Album: Niel Gow's Recovery, 1804

Album Summary: Niel Gow's Recovery is a small collection of 5 dance tunes published by Gow & Shepherd from their music-shop at No.16, Princes Street, Edinburgh in 1804. The first 2 tunes were "Danced as a Medley at the Queen's Assembly in George Street the 18th. of January 1804", reflecting the fact that the Gow dance-band was the height of posh Edinburgh ball-room fashion at the time. As was the relatively new Germanic style of composition that clearly influences both the harmony and texture of these late-Georgian arrangements. This ScotMus.com album preserves the look 'n' feel of the original scores in a direct facsimile edition.

Edition Notes: This facsimile edition is based on one I originally created for a hard-copy edition (Glasgow: Books for Burning, 1990). Unfortunately, not only is that now out of print, but the originals themselves were subsequently lost. Thankfully, though, I still had a surviving copy of my print edition, from which the above images were scanned for this new online one. Given the traumatic provenance involved, I can't remember much that would be of use about original sizes that would mean much for the current image ratios, so let's just say the originals were approximately B4-sized-ish, but probably smaller. However, I do remember that back in 1990, the originals required a fair bit of cleaning up prior to publication (in those mostly pre-digital days, this meant careful tweaking of photocopier settings along with cautious applications of Tipp-Ex!).

As a group a Gow dance pieces, my audio realisation of the parts simply for fiddle + cello is perfectly historically-viable (see my more extensive notes on their Collection of Strathspey Reels). But the Recovery tunes could also work well enough with the thorough-bass part being fully-realised for keyboard, with or without cello doubling. I say "keyboard" here rather than just harpsichord, because, of course, by 1804, not only was the piano starting to make major in-roads on its older cousin, but this fact is reflected in many other larger Gow publications of the time, which specifically state "piano" rather than "harpsichord" on their instrumentation lists. However, my own personal feeling is that if you were thinking about going down the keyboard path, harpsichord would just sound better than piano in this particular collection.

The Recovery is interesting as a reflection of shifting tastes — while Gow collections began with primarily Italianate Baroque influences, here we have a far more Germanic Classical feel to both texture and harmonic structure. The particular way in which this works also has an effect on tempo, not least with its slow Jigs masquerading as Waltzingly-mincing Minuets (cf. Track No.2 & Track No.4). It's as if we've shifted from Caledonian Corelli to Highland Haydn — almost with a hint of the new String Quartet genre in some places (something that would actually be lost with a keyboard realisation). One way or another, before putting a performance of this material together, it's important to ponder the way that these new Germanic influences re-write the rules you'd normally expect for what at first appears to be a standard collection of Strathspey, Reel 'n' Jig. Whatever Niel Gow's Recovery is, it's not quite business-as-usual.

Acknowledgements: I'd like to thank Dr. Stuart Eydmann, fiddler and accordionist of The Whistlebinkies, co-impresario of rareTunes, wise ethnomusicologist and all-round canty lad for the various productive arguments and agreements we've had about the style and the meaning of Niel Gow's Recovery — and particulary for sharing with me his own background research into various issues surrounding it.