Author: Alexander Stuart

Publisher:

Published: 2017-03-08

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9781543049381

Allan Ramsay's collection The Tea-Table Miscellany, first published in Edinburgh in 1724, was among the most influential and most reprinted Scottish song collections of the century before Robert Burns. It gave a mixture of earlier traditional songs with others by contemporary song writers, including Ramsay's own words for "Auld Lang Syne" and other well-known songs. However, Ramsay's collection provided only the song words, not the tunes.The little book reproduced here, Musick for Allan Ramsay's Collection of 71 Scots Songs, was designed to fill that gap. With settings by the Edinburgh musician Alexander Stuart, and engraved by one of the best Edinburgh engravers Robert Cooper, the book was published in parts, probably in 1725, and complete sets of all six parts are extremely rare. This reprint is taken from the copy in the G. Ross Roy Collection, at the University of South Carolina, which has also been made available in the University Libraries' Digital Collections. Kirsteen McCue's specially-commissioned introduction traces the publication history and its connection to Ramsay and to the aristocratic Scottish women patrons to whom each part is dedicated. A new appendix provides cross-references between the music in this volume and the song-texts in The Tea-Table Miscellany.