William McGibbon and the Vernacularization of Corelli's Music

Abstract

In his 1720 poem ‘To the Musick Club’ Allan Ramsay famously called upon an incipient Edinburgh Musical Society to elevate Scottish vernacular music by mixing it with ‘Correlli's soft Italian Song’, a metonym for pan-European art music. The Society's ensuing role in the gentrification of Scottish music – and the status of the blended music within the wider contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment and the forging of Scottish national identity – has received attention in recent scholarship. This article approaches the commingling of vernacular and pan-European music from an alternative perspective, focusing on the assimilation of Italian music, particularly the works of Arcangelo Corelli, into popular, quasi-oral traditions of instrumental music in Scotland and beyond. The case of ‘Mr Cosgill's Delight’, a popular tune derived from a gavotte from Corelli's Sonate da camera a tre, Op. 2, is presented as an illustration of this process. The mechanics of vernacularization are further explored through a cache of ornaments for Corelli's Sonate per violino e violone o cimbalo, Op. 5, by the Scottish professional violinists William McGibbon and Charles McLean. The study foregrounds the agency of working musicians dually immersed in elite and popular musical traditions, while shedding new light on McGibbon's significance as an early dual master of Italian and Scots string-playing traditions.