The Tea-Table Miscellany (The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Allan Ramsay)

This edition of The Tea-Table Miscellany is the first ever produced, bringing together the four volumes of this collection of songs published between 1723 and 1737. TTM combines traditional Scottish song, works by Allan Ramsay and his contemporaries, together with material from D’Urfey, Playford and the English stage and broadside, in a collection of 399 songs. This edition offers, for the first time, annotations, background, and a study of origins for all the songs and tunes examining both Ramsay’s categorisation of the authorship and origin of the song texts and tunes to which it was most likely he was referring. As such, the edition consists of a detailed introduction, the clearly presented song texts, notes on the songs that identify both their print and musical antecedents, musical illustrations that show major variations in the contemporary tunes with which the songs are associated, illustrations of the title pages, and the main design features and ornaments used in Ruddiman’s original edition.

Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland is the Music Research Associate on the ‘The Edited Collection of Allan Ramsay’ project and is a Lecturer in Historical Musicology at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Her first monograph, Venanzio Rauzzini and the Birth of a New Style in English Singing: Scandalous Lessons was published in 2022.She is the Principal Investigator for the Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded project, Scotland’s Singing for Health Network and she has been a visiting researcher at the University of Sydney and at Chawton House. Past projects include establishing the Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded network, the Eighteenth-century Arts Education Research Network and working as Research Assistant for the Romantic National Song Network, also funded by Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Select Publications include Music from home: Symonds sheet music collection and the Scots in Australia, Journal of the Sydney Society for Scottish History (Forthcoming, 2022), Venanzio Rauzzini and the Birth of a New Style in English Singing Scandalous Lessons (2022), ‘Damage to trees’: Performing Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd at Haddington Grammar School: A theory and its scholarly impact, Theatre Notebook 75(3), pp. 173-186 (2021), Mapping changes to the songs in The Gentle Shepherd, 1725-1788, Studies in Scottish Literature, 46(2), pp. 103-126 (2020) and Performance potential of Stationers’ Hall collections, Brio, 56(2), pp. 77-86 (2019).