Scots Minstrelsie (6 Vols) Scottish Song Traditional Music Scotland John Grieg

Scots Minstrelsie A National Monument of Scottish Song

Edited and Arranged by John Grieg

With a Gallery of Authentic Portraits and Illustrations after Wilkie, Duncan, Faed, Harvey, Bough, and Others

Published by The Caxton Publishing Company, undated, circa 1900. Complete in 6 Volumes. Large hardback books measuring 32cm x 25cm. Blue cloth bindings with gilt stamped design to upper boards and gilt titles to spine. Black clay endpapers. Illustrated. Containing both the song and the musical score.

CONDITION
A very good complete set. All cloth bindings are in good condition with no tears, stains etc, perhaps a little light rubbing to the shoulders and spine ends, and volume III has a little grubby mark at the top front corner. All endpapers very good. All contents present to all six volumes and pages very clean throughout. No writing or names. Overall a very good complete set.

Dr John Greig (1854-1909) and his ‘national monument of Scottish song’

When Leith-born lace maker’s son and Oxford educated musician Dr John Greig brought out his ‘Scots Minstrelsie’ in the 1890s – a 6-volume collection of Scottish song – he aspired to make a permanent monument to his beloved native music. Yet, in his own life, enduring fame evaded him. Passed over for a permanent post – a professorship – in his native capital, he left for London and faded into musical obscurity. The Scottish doctor of music’s story is a sad one, but popular with his students, playful in humour and highly thought of by colleagues and critics, his fine Scots song legacy can still inspire today.

Admirers of Scots song, at home and furth of Caledonia, had cause to celebrate in 1893 when Dr John Greig, the first Scotsman ever to take a doctoral degree in music at Oxford, published the first volumes of a work he hoped would stand as a ‘national monument of Scottish song’.

This was his Scots Minstrelsie, a handsomely bound 6-volume ‘compendium’ edited and arranged with copious notes by Greig himself for the Messrs TC & EC Jack, an Edinburgh publishing firm who had sensed big opportunities in the folksong market. Completed in 1895, it contained over 500 songs: some ‘ancient’ and fondly treasured, some rescued from oblivion and others new, composed with airs of Greig’s own devising. The distinguishing feature of this ‘noble heritage’ of song, as Greig celebrated it, was not the fact of the collection itself – there were many others – but Greig’s skillful piano arrangements: unfussy and carefully conventional in harmony, yet full of rhythmic invention and colour. Greig had a particular facility for intricate harmonic texture and beautifully expressive ornament in his melodic writing.

(Loc  : Scottish Shelf)