You may recently have noticed that York Digital Library (or YODL as it was known) is no longer with us. Since it first launched in 2010, YODL has provided digital access to a range of our unique and distinctive collections, from 13th century church manuscripts to 20th century scientific instruments. But as is true of us all, YODL got old–and with age comes (what I hope will be a very happy) retirement.
The York Digital Library home page--to which we say a fond farewell
And so we enter a new phase of York’s digital collections, one which we hope will offer the opportunity to rethink how we deliver digital access in order to better support a range of research and uses. Regular readers of the Borthwick blog will know that we are home to archives, rare books, and artworks that span centuries. These materials tell stories that you won’t find elsewhere. The ongoing development of our new digital library, Discover.York, will let our users interact with these important collections and discover the stories they tell, whether they are down the road or across the globe.
But in addition to increasing the reach of our collections, digital access provides opportunities for users to explore and understand our collections in new ways. As the team here at York continue to plan for the development of Discover.York, we have been inspired by examples at other organisations where digital content can be annotated and transcribed, curated into insightful digital exhibitions, and shared and compared with collections held elsewhere. We have been excited to see research based on large corpuses of digital content, using machine learning, topic modelling, and named entity recognition. Such methods can reveal patterns and threads that might otherwise have been impossible to spot. And we have been curious about how the discovery of digital collections can help our user communities tell their own stories. In all of these examples, we see opportunities for our collections and our users.
The homepage of our new digital library, Discover.York
So, what’s next for York’s digital collections? Well, work on Discover.York is already underway, with a handful of collections now available. We’ve plans to add a further three collections over the coming weeks, including the Lord Halifax diaries (1940-6), and photographs from the Vickers Instruments Archive and the University of York Archive, with more to follow as development progresses. You’ll also find digitised content in our YorSearch Rare Books Collection. Looking further into the future, we’ll be working hard to enhance Discover.York with a range of features that will let our users discover, explore, and interact with our unique collections. This will be a gradual process and one that will take time. Our goals are ambitious and there will doubtless be many lessons learned along the way. We’ll continue to share updates with you for the duration of this work. In the meantime, if you have questions about digital collections that were previously accessible via YODL, please contact our team at dti-service-desk-group@york.ac.uk.
We hope you’ll join us in thanking YODL for its fine service and we look forward to sharing more about the ongoing development of Discover.York over the coming months and years.
By Dr Philip Burnett, School of Arts and Creative Technologies, University of York
A few months ago, while working in the Borthwick on the
papers of the Society of the Sacred Mission (SSM), I came across a document written
in 1904. It contained a series of character sketches of the missionaries
working at Modderpoort, a mission station established amongst
the Basotho people in the Orange Free State (as it was then known) of South
Africa.
Figure 1. The Priory buildings and Chapel at Modderpoort (date unknown)
[Borthwick Institute, SSM/Photo 7]
The handwriting was difficult to read, but out of the faded and
smudged lettering appeared a phrase referring to the missionary William Norton:
‘a bit of poet, a beautiful linguist, and mad on plain-song’ [SSM Archive, SSM/DIR/D/SA/4/1].
As a music historian, I look for sounds that were once heard, research how they were created, and try to understand the different ways
people heard them. The mission archive is a particularly rich source for this
work, as my find in the papers of the SSM exemplifies.
So, I was intrigued by this sketch of Norton and wanted to
know more. It was interesting in its own right, but also because by
understanding more about why he was so ‘mad on plain-song’ we can learn more
about the ways in which missionaries made sense of the worlds in which they
worked; and, indeed, how those worlds made sense of and responded to them.
Elsewhere, I’ve examined the backgrounds of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
British missionaries and found that while missionaries were often required to
have a broad skill set – as they had to turn their hand to anything from
carpentry, to masonry, to riding a horse –, wherever they worked in the world
they always needed to have music in their toolkit. Music was fundamental to how
both missionaries and converts expressed their worldview and beliefs.
An obituary of Norton published in The South African
Journal of Science in 1962, tells us that he was born in 1870 in Exeter
where he was educated at the Grammar School. He then went to Exeter College,
Oxford where he read for an undergraduate degree in “Greats”, also known as
Classics. He was a gifted linguist and stayed at Oxford on a postgraduate
scholarship to study for a BLitt in Philology. After Oxford, he was ordained
and worked as a priest in Cornwall for seven years. He then joined the SSM and
went out to South Africa in 1903 to join the community at Modderpoort in the
Orange Free State.
The missionaries at Modderpoort lived like a monastic
community, which involved coming together for prayer several times a day. In
the chapel (see Figure 2), they sang psalms and office hymns to plain-song,
also known as plainchant.
Figure 2. Interior of the Priory Church at Modderport (date unknown) [Borthwick Institute, SSM/Photo 7]
Plainsong (as it is often also spelled) is one of the oldest styles of European sacred music and usually consists of a text sung by unaccompanied voices to a single line of melody. To give an idea of what that sounds like, here is an example of the evening office hymn sung in the chapel at Modderpoort in August 2023:
In the SSM’s Quarterly Papers (see Figure 3), which
collated news and reports of missions all over the world, we find mention of
Norton and plainsong. In April 1903, it was noted that Norton was ‘very busy
with plainsong, teaching the sisters and adapting the tones to Sesuto [sic.]’,
while in July of the same year Fr Wrenford, a priest on one of the outstations,
recalled how when he visited Modderpoort, ‘Fr Norton soon coaxed me into a
small choir practice of plainsong.’ It seems that Norton was keen for all his
fellow clergy and mission workers to be competent in plainsong, and this
suggests, further, that plainsong was used not just at Modderpoort, but also in
outstation churches.
Figure 3. Cover of SSM Quarterly Paper (July 1903) [Borthwick Institute, SSM/DIR/S/QP/1]
Norton’s reputation, it seems, went beyond Modderpoort and
Bloemfontein. Robert Carroll, a young priest who went to work at Inhambane in
Lebombo diocese (part of present-day Mozambique) corresponded with Norton about
how to use plainsong in mission work and adapting to different languages.
Carroll wrote that Norton had asked him to, ‘use my influence with the Bishop
[of Lebombo] for the introduction of plainsong liturgical music.’ [SSM/PP/4/8 iii
(6) [1909]]
At Modderpoort, Norton was involved in other aspects of the
music making. His linguistic skills meant he was kept busy with translation,
and he worked with the committee that produced Sesotho hymnbooks. When it came
to adapting hymns, he had some forthright opinions, as his correspondence
reveals. In 1904, Norton drew up a geographical report of the Modderpoort area [SSM/DIR/D/SA/6/3]. On one
side is a typed report of the area and some suggestions for where new mission
outposts could be established. On the other side is a handwritten letter in
which Norton outlines his thoughts on how English hymns could be successfully
adapted into Sesotho. “I wanted to chuck the old hymns & tunes, & start
afresh, but knew it was too revolutionary,” writes Norton. The versions of
hymns then in use had been written in English metres, unsuited to the shape and
rhythm of the Sesotho language.
Norton’s career as a missionary came to an end in 1917 when
he got married. For the SSM, which insisted that its members remained celibate,
this was a taboo, and so Norton had to leave the order, whereupon he pursued a
career as a parish priest and an academic, eventually becoming a professor of
African languages at the University of Cape Town. While he built a separate
reputation in those spheres, his legacy in the SSM was his contribution to
plainsong. In 1952, Fr Harold Firkins, a fellow SSM missionary, in a memoir of
his time in South Africa, noted of Norton: ‘We owe him gratitude for having
established Plainsong in our Sesuto [sic.] Mass, so well that it flourishes to
this day’ [SSM/PP/40].
What do we learn from Norton who was ‘mad on plain-song’?
Foremost, it is that music was an important part of missionary practice, to
which many in the mission field devoted a lot of energy and time. But while he
was celebrated by his peers, Norton’s legacy, however, is not so
straightforward. The archival papers tell us next to nothing of the local
agents and informants who would have helped him in his work of adapting
plainsong for use with Sesotho, nor what the Basotho people thought of this new
music. Language, not least musical language, was a highly contested realm of
the mission field with missionaries often struggling to translate effectively
their texts into local languages and dialects. What did happen is that the
musical language of plainsong and the pre-existing musical systems found at
Modderpoort came to shape and influence each other in complicated ways. That
find in the Borthwick that prompted me to look further at Norton and his plainsong,
therefore, points us to the complex story of colonial missions, and this is the
focus of the current phase of the research for my Leverhulme Early Career
Fellowship.
Acknowledgments: I’m very grateful to Charles Fonge and the Staff at the Borthwick for their assistance with my research.
Further information: If you'd like to find out more about this story and the history and music of colonial missions, Dr Burnett will be expanding on his research in an online seminar on Wednesday 28 February 2024, 4pm to 6pm. It is open to staff, students, the public. Details can be found through the link.
