Scottish musical genius: a look at composer James Oswald

JAMIE Oswald was just 31 when Alan Ramsay lamented his loss to London and, as far as we know, Oswald never returned. He was and is one of our finest composers – a miniaturist rather than one for the grand gesture, but, as I wrote elsewhere, there is genius in the construction of a bee’s wing as well as in that of the eagle.

Oswald was born in 1710, the second son of John Oswald and Elspit Horn of Crail in Fife, and was buried at Knebworth in 1769. His father was a town drummer and as often in gaol as out of it for drunkenness and swearing.

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In 1715 the Jacobite rebels were billeted in Crail and, at five years old, Oswald may have been impressed enough to remember their presence. Music, however, seems to have been the most important influence in his upbringing. Two of his brothers were also musicians, and a 1731 notebook of his from Dunfermline, where he was a dancing master in 1734, contains copies of Italian music and workings of Scots song arrangements.

A concert ticket for Mary’s Chapel

This suggests that from his early 20s he had a clear notion of what seems almost to have been a mission – to show the music-loving and music-purchasing public that the Scots had their own musical genius and that it could demand an honoured place alongside the Italian style which had swamped Europe.

In 1740, he was in Edinburgh and published a Sonata on Scots Tunes, which did much the same as the sonatas of Alexander Munro and Charles MacLean that I wrote about previously. That is, he blended Scots and Italian styles, and he did it with great skill. In Edinburgh he knew people such as William McGibbon and was a regular with the Edinburgh Musical Society and clearly much appreciated, as Allan Ramsay’s poem tells us:

“Dear Oswald, could my verse as sweetly flow, As notes thou softly touchest with the bow, While all the circling fair attentive hing, On ilk vibration of thy trembling string, I’d sing how thou woulds’t melt our sawls away By solemn notes, or cheer us wi’ the gay, In verse as lasting as thy tunes shall be, As soft as the new polish’d Danton me.”

But Ramsay was going to miss Oswald as a performer as well as a composer of the kind of music he approved of:

“Alas! no more shall thy gay tunes delight, No more thy notes sadness or joy excite, No more thy solemn bass’s awful sound, Shall from the chapel’s vaulted roof rebound.”

This last remark may refer to Oswald as a cellist or bassist (the chapel being St Mary’s) or to his voice. Whether he sang in chapel or no, he probably sang at Masonic lodges. Musicians were welcome lodge members, often admitted free, and it gave them a chance to meet with potential patrons, especially among the aristocracy. Oswald set two masonic songs in his Edinburgh days. The first one is full of appropriate symbolism – the special properties of the number three were reflected by using three parts and three beats in the bar – and parallel thirds and linked notes to indicate friendship. The Freemason’s Anthem anticipates by decades the depth and seriousness of Mozart’s Masonic music.

Oswald next turns up in London, first assisting the publisher Simpson, then taking over the business and setting up under his own name, just beside the beautiful Saint Martin-in-the-Fields church, designed by the Scottish architect Robert Gibbs. It was the first church in England to have its foundation stone laid with special Masonic ceremony.

Oswald must have had some pretty good introductions when he went south, for his first two publications there were dedicated with permission to Frederick, Prince of Wales, in the early 1740s, and another, almost certainly from the same period, was dedicated to the Earl of Bute. All three publications are of Scots tunes. The Prince of Wales was the heir to the throne and the third Earl of Bute was later to become Prime Minister. We shall meet him again next week, but one wonders was there an additional sympathy between the Earl and Oswald because both had eloped?

The Caledonian Pocket Companion

Having already produced two volumes of Scottish traditional music in Edinburgh, followed by three new volumes in London, Oswald set about his biggest assertion of Scotland’s rights with his The Caledonian Pocket Companion, which came out in 12 books, divided into two volumes. We have no known portrait of Oswald and I sometimes wonder whether the flautist shown on the frontispiece might not be him. But my fellow scholars have poured cold water on that, leaving me sad and lonely. The Caledonian Pocket Companion was published over two decades and honours its title. The books were compact and in the large coat pockets of those days one could have walked the country with several about one’s person, if not both volumes. As to calling the work “Caledonian”, the vast bulk of its contents are Scottish in origin, but there is no obligation on a Caledonian musician to have exclusively Scottish music as his companion.

If The Caledonian Pocket Companion was a labour of love as much as a commercial venture, love of the romantic kind seems to have been absolutely central to Oswald’s life. He persuaded Marion, (Mary Ann Melvill) to run off with him. He was then living in the same parish and they had probably known each other from late 1741, as their first daughter was born in 1742. He was almost certainly celebrating this relationship when, in 1743, he published “The Bres of Ewes”, this being the village in which his intended spent her childhood. Quite possibly he had been her music teacher and/or dancing master. It is according to Melvill family tradition (for which thanks are due to Heather Melvill) that the eventual marriage was disapproved of. The Melvills were a good deal higher up the social ladder than a dancing master from an east coast Scottish village.

In the same year as their first child was born, out of wedlock, Oswald published Colin’s Kisses, settings of 12 poems by Robert Dodsley, each one depicting a different kiss. Like Oswald, the poet and dramatist Robert Dodsley (1703-1764), had risen to fame from the relatively lowly position of a footman, also becoming a bookseller and a major literary publisher.

DODSLEY’S rather conventional and sentimental verses have found all their better qualities in Oswald’s settings. The full cycle consists of 12 kisses. While these are essentially cameo situations, there are some thematic cross-references within the cycle, and the dozen is rounded off with the beautiful The Reconciling Kiss and The Mutual Kiss, suggesting a sense of overall musical and dramatic structure, but also a sense of fulfilment.

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James Oswald and Mary Ann Melvill were married on February 12, 1744, in St James’s Church, Piccadilly. Mary Ann Melvill died sometime before September 1756. According to a Trust document, Oswald was left a widower with three girls, all minors, as well as his wife’s brother Thomas’s illegitimate daughter. There must, therefore, have been some grateful acceptance of Oswald’s value to the family in the end. His situation may well have occasioned a supportive intimacy from Leonora Robinson Lytton, an aristocrat’s wife and, with him, a lover of music. As for Oswald, he knew how to make use of the London life around him, satirising it wickedly in two entre-actes called The Wheelbarrow Cantata and The Dustcart Cantata. The first features Porter Will and Cerissa, who sells cherries. They are doubly satirical, for the music would pass for a simple Italianate aria, with all the mannerisms of that genre but done well, whereas the sentiments are ridiculous.

The mismatch is hilarious. The apparent charms of a well-wrought arioso are exposed as merely conventional, but the petty arrogances of the aristocratic world are mimicked and made fun of when they are seen to operate just as selfishly among porters and sales girls. William Hogarth gives us a thoroughly satirical take on London street musicians in his etching The Enraged Musician, with an upmarket be-wigged composer covering his ears to keep out the cacophony of the street. He made it in 1741, the year Oswald arrived in London.

But London, despite Culloden and despite the Hanoverians and the Italians, was to take Oswald to its heart – as was Leonora who eventually became stepmother to Oswald’s girls. More on that next week. Meanwhile, if you want to hear a good variety of Oswald have a listen to Concerto Caledonia’s recording Colin’s Kisses The Music of James Oswald on Linn CKD 101.

That’s for starters. The internet will lead you to loads more. Musicians love him. And if you’re looking for The Caledonian Pocket Companion, go to nickparkes@btinternet.com. Nick has published the whole lot in facsimile and a modern fully annotated edition by yours truly, for which labour of love I was joined by my wife. The three of us have yet to cover our costs. Go on buy it.