VoxCarnyx

A concert in this year’s East Neuk Festival celebrates the work of Crail’s forgotten composer, writes Keith Bruce.

It is perhaps surprising that it has taken the East Neuk Festival, headquartered in the picturesque fishing village of Crail for over two decades, this long to celebrate the composer who was born there in 1710.

Local journalist Tom Davison has, however, done his memory – and the festival – proud with a new book, Thank you for the Musick: The Life and Times of James Oswald (The Hardie Press, £15), which is launched by the author on Thursday (July 2) at a concert featuring his music by harpist Karen Marchalsay (pictured) with fiddler Kathryn Nicholl and singer Chris Miles.

Oswald is far from unknown – he is included in the Grove Dictionary of Music and in John Purser’s definitive work on Scotland’s music, and his works have been recorded by Concerto Caledonia amongst others – but he is curiously uncelebrated, especially in his homeland.

His story is certainly a remarkable one. From lowly beginnings, and through troubled times, he made his name firstly in Edinburgh and then in London, and died at 59 as a composer to the Royal court and master of Knebworth in Hertfordshire, a venue more associated with summer concerts by the behemoths of rock’n’roll in recent years.

Davison packs a great deal into his 178-page biography of Oswald, and although he is fond of modestly limiting the scope of his book, and what is beyond it, it is hard to see what could have been added, or what is missed out.

On the music itself he defers to those of greater expertise, but encompasses the full range of opinion over the centuries before coming down firmly on the positive side of the argument. Just as convincingly, and probably of more interest to the general reader, he conjures up a picture of the era, the complexities of its politics and treacherous religious differences, and the fluidity of the class structure at the time, that is as compellingly readable as it is thoroughly researched.

Chapter 15, provocatively titled “Scotophobia”, should be prescribed reading for anyone interested in contemporary politics north of the border. Davison is less impressed than many by 18^th century Whig parliamentarian John Wilkes, for example, but concedes his “sharp wit and neat turn of phrase”. Those qualities often distinguish Davison’s own writing, enlivening what could easily have been a dull history lesson.

His book is never that, chiefly because the reflections of our own time are too obvious to ignore. So it is a paradox that it is probably the crucial differences between then and now that account for James Oswald’s neglect.

Although he was a clearly a very original and ground-breaking musician, he worked in an era when originality was less prized, including by himself. His chief interest was in publication rather than copyright and intellectual property, so he was careless of attribution and cavalier with pseudonyms.

Davison takes a chapter to consider the possibility that Oswald composed “God Save The King”, a melody that would surely guarantee his immortality, and wisely concludes that, while the argument is strong, there is no way anyone will ever know one way or the other.

Those “definite maybes” (as one Knebworth headliner might say), all accumulate to create what is surely the fullest picture of The Life and Times of James Oswald that can be painted. With so few hard facts about the composer’s life to go on, Davison’s depth of research and stylish writing contrive to make a convincing character of a major figure and remarkable talent in the history of Scottish music.

Karen Marshalsay’s Looking for Oswald is at Crail Community Centre at 1.45pm on Thursday July 2 as part of the East Neuk Festival, which runs July 1 to 5. Tom Davison’s Thank you for the Musick: The Life and Times of James Oswald is published by The Hardie Press at £15.