Lest anyone imagine that this is to be a saccharine, soft-centred eulogy, let me say at once that having Isobel as a colleague for over a decade was no easy ride. She was a tough, pugnacious creature, who brooked no bullshit or dishonesty from anyone - neither vice-chancellor nor first-year undergraduate - and in some difficult times in the 1980s, when our still young department was being assailed by philistine and ignorant bureaucracies, Isobel was always there, ready with a deft (if often perverse) counterargument to defend our patch. Her work always seemed to be driven by a kind of passionate moral crusade, inspired no doubt in part by her non-conformist Scottish upbringing. This was true whether it was in her many concerts with the University Orchestra (where, I remember, sheer force of will from the rostrum produced performances of Tchaikovsky which defied the players' individual limitations), in her teaching, or in her commitment to the evolving technologies that were becoming so rapidly available. She was a curious yet potent mix of the conservative and the radical and, whilst in many everyday circumstances this made her quite volatile to deal with, it proved invaluable when it came to assessing the latest bells-and-whistles computer gear. She always knew what had just come on the market (I suspect she was a closet reader of all the nerd-mags) but she nevertheless had a clear-sighted scepticism about whether we really needed it, or whether it was just another gadget to go wrong. We were rarely allowed to forget that she had a first degree in science as well as music - to be honest, some of us played mercilessly on her self-appointed status as techie-in-residence - though I am sure that it was during her time as graduate student and teaching assistant at Princeton that her computing skills were really fostered. Her rather fundamentalist turn of mind engendered a fervent relationship with MS-DOS: I seem to remember that she was deeply suspicious of Windows when it first came along, and the way it deprived her of all those arcane command structures which baffled the rest of us - though I think even she was eventually converted to its glossy charms.
But Isobel's death (how she would have hated my starting that paragraph with 'But') is so terribly sad from a personal, family perspective, too. She married Clive quite late, and was already 40 when they had Thomas in 1996. After a period of leave from Newcastle, she decided that she would not return to work there, but spend more time with her new baby, and finally complete her book on early Scottish music (she was a specialist in pre-Reformation Scottish liturgies and the music of Robert Carvor), which had been on the back burner for too long already. Yet she has been deprived of both of these, and only a matter of days, I think, after formally quitting her senior lecturer post, we in turn were deprived of Isobel: her company, her vigorous friendship, her manifold expertise. One thing that remains, though, apart from the memories, is the Med-and-Ren list itself; and I hope that the many musicians and scholars who benefit from that new e-contact, that passing tip-off about a manuscript somewhere, that new idea floated across the ether by an acquaintance as yet unmade, will pause occasionally to remember Isobel, who made it all happen.
Ronald Woodley
Lancaster University
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