some new-strung Instrument thats newly put in tune." The provenance for such a song is likely medieval. Music Urbani Pietro Urbani was the first composer to score Burns' poem in 1794. Like most of the pieces in Scots Songs, it is orchestrated for a small chamber ensemble of 2 violins, viola, and harpsichord. Unlike most other settings of the poem, Urbani puts it in , which creates certain metrical problems that results in missplaced stresses. At one point, Urbani even has to add a word to fit his chosen meter. Though his is the original setting of "Red, Red Rose", it is little known and rarely performed. Gow Burns specified the melody that he had in mind for "Red, Red Rose" in a letter to James Johnson, "The tune of this song is in Niel Gow's first Collection & is called there 'Major Graham'-it is to be found page 6th of that Collection." Niel Gow's A collection of Strathspey Reels appeared in 1784. He later published two more collections. "Major Graham" is so similar to an earlier song called "Miss Admiral Gordon's Strathspey" that one writer referred to Gow's tune as a "palpable plagiarism". Johnson dutifully set "A Red, Red Rose" to Gow's "Major Gordon" as per Burns' instructions and published it as song number 402 in the fifth volume of Scots Musical Museum in 1797. This tune bears striking similarities to the eventual melody which would make the song famous, and "Major Gordon" is often mislabeled as the source. Johnson also included an "Old Set" version of "Red, Red Rose" as song number 403. It has been suggested that it is the "Old Set" version which contains the actual melody Burns heard sung in the country. Johnson's setting of "A Red, Red Rose" has been recorded by Jean Redpath. Marshall George Thomson finally did get around to publishing "A Red, Red Rose" as song number 89 in the fourth volume of his Original Scottish Airs, which appeared in 1799. Thomson attributes the melody to William Marshall, calling it "Whishaw's Favorite". Marshall's tune is actually called "Mrs. Hamilton of Wishaw's Strathspey", and it was published in the composer's Early Scottish Melodies. Thomson's choice yielded similarly clumsy results as Urbani's, requiring alterations and additions to Burns' text to fit Marshall's melody. Traditional The version of "A Red, Red Rose" that is popularly known all over the world uses the tune of