I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in the civilised surroundings of the Special Collections reading room at the National Library of Scotland, as Karen McAulay and I work our way through a very large number of sources for the Bass Culture project. This morning, when not looking out of the window at Arthur’s Seat in the rain, I was grinning at some really badly-composed basslines from the 1830s and wishing that I was allowed to sneak a fiddler and cellist into the reading room to try them out. Not possible in such hushed surroundings. But as Karen wasn’t around today, I also allowed myself the indulgence of writing MS.9447 in pencil on one of the library’s little green slips, and within an hour or so what should be sitting on my desk in a smart cardboard box but Duncan Burnett’s Music Book, compiled in Glasgow around 1610.

I half-hoped to find that for all the years I’ve been playing Burnett’s Paven (it’s available on our website frontpage) I’ve been getting something crucial completely wrong, but looking through the faint and faded ink on the gossamer-thin paper, I was really impressed at just how accurate Kenneth Elliott’s edition was. And he couldn’t just type it into a computer: in the 1950s he was working with a pencil, gradually figuring out the idiosyncrasies of Burnett’s notation and hoping that a good piece of music would emerge from the detective work. I bet that was exciting.  

You might have noticed that the final series of Skins has just started too. As the Channel 4 credits didn’t allow for a full listing of all the musicians, I’ll post one here nearer the time when Skins Pure airs on the 15th and the 22nd July. It’s on E4 for folks in the UK, then it will be available on iTunes.