Keeping Notes

Scottish Music Centre's Digitization Project

Music hall stars on 78, hand-packaged demo tapes, early sketches of classical masterpieces, rare concert recordings, popular song arrangements for almost any instrumental combination you can think of. There is a whole hidden history of 20th-century musical activity in the Scottish Music Centre archives.

The Scottish Music Centre has begun a programme of digitizing its archive collection of sheet music and sound recordings.

A large part of the music collection held by the Scottish Music Centre consists of original hand-written manuscripts and older sound recordings on reel, cassette, and vinyl. Much of this material has never been published or released commercially and represents a relatively unknown segment of Scottish musical history.

While the material has recently been re-housed in a secure off-site facility which meets recommended archive storage conditions, we feel it is important to make digital copies in order to help make this music more widely accessible and safeguard the future of this vital part of our heritage.

The collection includes over 3000 manuscript items, and over 3000 hours of analogue sound recordings. Putting all this onto computer is clearly a major project, and will take several years to complete.

First, each page and each continuous recording will be captured in digital form through scanning and audio transfer, and the files stored safely and backed up.

Secondly, copies of these files will be tidied up edited and saved in accessible formats which can be easily consulted on the public work-stations at the Centre.

Pilot Project

With the valuable assistance of a team of volunteers, we have begun to work through some of our older analogue recordings and manuscript sheet music holdings. This pilot project will allow us to test and refine our technical resources and procedures, and give us a range of sample material we can use to develop new ways of making the material available to as many people as possible.

Among the material we will be aiming to digitize first are:

• the manuscripts of Francis George Scott (1880-1958), arguably Scotland's finest composer of songs during the first half of the 20th-century, famous for his settings of Robert Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid.
• the manuscripts of Ian Whyte (1901-1960), who left over a thousand original compositions and arrangements of Scots tunes and songs.
• recordings from the 1960s and 70s of the music of William Wordsworth (1908-88), Robin Orr (1909-2006) and Thomas Wilson (1927-2001), leading Scottish composers of the era.
• original rare editions of song collections from the late 18th and early 19th Century, including The Scots Musical Museum, edited by James Johnson, and A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs edited by George Thomson.
• selected 78rpm records including music hall classics, Scottish dance music, and light orchestral arrangements of well-known traditional tunes and songs.

You may sample some of this work in progress by clicking on the following links:

• Harry Gordon, 'The Story That I Startit (Kirk Soiree)' (extract) (mp3 file 1.2 MB): hear how the 'Laird of Inversnecky' told a story he maybe shouldn't have.
• Francis George Scott, 'Of the False Fire of Purgatorie' (pdf file, 42.3 MB): towards the end of his life, Scott returned to the poets of the 16th Century, including Alexander Scott, whose amusing satire this is, in a setting that remains unpublished.
• Robert Burns, 'Mary Morison' (pdf file, 11.1 MB): an arrangement by Beethoven from the 1822 edition of Thomson's Select Melodies.
• William Wordsworth, Theme and Variations for Oboe and Piano, Op 57 (extract) (mp3 file 1.2 MB): the opening of a performance of this work by Evelyn Rothwell and Wilfrid Parry from the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Digitization Services

If you have written or recorded material you would like converted into digital format, drop us a line. We are able to deal with images up to A3 in size and sound recordings in most analogue formats. Options include:

• scanning pages as high-definition .tif files, which can then be merged together in a single multi-page .pdf file.
• capturing tape recordings as high quality .wav files, which can then be divided into separate files corresponding to each song, and burnt onto CD or saved as .mp3 files for convenient listening on a portable player.

Jobs can be tailored to suit your specific needs, and our charges are very competitive.