Notes on Sources of Musical Americana

Abstract

Before the broad field of Music in has been adequately analysed and presented, there are source materials still undiscovered which must be hunted down, and subjects as yet untouched which must be studied. Able scholars of the field have been few in number, and they have not exhausted any single corner of it or of its implications, while local surveys by amateurs show plainly that there is need for competent direction in organizing and presenting the material they have so earnestly sought. Musicological activity by Americans began many years ago, but we may not take much comfort in the record of our encouragement of it. Alexander Wheelock Thayer's monumental biography of Beethoven had to wait fifty-five years for publication in English; Sonneck's Concert Life in America found its publisher in Germany and is not yet owned by many of our music libraries. We have gone far enough in our scholarship, however, to recognize that the works-the books, counsels, and collections -of Oscar Sonneck are a firm foundation on which to build. There is further reaping to be done in some of the fields in which he labored, but there will be no need to revise his conclusions or correct his errors, for he was a scholar of irreproachable integrity and enviable skill. Within a decade signs have appeared of a genuine movement toward an accurate and extended appraisal of our musical past from the perspective of the entire country. These signs give urgency to the need for discovering and classifying source materials wherever they may exist. Sonneck, too, was conscious of this need. One of his first steps was to tour the country in a search for basic materials. He believed, with the historian J. B. McMaster, that newspapers are an unexcelled repository of local history. Sonneck was the first musical scholar to travel in -although he confined himself largely to the Eastern seaboard-with a perceptive mind for actual documentation as compared with the autobiographical method-first or third-hand-of F. L. Ritter or W. S. B. Matthews. The amount of dust he stirred up in historical societies and music libraries can be appreciated only by one who makes a similar tour today. Lack of awareness of the location of source materials is a handicap often difficult to overcome. The great libraries of Washington, Boston, and New York are first resorts; beyond them one hesitates. I have recently turned up a few locations and take pleasure in pointing them out, refraining from any attempt at bibliography, a subject so large and so irregular in scope and merit that another and more critical survey would be required to do it justice. The problem of availability within a library is of great concern to the efficient researcher. Institutions that refuse accredited scholars all priv-