Erik Chisholm was not thought of as a scholar. His Bachelor of Music degree and his doctorate in music were undertaken in an unorthodox manner. In the catalogues of Edinburgh University there is no reference to any material relating to Chisholm's submission for his doctorate. There is nothing in the Senate Minutes, and the schedule for graduates in music 1898–1950, confirming his graduations in 1931 and 1934, has, under the heading ‘Courses of Study in the University’, nothing more than ‘studied subjects privately.’

What this means is that, whatever training Tovey put him through, we cannot demonstrate that he had studied the then current musicological methodologies, or that he had conducted any in-depth analysis of a genre of works or an individual work. What we do know (see Chapter 2) is that Tovey and Chisholm were close to each other, and that as a student of Tovey, spending hours with him each week, with no one else to bother them, Chisholm had a unique opportunity to learn from a man who was regarded as one of the greatest all-round musicians of his time. We also know in what high respect Tovey held Chisholm (see Chapter 5), and it is worth pointing out that Tovey could himself be thoroughly radical in his approach to the explication and teaching of music.

Professor Tovey always maintained that the writing of strict counterpoint was an intellectual exercise on a par with trigonometry, and consequently should be taught to the adolescent of thirteen rather than to the undergraduate of eighteen – but perhaps nobody learns strict counterpoint these super-serial days!2

None the less, on becoming Dean of the Faculty of Music, as well as Professor and Principal of the College in Cape Town, Chisholm must occasionally have felt the need to address himself to the kinds of things that musicologists do: analysing works, tracing manuscript traditions, detecting influences, correcting scribal and printing errors and, occasionally, expressing pleasure in the material they discuss. In preparing rare Berlioz, Gluck and Mozart operas for performance (see Chapter 4), he had already some experience of working on the production of a proper edition, but these were not prepared to scholarly standards, which require justification for each decision, accompanied by thorough annotation. Chisholm's were working editions and none the worse for that.

As part of his duties in Cape Town, Chisholm had to devise courses and, in so doing, he took on a pedagogic role. Choices have to be made between this or that approach, and in Chisholm's case his approach was decidedly radical for the time.