The Performing Arts in Colonial American Newspapers, 1690-1783. Text Data Base and Index

Abstract

Performing Arts in Colonial American Newspapers, 1690-1783: Text Database and Index. By Mary Jane Corry, Kate Van Winkle Keller, and Robert M. Keller. New York: University Music Editions, 1997. UMEl0ICD. $99. CD-ROM for Windows or DOS. Requires 18 MB hard-disk space, VGA monitor. Writing in December 1953 issue of Notes about Oscar Sonneck, the young American musical Columbus who determined upon returning to United States after twenty-five years in Europe to lay foundation for correct and adequate historical presentation of music in early America by an exhaustive investigation of primary sources, Otto Kinkeldey pointed out that the American pioneer in this musical field had a decidedly harder task than his European forerunners (Notes 11 [1953]: 26). Municipal and church records, when locatable, were terse on matters musical; biographies of musicians were few; music journals, for colonial period, were nonexistent. Indeed, Sonneck found only one that covered any appreciable period of time--the ordinary weekly and later daily newspapers. Kinkeldey continued: These, in their advertising columns or among their news items, would occasionally--very occasionally--print... a brief reference to something musical--the notice of a concert or theatrical p erformance with music, a music teacher's announcement of a school, a music dealer or publisher advertising his wares. The harvesting of these scattered grains was no inconsiderable task, and Sonneck spent two years combing through all available American newspapers published to 1800 (ibid., 27). But results of that harvest were rich, and are still consulted today: A Bibliography of Early Secular American Music (1905), Early Concert-Life in America (1907), and Early Opera in America (1915). Returning many decades later to same regular source that Sonneck consulted--early American newspapers--a small army of dedicated researchers emerges not with a scholarly monograph such as Sonneck's but with a stunningly vast array of primary-source material that surely will serve as basis for many monographs to come. item under review is remarkable product of an equally remarkable project. Over a period of five years, Mary Jane Corry (project director), Kate Van Winkle Keller (director of technology), Robert M. Keller (computer consultant), and fourteen other people--Linda Bierling, Susan Cifaldi, John Cuthbert, David Hildebrand, Barbara Lambert, Rosamond McGuinness, Sharon McKinley, Geoffrey Miller, Zaide Pixley, Susan Pregger, Arthur F. Schrader, Marilyn Smiley, John Wagner, and Edythe Walmer--read every issue they could locate of every newspaper published in colonial America (50,719 issues and 4,523 supplements of 162 newspaper titles), searching for references to music, dance, and theat er. They found 54,411 reports, advertisements, stories, ... announcements ...; allusions, metaphors, song lyrics, and other representations of performing (I quote from a flyer for CD-ROM), which they copied with painstaking care. These transcriptions were then keyed into a database and exhaustively indexed, producing a general index file of 235,676 records and a first-line index of every poem and lyric collected, containing 12,061 records. Thanks to marvels of electronic technology, all of this information, and more, is available on a single CD-ROM, and it is a wondrous tool, absolutely indispensable for anyone doing any serious research in performing arts of America's colonial period. Here is an example of what one can find in this labyrinth of research possibilities. It has long been known that fiddle was a special instrument of black male slaves in early America. This CD-ROM makes clear extent of these slaves' involvement with instrument. A search of database for negro or mulatto near fiddle or fiddler or violin (near, in this case, means within twenty words' distance of any of transcribed items; this default setting can be changed to anywhere between ten and thirty words' distance) brings up names of hundreds of slaves--almost all of them runaways identified as fiddlers--as they appear in advertisements placed by their owners. …