefore wasn't in a position to improve them. I also had a peek at John Brysson’s placebook, which appears to have been a source MS book for many and various Edinburgh publications, and most exciting of all for me, a unique MS copy of two of the four parts of Kellie’s quartet in C minor, which (mirabile dictu) is a far more reliable source than the Kilravock MS on which I based my edition for our Fiddler Tam CD. So … I can now tell where I guessed wrongly about what the notes should have been in those places where they were clearly incorrect in the other source. I found three wrong notes in our recorded version before it was time to stop for lunch.

Richard also took some of us out in his Land Rover to see the new underground inverted-pyramid amphitheatre in the grounds, which Matthew and I couldn’t resist climbing down into to test the acoustics.  And it was great to finally meet Patrick and Rachel Cadell: about 6 years ago when I really wanted to see that Kellie MS they emailed me their draft catalogue of the collection.  A very enjoyable day that I hope will bear fruit in due course.