Loeb Music Library

Hardened operetta fans have good reason to feel lucky this Friday the 13^th: it is the 169^th anniversary of the birth of Sir Arthur Sullivan, whose music put wings on the House of Lords, enchantment in the Vicar’s teapot, and wind in the sails of the Pinafore.  Those who love W.S. Gilbert, Arthur Sullivan and the fourteen operas they wrote together remain as passionate as they were a century ago, as a glance at Savoynet or the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive will tell you.

Savoy scholarship has recently flowered: the past two years alone have seen The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan, Carolyn Williams’ landmark Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody, Regina B. Oost’s Gilbert and Sullivan: Class and the Savoy Tradition 1875-1896 (a thorough examination of the commodification in, of, and around the operas) and The Japan of Pure Invention, in which Josephine Lee considers the racial implications of The Mikado‘s production history.

Sullivan himself always longed to be appreciated for his serious compositions.  If you wish to explore his depth and range, the Loeb’s record stacks offer recordings of his grand opera Ivanhoe and his cantata The Golden Legend.  Among the Victorians, this setting of Longfellow’s poem of true love, evil and redemption was second in popularity only to Handel’s Messiah.  For more Sullivan without Gilbert, try The Beauty Stone or The Emerald Isle or The Contrabandista.  Or sample his wildly popular parlor songs, including his setting of Kipling’s Boer War appeal “The Absent-Minded Beggar” and the inevitable “Lost Chord.”

If only Sullivan’s entire legacy had had as faithful a guardian and as staunch a promoter as his work with Gilbert did.  For over a hundred years the family-run D’Oyly Carte Opera Company staged the Savoy operas in accordance, as nearly as possible, with Gilbert’s directions, providing an enduring link with the original productions.   Performance styles may have evolved a little: we invite you to compare, say, the 1928 Yeomen of the Guard with the 1958 and 1964 versions, and then hear a non-D’Oyly Carte interpretation, like the 1993 recording with Bryn Terfel and Thomas Allen.  The 1966 taping of The Mikado offers a chance to see John Reed, Kenneth Sandford, and other D’Oyly Carte stars in their prime.  Sadly, rising costs and the Arts Council’s infamous denial of funding caused the D’Oyly Carte to close in 1982, and  it is hard to hold the LP of the company’s final concert without a sigh and a tear in the eye.

If you need a fix right now and cannot make it to the library to hear our G & S discography, Naxos Music Library offers subscribers a variety of goodies while the Internet Archive’s treasure trove (which includes the notorious Groucho Marx Mikado) is available to all.  I cannot let the occasion pass without mentioning With Words and Music, a bizarre but entertaining B movie about a bookie who mounts a comeback for a washed-up troupe of Savoyards.  You imagine a team of desperate screenwriters, robbed of their rest in some dingy, labyrinthine studio basement, cranking out the script at 4 am after discovering a mutual love of melodious topsy-turvydom.  Interesting recordings and sheet music (scroll down for all the Sullivan: they have him under “Arthur” and “Arthur S.” and just “Sullivan” and everything) are free to all at the Library of Congress, as well.   Sullivan did his duty; I have done mine.  Go ye and do yours!

-Sarah Barton

These operas by Cherubini are among the latest additions to our digital scores collection; find them, and many others, in Digital Scores and Libretti:

Les deux journées : opéra comique en 3 actes / paroles de J.N. Bouilly; musique de Cherubini; partition de piano et chant. Paris: M. Schlesinger, [1837?]. Mus 637.1.663

A vocal score of Cherubini’s most successful opera, premiered in 1800 at the Théâtre Feydeau and repeatedly revived during the first half of the nineteenth century. Bouilly purportedly based his libretto – a story of political persecution, disguises, narrow escapes, and eventual reconciliations – on events he witnessed during the French Revolution, but the action of Les deux journées is shifted to 1647, during Cardinal Mazarin’s time as Chief Minister.

Faniska

Cherubini’s only Singspiel, written for the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna and premiered on February 25, 1806. Joseph Sonnleithner’s libretto, based on Pixérécourt’s melodrama Les Mines de Pologne, bears some similarity to the captivity and rescue plot of Lodoïska, down to the dramatic third-act attack on the villain’s castle.

• Faniska : eine grosse Oper in drey Akten ; vollständiger Klavierauszug von A. E. Müller. Leipzig : A. Kühnel, [between 1806 and 1809]. Mus 637.1.690

  This copy of an early vocal score has a two-page manuscript of Oranski’s part of the 1st act Terzetto, in an unidentified hand, tipped in following the printed score.
   

• Faniska : opéra en trois actes : représenté à Vienne le 25 Février 1806 : paroles italiennes / musique de Cherubini ; avec accompagnement de piano par A. Fessy. Paris : Chez tous les editeurs de musique ; Leipzig : Chez Breitkopf et Haertel, [184-?]. Merritt Room Mus 637.1.685

  An Italian full score of the opera, with piano reduction added for rehearsal.

Medea : tragedia in trè atti / di L. Cherubini. Milano : R. Fantuzzi, [1910?]. Mus 637.1.645.5

While Médée was revived in several German productions during the nineteenth century, its first performance in Italy did not occur until December 30, 1909. La Scala used an Italian version by Carlo Zangarini, with Franz Paul Lachner’s recitative settings of the dialogue, composed for the 1855 Frankfurt production.

This edition of the vocal score features a title page illustration by the painter and theatrical designer Giuseppe Palanti, known to La Scala audiences for his set and costume designs, as well as the advertising posters he created for the publishing house Ricordi.¹

- Kerry Masteller

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1. See Vittoria Crespi Morbio, “Il teatro,” in Giuseppe Palanti: Pittura, teatro, pubblicità, disegno, 66-84 (Torino: U. Allemandi, c2001).

Next Stop is Vietnam: the War on Record 1961-2008

We just received this beautifully produced box set from Bear Family Records documenting the recorded legacy of the Vietnam War. The collection contains 13 CDs and a 300 page book that features the label’s typically rich detail about the music, an essay about soldiers’ preferred songs, and a foreword by Country Joe McDonald. Besides well-known songs by Phil Ochs, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Edwin Starr, John Lennon and others, one finds here many lesser-known tracks and songs written by soldiers themselves. Archival recordings range from Anita Bryant’s PSA for Patriotism to an excerpt from Jane Fonda’s Hanoi press conference on August 14, 1972.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library AC 36778

Bill Evans on DVD

Just in are two DVDs featuring Bill Evans in trio recordings taken from several different points in his career. The first DVD, Waltz for Debby, includes television broadcasts from London in 1965 and New Jersey in 1971. The other, But Beautiful, comes from 1979 and highlights Evan’s final regular trio with Marc Johnson on bass and Joe La Barbera on drums. That trio is the same group he played with at the Harvard Jazz Band concert in 1980, a performance which Tom Everett recently recounted during the 40 years of Jazz at Harvard celebrations.

Find them here:
But Beautiful, Loeb Music Library DVD 1866
Waltz for Debby, Loeb Music Library DVD 1867

(Selections from the Tom Everett Collection of Jazz Manuscripts, including John Lewis’ The Gates of Harvard, composed for that 1980 visit, are on display in the Music Library through September 30.)

Music for Merce 1952-2009

Another box set, this time 10 CDs on New World Records of music written for dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Besides his work with John Cage, Cunningham collaborated with many other experimental composers and this set includes music by David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi, Earl Brown, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros and others. The collection also includes a lengthy essay by music historian Amy Beal entitled “A Short Stop Along the Way: Each-Thingness and Music for Merce.”

Find it here: Loeb Music Library CD 37520

People Time… Stan Getz and Kenny Barron

And finally, we recently acquired the complete set of recordings made by Stan Getz and pianist Kenny Barron at the Café Montmartre in Copenhagen on March 3-6, 1991. Made just months before Getz’s death in June of that year, some of these performances were originally issued on two Verve CDs in 1992. Now Sunnyside Records via Universal Music France has put out the entire four nights (7 CDs of music), and the set includes both the original 1991 notes by Kenny Barron and new notes written by Gary Giddins.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library CD 38539

-Peter Laurence

The Music Treasures Consortium proudly announces a new site designed to give access to selected music manuscripts and printed editions from six institutions in the United States and United Kingdom. The site is hosted by the Library of Congress on its Performing Arts Encyclopedia, and is available at:

http://loc.gov/musictreasures

(The scores pictured in this post represent a tiny fraction of the items available on the Music Treasures Consortium site; click any thumbnail to view the uncropped images.)

The Consortium’s goal is to further music scholarship and research by providing access in one place to digital images of primary sources for the performance and study of music. Two examples may help to demonstrate the connections researchers can make through the site:

• The 1741 autograph manuscript of Handel’s Messiah, from the British Library, can be easily compared with both the first published edition of the score, from the Loeb Music Library, and a copyist’s manuscript, ca. 1743-46, from The Morgan Library and Museum.
• Scores from the Loeb Music Library’s extensive collection of Schubert first editions can be studied in tandem with manuscripts from the Library of Congress, the Morgan, and the Lila Acheson Wallace Library at Juilliard (Schubert in the Music Treasures Consortium).

In this initial launch, online items range from the 13^th century – the British Library’s manuscript Harley 978, Musical, medical and literary miscellany, including ‘Sumer is icumen in’[...] – to the 20^th, by composers including Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, Georges Bizet, Arnold Schoenberg. The site will continue to grow as Consortium members add more items.

Read more about Harvard’s contributions to the Music Treasures Consortium in this Harvard College Library News article.

Members of the Consortium include:

• The British Library
• Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library at Harvard University
• Lila Acheson Wallace Library at the Juilliard School
• The Library of Congress
• The Morgan Library and Museum
• New York Public Library

Initial planning for the Consortium was funded by Bruce Kovner. The MTC Advisory Board includes Christoph Wolff, Jeffrey Kallberg, Philip Gossett, and Laurent Pugin.

-Kerry Masteller

Andrea Bohlman, a doctoral candidate in Historical Musicology in the Harvard University Department of Music, works on socialist and post-socialist music cultures, European popular song and hymns, musical media, and music in politics. In this guest post, she describes some of her discoveries in the stacks of the Harvard libraries, and their importance to her research:

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Though the bulk of my dissertation research brings me to archives housed in basements of private homes, government organizations, and academic institutions across Poland, generous support from the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Houghton Library, and the Music Department at Harvard has helped to make some of the most unusual materials available on this side of the Atlantic: a selection of rare cassette tapes. The digitization of these materials, which were collected among members of the Polish opposition in the 1980s, makes radio programs, audiobooks, news montages, and more available to any user at Houghton Library. The creative sound documents recorded on the tapes had previously been inaccessible because of their fragile media. Now we have the opportunity to listen to the sounds of organized dissent and to understand the significance of music for Polish activists.

The Solidarity Collection itself (to which these tapes belong) is unique outside of Poland. It contains a variety of materials assembled from private collections of Polish-American supporters of the independent Solidarity trade union (Solidarnosc), and other dissident organizations from the late 1970s to the end of the Cold War. Members of Polish opposition depended on a variety of means of communication to organize meetings, discuss their demands, critique the ideologies behind the Peoples’ Republic of Poland, and create a culture of dissent. In scores of news bulletins and written documentation of organizational matters, “dissident culture” supported the publication of literature censored by the government and promoted its own agenda through stamps, posters, and other iconographic media.

The Solidarity Collection, because it represents not the record of a single organization, but the collections of individuals invested in the movements’ politics, speaks volumes about the way in which documents printed by the Polish underground presses—Polish samizdat—were actually disseminated and received. The Solidarity Collection offers a snapshot into the diverse means of expression at the heart of the Polish opposition, the local efforts in what came to be a nationally triumphant political party.

My dissertation concerns music and activism in Poland during the 1980s. It was when I was perusing the Solidarity Collection for songbooks that I noticed a reference to 38 cassette tapes. When I inquired about them, a Houghton librarian, Joseph Zajac, was kind enough to take me into the bowels of the stacks, where I got a sense for the richness of the sound materials. I began to talk with Richard F. French librarian Virginia Danielson about listening access, since Houghton has neither the digitization facilities nor the audio technology of the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library.

The tapes represent the bulk of the output of two major underground presses. From 1983-1990 these presses used cassettes as a primary means of disseminating political cabaret, political anthems, and audiobooks (such as George Orwell’s 1984), as well as editorial essays read by their activist authors. Cassettes not only recorded the sounds of the opposition, they afforded journalists, workers, and literary figures the opportunity to create a sound object. The digitization of these tapes has made the material more accessible and has transformed the nature of my work with the cassettes: I can return to listen to interviews and audio montages repeatedly. But, most importantly, engagement with their form and content can alter historians’ understanding of music in the Polish opposition by underlining the vitality of sound and music at a crucial moment of Cold War history in Poland.

- Andrea Bohlman

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Notes: David Ackerman, Bruce Gordon, and Darron Burke, of the library’s Audio Preservation Studio, digitized the tapes, which are stored in the University Library’s Digital Repository Service, a state-of-the-art permanent digital storage facility.

The Music Library acknowledges the continued, valuable support from the Andrew W. Van Houten Audio Preservation Fund for our work with rare and unique electroacoustic and ethnomusicological recordings.

Our latest collection of digitized scores focuses on early 20th century works of musical modernism: operas by Busoni, Schreker, and Zemlinsky. As always, these and many other scores from our special collections can be found in our collection of Digital Scores and Libretti.

Ferruccio Busoni

1. Die Brautwahl. Klavier-Auszug von E. Petri [Leipzig? Breitkopf & Härtel? 1914?]. Mus 633.5.621

Busoni’s first opera, with a libretto by the composer based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story of the same title, from Die Serapions-brüder. This copy of the vocal score contains numerous cuts, corrections, and annotations – some pasted over the original score – which may represent a conductor’s revisions for performance.

2. Die Brautwahl: Orchester-Suite: Op. 45. Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel [c1917]. Mus 633.5.623

3. Arlecchino: ein theatralisches Capriccio in einem Aufzuge. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, c1917. Mus 633.5.615

A vocal score of Busoni’s Mozartian one-act number opera, centered on the acrobatic Harlequin figure of the Commedia dell’arte: his first stylistic foray into Junge Klassizität (Young Classicality). The work premiered on May 11, 1917, with Busoni’s Turandot.

Franz Schreker

4. Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin: Oper in einem Vorspiel und zwei Aufzügen. Wien: Universal-Edition, c1912. Mus 800.42.621

Schreker’s third opera, strongly influenced by Symbolism and later extensively revised to become Das Spielwerk. This copy of the score includes the spoken interlude “Des Burschen Traum in der Hütte des Meisters Florian” (“The Boy’s dream in the cabin of Meister Florian”), performed only for radio broadcast and not included in the libretto published in 1913.

Alexander Zemlinsky

5. Eine florentinische Tragödie: Oper in einem Aufzug : Op. 16. Wien: Universal-Edition, c1916. Mus 887.575.621

As he would do several years later in commissioning Georg C. Klaren’s libretto for Der Zwerg, Zemlinksy based his own libretto for Eine florentinische Tragödie on a work by Oscar Wilde: in this case, his unfinished play A Florentine Tragedy.

6. Kleider machen Leute; musikalische Komödie in einem Vorspiel und zwei Akten. Wien, New York, Universal-Edition, c1922. Mus 887.575.616

A vocal score of the revised version of the comic opera, based on Gottfried Keller’s novella Kleider machen Leute. Originally produced as a three act opera in 1911, this two-act revised version premiered in Prague in 1922.

- Kerry Masteller

Though the weather report promises but little joy, though due dates for theses and applications loom menacingly over us like steadily advancing diplodoci, though the ice and snowdrifts cling to the pavement as clings the tritone to Vitellio Scarpia, though we are, if not actually disgruntled, far from being gruntled, yet be of good cheer, gentle library patrons, for a brief escape to the enchanted land of Bolton, Wodehouse and Kern is but a mouseclick or two away.

Between 1915 and 1924 Jerome Kern, often in cahoots with P. G. Wodehouse (brilliant lyricist as well as brilliant novelist; life is not fair) and Guy Bolton (the wizard of plot and pun) wrote several musicals for the small, stylish Princess Theater in New York.    Their intricate, tuneful scores  and believably nonsensical books distinguished the Princess shows from Ziegfeld’s extravaganzas and Cohan’s revues.  Kern and Wodehouse created songs which advanced the plot and illuminated the characters, rather than a series of interchangeable numbers for interchangeable soubrettes and juveniles.  The world of these shows is long, long gone, but the songs are as fresh as ever.

If you are stuck in your room with the cold that’s going around,  Music Online streams an utterly beguiling album of Wodehouse lyrics (mostly set to Kern’s music) called “The Land Where the Good Songs Go.” Sylvia McNair (she of the voice like silver honey), joins forces with pianist Steven Blier and tenor/Wodehouse buff Hal Cazalet for songs like “You Can’t Make Love By Wireless” and “Non-Stop Dancing” (“Father pluckily continues, though he’s sprained eleven sinews, since we got the non-stop dancing craze.”)  Those interested in the evolution of singing styles might want to listen to the vintage recordings of many of the same songs on “The Theatre Lyrics of P. G. Wodehouse”.  Some of these tracks date back to 1905, and there’s an interview with Wodehouse about working with Kern.

For the full Bertie Wooster experience, try visiting the UCLA Archive of Popular American Music, printing out a .pdf of the original sheet music for “The Sirens’ Song” or “Sir Galahad” and playing through it on the nearest keyboard.  You never know what might summon up Jeeves, tray in hand and mammoth brain at the ready to solve all your problems.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dinah Washington… The fabulous Miss D!

We recently received this fine Hip-O-Select collection that brings together in one place all of Dinah Washington’s Keynote, Decca and Mercury singles from 1943 to 1953. The book/CD package has great photos, reproductions of record labels and album covers, and detailed discographical notes for each single. The introductory essay was written by Marc Myers, who pens the Jazz Wax blog.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library AC 36777

The Rake’s Progress

Just in on CD is this landmark recording from 1953, the first complete Rake’s Progress conducted by the composer. Stravinsky leads the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus and a cast including Hilde Gueden as Anne, Blanche Thebom as Baba the Turk, Eugene Conley as Tom, Mack Harrell as Nick Shadow, Martha Lipton as Mother Goose and Norman Scott as Trulove.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library CD 38218

Menotti in German

We recently acquired an Arthaus DVD that contains 1960’s German-language studio recordings of Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief and The Medium. Elisabeth Höngen and Hilde Konetzni are featured in both operas, along with the Orchestra of the Vienna Volksoper. The DVD also includes an interview with stage director Otto Schenk.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library DVD 1780.

Venus Records

Over the past few years we’ve received a number of jazz titles on Japan’s Venus Records. This label has primarily been marketed to a Japanese audience, but is becoming more visible here in the U.S. Cambridge-born pianist Eddie Higgins, who died in the summer of 2009, was a favorite of the label’s owner and is featured on many Venus titles. A recent release culls “essential” ballads from some of those recordings.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library CD 38226.

- Peter Laurence

We’ve added a number of scores to our collection of Digital Scores and Libretti, including this set of late 18th and early 19th century operas:

Johann Christian Bach

Amadis des Gaules: tragedie lyrique de Quinault reduite en trois actes … Représentée pour la premiere fois au théatre de l’Académie royale de musique le quinze decembre 1779. Mise en musique par Jean Chretien Bach. Paris.: Sieber, [1780?].
Merritt Room Mus 627.3.604, RISM A/I, B 167

Johann Christian Bach’s only French tragédie lyrique was premiered by the Académie Royale de Musique on December 14, 1779, to virtually universal distaste. As Friedrich Melchior Grimm wrote in an issue of the Correspondance littéraire, a journal covering the cultural events of Paris,

The Amadis of Mr. Bach…appeared for the first time this Tuesday the 14th and has not fulfilled our expectations….while it’s always good enough, it’s never more, and one cannot hide that, in this work at least, the whole of the composition lacks heat and effect. The Gluckists found it had neither the originality of Gluck, nor his sublime élan; the Piccinists, that his song had neither the charm nor the variety of melody of Piccinni.¹

Luigi Cherubini

Lodoïska : opéra en 3 actes / paroles de Filette Loraux ; musique de Cherubini ; partition de piano et chant. Paris : M. Schlesinger, [1837?].
Merritt Room Mus 637.1.627.5

The first French edition of the vocal score.

Lodoïska, which premiered at the Théâtre Feydeau on July 18, 1791, was a great success. Based on an episode from the popular novel Les amours du chevalier de Faublas, Lodoïska is notable not only for its music but also for its spectacle: the third act ends as a troop of Tatar soldiers burn the castle in which Lodoïska has been imprisoned by the villain Dourlinski.

Medea : Oper in drei Akten / Musik von L. Cherubini. Vollständiger Klavierauszug. Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel [1855?].
Merritt Room Mus 637.1.643.3

A vocal score, in German and French, of the opéra comique Médée, premiered at the Théâtre Feydeau, 13 March 1797. While the opera was not especially popular in France, it was given multiple German-language revivals in Berlin, Vienna, and other cities. This edition, though it dates from around 1855, does not include the recitative settings of the dialogue composed by Franz Paul Lachner for the 1855 Frankfurt production. (It may be worth noting that its extended passages of dialogue, not its subject, cause Médée to be classified as an opéra comique.)

Anacréon, ou, L’amour fugitive : opéra ballet en deux actes / par le C.R. Mendouze ; mis en musique par Chérubini. A Paris : Au magasin de musique dirigé par MMrs. Chérubini, Méhul, Kreutzer, Rode N. Isouard et Boieldieu rue de la Loi, no. 268 vis-à-vis celle Ménars ; A Lyon : chez Garnier, Place de la Comédie no. 18, [1803].
Merritt Room Mus 637.1.602, RISM A/I, CC 2028 I, 79

A full score of Cherubini’s first, and unsuccessful, opéra-ballet, premiered at the Opéra on October 4, 1803. While the opera itself is rarely performed (the first revival didn’t occur until 1971), the overture – borrowed from his cantata Amphion – remains a popular concert piece.

-Kerry Masteller

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1. See Friedrich Melchior Grimm, Correspondance, littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc…., (Paris, Garnier frères, 1880), 12:350.

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

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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