Loeb Music Library

The Galpin Society Journal of 1955 contains an article by musicologist Gerald Hayes on The Lutes Apology by Richard Mathew, the only English lute book that is known to have been published between 1610 and 1676. The lone copy of the book was discovered in 1936 in Bedfordshire and deposited in the archives of the Bedford County Record Office. Hayes relates how he prepared a lengthy essay on the book, its author, the original owner, and the history of the lute, for what he hoped would be a facsimile edition. Oxford University Press agreed to publish it; lute scholar Diana Poulton provided transcriptions from the tablature into staff notation; the volume was entrusted to the British Museum where the necessary photographs were made. Hayes writes, “By 1940 everything was ready and the letterpress, duffed-out photographs, and engraved music were all photographed together onto glass, from which the zinc lithographic plates were made: at that stage a bomb fell on the printing works and everything disappeared without a trace.”¹

Although Hayes’ edition never saw the light of day, the original volume of The Lutes Apology survived the Blitz, and a microfilm of the British Library’s copy now resides in the Isham Memorial Library, one of 300 new items from the personal microfilm collection of Prof. Emeritus John M. Ward. Now in his nineties, Prof. Ward continues to work as a collector and curator of music, theater and dance material for the Harvard libraries. A few years ago, as part of a general house-cleaning, Prof. Ward donated more than 1400 of his personal microfilms to the Harvard University’s Isham Library, a collection of music primary source material where I work as Associate Keeper. Over a two-year period, I had the pleasure of sorting through all the films in order to identify items that could be added to the Isham catalog; see this Ward Films Inventory (PDF) for a list of these new acquisitions. Duplicate films were claimed by the Music Library at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and the Lute Society of America.

Prof. Ward’s wide ranging research interests include five centuries of British popular and folk music. About 50 of our new items are collections of Scots dance tunes, including manuscripts of McClaren, Webster, Niven and Christie in Aberdeen; Nicoll, Stickle, Anderson and Virtue in Edinburgh; Doig, Stafford Smith and Sutherland in Glasgow. Along with The Lute’s Apology, more than 100 of the new films pertain to early string instruments such as lute, cittern, guitar and viola da gamba. Of particular note are binders containing Ward’s transcriptions from lute tablature (finger notation) into standard keyboard notation, making accessible vast amounts of repertoire previously hidden in the lutenists’ esoteric code. For players and scholars of the viola da gamba, the new acquisitions fill out Isham’s collection of consort manuscripts from Archbishop Marsh’s Library in Dublin; one tablature manuscript in Manchester for viol played “lyra-way,” or chordally, contains 246 pieces with 22 different tunings. In the front-matter of a viol tablature manuscript in the Cheshire Records office, I found this affectionate apostrophe by its owner, Sir Peter Leycester:

To his Viole

Come Sweete Companion, Solace of my life,
Asswager of my Cares, another wife,
Let us retire into some Shady Place,
Where with my circlinge thighs I may embrace
And gently hugge thee, till thy trembling strings
Cause the Sweete friskind ayre to dance & singe:
Whiles I bestride thy belly, sweetest Mate,
It is expected we should propagate:
The numerous issue of thy pleasinge mirth
Are all Abortives, perish[ed] in the Birth.
Oh I could with the Sportes of all our leasure
Might like the Spheres move in Eternall pleasure.
Embleme of Heaven! Fit for the feasts of Jove,
Where’s nothinge else but harmony and Love.²

- Douglas Freundlich, Associate Keeper, Isham Library

---

1. Gerald Hayes, Music in the Boteler Muniments, The Galpin Society Journal 8 (1955): 44. Requires Harvard ID/PIN for access.

2. Peter Leycester, Poems & characters by me P. Leycester, [16--], Leicester of Tabley Archives, DLT/B70, Cheshire Record Office. Isham Lib. 3519.889.24.3

Among the Merritt Room’s holdings are several continuity scripts for classic musicals, including one for Les Girls (1957) Cole Porter’s last major work (apart from a children’s television production of “Aladdin”) before his retirement in 1958. In tandem with the DVD, it offers a unique look over the shoulder of director George Cukor (legendary for his skill with “women’s pictures”) as he assembles a movie.

It seems at first ironic that this film is billed as “Cole Porter’s Les Girls“, when Porter himself admitted the Les Girls songs were not up to his usual standard*. Suffering from the cumulative effects of a host of physical ailments and a series of heavy personal losses, Porter had been unable to summon up the sparkle and gleam of the previous year’s “High Society” score. Yet the picture itself, helmed and staffed by some of the most elegant minds in the business and starring Gene Kelly and three beautiful lead actresses (including the blazingly talented Kay Kendall), is redolent of the world of accessible sophistication conjured up by a good Porter song.

Color consultant George Hoyningen-Huene (the man behind the haunting deep blues in Cukor’s “A Star is Born”) fills the frame with glowing blacks and startling pinks and rigs up a feathery collage for the credit sequence (note how he handles the transition between the credit for Porter’s music and that of Adolph Deutsch, who adapted and conducted it); John Patrick’s screenplay offers a clever, Rashomon-like plot (Taina Elg and Kendall play former showgirls with Kelly’s troupe, one of whom sues the other over an allegedly libelous memoir) and some wicked one-liners, and Jack Cole choreographs some lively dances (performed in clothes by Orry-Kelly).  Robert Surtees’ cinematography makes the most of the multiple points of view and flashbacks upon flashbacks.

Even tired Porter is still Porter. Les Girls is set mostly in Paris, in the backstage world of crowded dressing rooms, tiny, shared flats, cheap restaurants and third-class train carriages. In the musical numbers, this tawdry milieu suddenly becomes the scene for dazzling light romance. It’s not a bad last look at the man whose music and lyrics could confer instant urbanity on anyone who sang or played them.

- Sarah Barton

*Eells, George. The Life That Late He Led: a Biography of Cole Porter. Putnam, New York, 1967. p.307

The generosity of the Women’s Task Force Fund has enabled the Loeb Music Library to acquire a wide variety of rare works by women composers: some, like Carrie Jacobs Bond or Liza Lehmann, top of the charts in their lifetimes but less known today, some, like Miss Mellish, composer of My Phillida, adieu love, hauntingly obscure: we don’t even know her first name. None of them pique this writer’s curiosity more than the one-woman hit machine known as Loïsa Puget.

Puget (1810-1889) was one of the most popular and playable French songwriters of the 1830’s.  Her romances, or simple, pretty, easy-to-sing ballads of peasant and bourgeois life, were as much a part of life as the poke bonnet.  Her mother had been an singer, and made music a large part of her daughter’s education, which included some time at the same boarding school as the young George Sand (then known as Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin.)  Quick to spot the one other pupil interested in the arts, Sand remarked on the younger girl’s talent, vivacity, roguery and beauty.  These served Puget well as she began to make a name for herself as a songwriter, singing and accompanying her own ballads in the salons of the well-to-do. Her facility and charm won over such diverse people as Hector Berlioz, who ruefully remarked that to the people of Paris all the symphonies in the world are not worth a romance by Loïsa Puget sung by their favorite prima donna, and the dialect poet Jacques Jasmin, who wrote a poem praising her melodies, at which “la terro tout s’amayzo, tout se tayzo.”  Together, Puget and Gustave Lemoine, her lyricist, dominated family music racks, school songbooks, popular concerts and after-dinner piano singalongs from 1830 to 1845, when composer and lyricist married, fashions in song began to change, and Puget’s prolific production rate slowed down.

Puget enjoyed herself thoroughly giving her public exactly what they wanted, even, in 1836, an opera, Le mauvais œil, but her greatest hit was “À la grâce de Dieu.”  If cell phones had been available in 1836, Puget’s ballad would have been the most popular ringtone in France.  A mother’s song of farewell as she watches her daughter leave her village to seek her fortune in Paris, this romance was the “Single Ladies” of its day: church organs played it, dance bands played it, accomplished young women beguiled the long evenings with it.  It was so successful that in 1841 Lemoine and Adolphe Philippe D’Ennery elaborated the basic idea into a melodrama, La Grâce de Dieu, which in turn became the basis for Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix.

Loeb Music Library owns seventy-two pamphlet scores of Puget’s romances. The earliest dates to 1830.  In addition, a score of Le mauvais œil is available for study in the Merritt Room.

- Sarah Barton

As May washes over Cambridge, no fan of Jeeves-era British popular music can pass a garden without thinking of Ivor Novello, who gave us several ravishing songs about lilacs and Spring. Novello ranked with Noel Coward as England’s top triple threat of the light spectacular. When not writing, scoring and starring in a procession of backstage comedies and Ruritanian extravaganzas which reigned over Britain’s stages for twenty years, Novello launched careers, fed out-of-work show people, fostered every kind of talent, threw thrilling parties and displayed his faultless profile to best advantage in a range of films.  His death in 1951 gave rise to public grief as intense as that for Princess Diana half a century later.

Loeb Music Library recently acquired Novello’s personal rehearsal libretto (ML50.N934 D3 1939, typed on carbon paper in a clip binder) for his  1939 smash hit The Dancing Years. The pages explode with notes, eliminations, elaborations, mapping Novello’s legendary theatrical insight at work. If you can read his writing, he inserts a fairly important plot point – a scene in which Maria, the heroine, tells Rudi, the hero, that she has had his child – in longhand on the back of the previous scene.

It’s much easier to follow the final dialogue for the 1951 film version (PN1997.D362 1950.) Daringly for a show produced in Neville Chamberlain’s England, the stage version of The Dancing Years had concluded with Rudi and Maria’s last meeting in an Austrian prison, where Rudi is under arrest for aiding refugees.   By 1951, political defiance was slightly passe, and the film ends poignantly rather than tragically, with Maria introducing Rudi to his long-lost son.

For Novello, the “joy of giving” Maria sings about was not just a figure of speech: his time, his talent, his influence, his money, his company, he gave them all freely and gave great joy in the process.

For Further Reading, Viewing and Listening: Read the rest of this entry �