Back before Christmas, in the middle of copy-editing, I received an invitation to submit a proposal for a panel at the MedRen Music Conference in Maynooth in the summer; I accepted and hastily cobbled something together:

‘Mere Claptrap Jumble’: Music and the 16^th Century Broadside Ballad

A New Ballade of a Lover is the earliest extant broadside ballad with music. At first glance though, this music appears catastrophically wrong.  For many years it epitomised the poor quality of printed ballad music, which is often seen as worthless, especially in the context of oral transmission.  Even the tunes named on broadsides can create anomalies. Viewing the ballad as part of a wider musical scene, this paper will suggest alternative explanations for the shortcomings of printed music in Tudor ballads, including the potential for a simple typographer’s error to account for the problems with A New Ballade.

Then I thought no more about it…

…until the panel proposal was accepted.

Which was all well and good, but I hadn’t actually done any of the work needed to write the paper!

So that’s what I’m up to.  I’m looking at the music printed on early broadside ballads and the musical context of the time. Two weeks ago, I was thinking about the paper and what I wanted to say, and trying to find a different way of looking at the catastrophically-wrong music on A New Ballade of a Lover, when I had a brainwave: it’s a crossover genre.  I scribbled the idea down on a piece of paper, before I had chance to forget it, and then, the following evening just before I started teaching, I did something that I almost never do: I wrote a plan.  I was quite pleased with myself.  It wasn’t very detailed, just a list of the statements that I wanted to make in the order I wanted to say them and it only took one side, but I thought that, just maybe, it would make the process of writing this paper easier than some of my other work has been.  I saved it and, I thought, uploaded it to my dropbox.

Only I didn’t.  And the next day, when I was looking for it to flesh it out a bit, I couldn’t find it, which was not only disappointing, but rather frustrating.  It’s not often I write something (even something that simple) and think “that works”.  Moreover, because I’d written it down and saved it, I’d stopped thinking about it and I wasn’t at all sure that anything else that I wrote would be as clear, or as good.

As I only teach there once a fortnight (it is a blended learning course, and the other week is an online session) and I live an hour away, I rang the university centre at Holy Cross, where one of the lovely staff undertook to get in touch with the IT technicians to see if they could find it on the server.  She phoned back later that morning to say that the IT people had said that if I supplied them with some information about the file, they might be able to find it but they couldn’t make any promises.  I sent them the information that they asked for and half an hour later, they sent me back my file.  So I want to send a huge thank you to the folks who saved my skin.  And point out to my students that none of us are infallible. Getting the file back meant I could start on my next project properly and within a few hours of starting over, I had decided that maybe there might be enough there to generate a journal article.