By Elizabeth C. Ford

William McGibbon (1695–1756) was once described to me as the best-known Scottish composer no one had ever heard of; I believe that’s a reasonably accurate assessment. When I first encountered his name in David Johnson’s monograph Music and Society in Lowland Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, I was left with the impression that his music had faded into well-deserved obscurity. At the same time, I noted that Henry George Farmer in A History of Music in Scotland (1947) spoke highly of McGibbon’s flute duets (published around 1748), though most musicians I spoke to only knew of McGibbon’s collections of Scottish tunes and the one trio sonata of his that has been published a few times in “greatest hits” collections (no. 5 from his set of 1734, headed “In Imitation of Corelli”). I knew that this wasn’t quite good enough for my studies on the flute in eighteenth-century Scotland, so I wanted to see what the rest of his music was like, and if he deserved the reputation he had. This edition is the result.

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