Album Summary: William Thomson's Orpheus Caledonius (1725) was a landmark publication; the first ever large-scale collection of "Scotch Songs" in print — 50 songs arranged with un-figured bass, most with lyrics from Allan Ramsay's Scots Songs and Tea-Table Miscellany, plus an appendix of melodic reductions. It was an instant hit and in 1733, expanded into 2 volumes with 100 songs. Indeed, Thomson's Orpheus set the standard format for Scots Song settings for the rest of the eighteenth century, including those of Robert Burns in The Scots Musical Museum. This ScotMus.com album is a faithful reprint of the song arrangements from the historic 1st edition of 1725.
his house in Leicester Fields
Transcription Notes: The above transcription approximates the layout and relative font-sizes of Thomson's original, but substitutes the standard digital Times font for his rather more flowery cursive script and its many ornate Baroque flourishes. The only characters that are really compromised in my Times reduction are the capital S's of "Scotch Songs", which are more like a capital long-S in the original.