Loeb Music Library

The latest release of Harvard’s Page Delivery Service (PDS) – the system through which we share our digital scores with the world – is live, and there are a few enhancements to share with you.

We spend a lot of time writing a structural outline for every score we digitize, to make it easier to find works, movements, scenes, and even single arias. While we’ll keep adding that full indexing, it’s now possible to navigate using thumbnail images of each page, as well: when you’re looking at a digitized book or score, click “Expand All,” then “Show Thumbnails” in the left-side navigation frame. This might be an interesting way to get a simple visual overview of a work’s structure, and I have to admit that for some scores, it’s just fun; take a look at the thumbnails for this copy of Debussy’s La Boîte à Joujoux: Ballet pour Enfants, and I think you’ll see what I mean.

The next addition is a “Cite this Resource” button: click this to get descriptions and persistent links for both the entire score and the single page you’re looking at. These aren’t perfectly-formatted citations, but they gather a lot of the information you’ll need in a bibliography or caption. Here’s a screenshot, using a page from La Boîte à Joujoux as an example:

Screenshot: PDS "Cite This Resource" Tool (click to enlarge)

And finally, the full print-to-PDF option is back! Requests for 10 or fewer pages are delivered in real time; if you request more than 10 pages, you’ll be sent a link to the PDF once it’s been processed (those links remain available for 7 days).

Ready to start exploring? Digital Scores and Libretti is, of course, my favorite, but check out other Digital Collections of Harvard College Library and Web-Accessible Collections at Harvard University for photographs, pamphlets, manuscripts, books, maps, and other rare materials ranging from Digital Papyri to Latin American Pamphlets.

- Kerry Masteller

The full name of our library is the Eda (no “n”) Kuhn Loeb Music Library – not to be confused with the Frances Loeb Library at the Graduate School of Design or the Loeb Drama Center – and we are often asked about our namesake. Unfortunately, we do not have a picture, but we can tell you who she was:

Eda Kuhn Loeb was born to Solomon and Regina Kuhn, members of a prominent merchant and investment banking family in  Cincinnati in 1867. Largely at the prompting of her aunt Betty, the firm, Kuhn Loeb, moved to New York.  There the Kuhns and the Loebs moved in the same social and business circles as the Warburgs and other prominent German Jewish banking and investment families.    Eda married her cousin, Morris Loeb, in 1895 and Morris became a renowned (and rather eccentric) chemist who taught at Columbia University.  Eda became an active philanthropist and spent her life in the lively social and highly musical circles of Kuhns, Loebs, Warburgs and Guggenheims in New York, colorfully described in Stephen Birmingham’s Our Crowd.  Her husband died in 1912.  Eda never remarried.  She was clearly close to her multitude of nieces and nephews. At her death in 1951, she left generous donations to  hospitals, colleges, and universities (including Harvard), and the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, which houses a special collection of rare editions of books illustrated by artists (Loeb Collection), leaving the remainder of her estate to her great-nephew, cellist Gerald Warburg.  Warburg used this money to fund the construction of the Music Library at Harvard in 1956 which was then named in her honor.

NB One of Eda’s brothers-in-law was James Loeb who was instrumental in funding the construction of Paine Hall and who also established the Loeb Classical Library series of books.

Read more about the history of our library.  We thank the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County for this information.

-Virginia Danielson and Liza Vick

The grass is growing along the edges of the paths in Harvard Yard; the banners are hung in Tercentenary Theatre; seniors are making last rounds of their favorite haunts in Cambridge: it’s time for Commencement and class reunions.

Anyone who works in a college or university music library or archives is used to requests from alumni for copies of their favorite college songs; while for years we faxed blurry copies of “Fair Harvard” all over the world, we’re very glad to say copies of both the 1922 edition of the Glee Club’s Harvard Song Book and the 1909 edition of A Book of Radcliffe College Songs are now available online.

The 1922 Harvard Song Book, like many other university anthologies, is a combination of songs specific to the University, and especially to sporting events (“Soldiers Field,” “Poor Old Yale,” and others), with songs from Glee Club concerts and revues (“The Skye Boat Song,” “Good Night, Ladies,” “Jingle Bells”). Certainly, there are many other places to get a copy of “Gaudeamus Igitur,” but with this volume and a cadre of willing singers, all you really need are two football teams and an arena to recreate your own Harvard-Yale game.

The 1909 A Book of Radcliffe College Songs is a new addition to our digital library; its editors collected not only songs about the college, but some of the standard choral repertoire being performed by the students’ music clubs and songs composed for Radcliffe’s vibrant tradition of amateur theatricals. Later editions of the college song book – not yet digitized – reveal intriguing changes in the music that was most associated with the school by its own students: in the 1916 songbook, for example, most of the choral works were replaced by Radcliffe songs, and a new section of rally lyrics provides evidence for the popularity of basketball at women’s colleges.

Whether you’re graduating and leaving Cambridge, or returning to Harvard after a long time away, we hope that these collections will remind you of your own college experiences.

For further exploration:

• While it’s impossible to fully recreate online the print (and image, and object) collections of the Harvard University Archives and the Radcliffe College Archives at the Schlesinger Library, The Harvard Radcliffe Online Historical Reference Shelf is a fantastic starting point for research about the University.
• For those of you searching for more music, HOLLIS includes a selection of digital facsimiles of other 19th- and early 20th-century student songbooks…even Yale’s.

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* The opening lines of Radcliffe’s 1911 Class Song, written by Alice Hunnewell.

- Kerry Masteller