Manuscript Scores Research Articles

Time management at Turin's Teatro Regio: Galuppi's La clemenza di Tito and its alterations, 1759

Margaret R.Butler Time management at Turin’s Teatro Regio: Galuppi’s La clemenza di Tito and its alterations, 1759Hitherto unexplored materials surrounding Baldassare Galuppi’s 1759 setting of Pietro Metastasio’s La clemenza diTito for Turin’s Teatro Regio shed new light on the work and how the theatrical administration’s priorities influenced its performance. Three manuscript tables tipped into the back of a copy of the printed libretto contain precise durations of every portion of the opera as well as the performance’s total running time. Markings in the tables and the libretto indicate cuts in many of the arias. This study considers the evidence in the tables together with that of other sources including the libretto text, manuscript scores, administrative documents and contemporary reports. It contextualizes the sources within Turin’s operatic culture, yielding a clearer picture of the opera as it was likely performed and considering the implications of this view for 18th-century operatic production and performance practices more broadly. It demonstrates the decisive role a theatre’s administration and production staff could play in shaping an 18th-century opera’s form, character and performance.

The Ruined Bridge: Studies in Barberini Patronage of Music and Spectacle, 1631-1679 (review)

The Ruined Bridge: Studies in Barberini Patronage of Music and Spectacle, 1631-1679. By Frederick Hammond. (Detroit Monographs in Musicology/Studies in Music, no. 56.) Sterling Park, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2010. [xix, 303 p. ISBN 9780899901510. $55.] Music examples, maps, facsimiles, illustrations, bibliography, index. Those who work in area of seventeenth-century musical spectacle are acutely aware of issues plaguing our discipline, specifically small number of extant documents regarding performances of these events. Additionally, documents that allow us to reproduce performances are often no longer extant, or if they are, are either damaged or incomplete. In Frederick Hammond's The Ruined Bridge: Studies in Barberini Patronage of Music and Spectacle, 1631-1679, author deals with these issues head-on, making do with documents that are extant and placing them in their social and political context. The focus of Hammond's study lies in chivalric musical spectacle under Barberini patronage in seventeenth-century Rome. His study, as he notes, is based on five hypotheses, now generally accepted in remarkable development of Barberini studies during last three decades. First, that all important members of family of Urban VIII personally influenced artistic projects. Second, that these artistic projects embodied identifiable goals for papacy and for family. Third, that these goals were specific and consistent enough to comprise what may be termed program. Fourth, that this program was expressed in coherent symbolic language. Fifth and last, that Barberini program changed in emphasis and forum in response to political and intellectual events during two decades of Urban VIII's pontificate. (p. 3) He notes that this study is an outgrowth of his previous book, Music and in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage Under Urban VIII (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), in which he attempted to trace musical patronage of pope and his three nephews during period of their hegemony (p. xvii). He notes that archival work performed for this earlier book has in some way surfaced in material of current volume. He does remark, however, that this first book might be considered as a coda in minor key to Music and Spectacle (p. xvii). Hammond's new volume is rich in its reproduction of primary source material. He provides an examination of manuscript orthography as well as illustrations of choreography used in these events. The book is plentiful when it comes to engravings, supporting author's points and illustrative descriptions. He copiously outlines various expenses associated with opera and other chivalric spectacle, sparing no detail, and gives same attention to funerals as celebrations, right down to expense of candles and manner in which they are sold. The book is divided into nine chapters, each of which examines different aspect of music in Barberini patronage, often devoting chapter to one or more works. Hammond's writing performs rarelyachieved feat: it is scholarly, yet accessible. The book's opening chapter is devoted to La Contesa of 1631, one of several works discussed belonging to Ferrarese tradition of opera-torneo, noting that the plot of torneo was built on familiar conceit or inventione of personifying cities by rivers (p. 21). In following chapter he sets political context for music and spectacle, specifically examining Il berrattino di Pietro. Chapter 3 looks at ways in which Galileo Galilei scandal affected Barberini patronage. The next two chapters pertain to entertainments put on for members of Barberini family, first examining social and political context of Le pretensioni del Tebro e del Po, work composed for entertainment of Don Taddeo Barberini in Ferrara, as well as alterations made to manuscript score; then looking at entertainment set up by Don Taddeo Barberini for his brother, Cardinal Antonio. …

Current and future challenges in vocational rehabilitation

We are pleased to add our commentary to those of our distinguished colleagues. Indeed, the Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation has come a long way in the past 20 years. Subscribers and contributors come from every discipline in healthcare and human services and from many countries and cultures. We know from experience that subscribers read this journal and endeavor to translate the findings and innovations contained therein. Between us we have published 19 manuscripts in JVR, and have reviewed scores of manuscripts as members of the Editorial Board. We have always been impressed with the range of ideas, the quality of submissions, and the potential for knowledge translation that each article promises. This is a journal for working professionals who labor in the vineyard of vocational rehabilitation (VR) in every conceivable service delivery system: community based rehabilitation programs, the state-federal vocational rehabilitation program, veterans rehabilitation, industry based disability management, employee assistance programs, case management settings, school-to-work

Resonancias tristanescas en la ópera española: Wagnerismo en las óperas de Conrado del Campo

La obra musical de Conrado del Campo, a pesar de su importancia e influencia en la música española de la primera mitad del siglo XX, permanece en un injusto olvido, especialmente su amplio legado operístico. Se realiza en este artículo un estudio y análisis de las primeras óperas de Conrado del Campo, destacando en ellas tanto la asimilación del wagnerismo imperante en esos años como su interés por desarrollar los ideales de la ópera española. Para ello se han acudido a las fuentes originales: los manuscritos de las partituras, comentarios de la prensa y opiniones del propio compositor, con especial detenimiento en las óperas El final de Don Álvaro y La tragedia del beso, dramas líricos en los que resulta evidente la resonancia del Tristán wagneriano.

Critical Silence: The Unseemly Games of Love in Jeux (1913)

Following my article on Vaslav Nijinsky's L'Après-midi d'un Faune (1912), I turn my attention to Jeux, the first of Nijinsky's two choreographies for the 1913 season of the Ballets Russes. Made to a commissioned score by Claude Debussy, Jeux (Games) dealt with the chance meeting of three sporty young people in a twilit garden or park. Based on contemporary responses and the choreographer's notations to Debussy's manuscript score, I discuss how Jeux addressed modern life and what in this disconcerted the audiences of the Ballets Russes. Although the work disappeared after only one season, I argue it brings to the fore questions of canonisity and success that are still relevant in our discourse of art, today.

JOHANN SIGISMUND COUSSER, WILLIAM III AND THE SERENATA IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DUBLIN

ABSTRACTAmong the holdings of Hamburg’s Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Carl von Ossietzky is an anonymous fifty-two-page score headed ‘Serenata à 4’, described in the corresponding catalogue entry by its former owner, German musicologist Friedrich Chrysander (1826–1901), as a ‘cantata for the funeral of the English king William III of Orange, 1702’. But both the work’s text and the recent identification of the manuscript as being in the hand of Johann Sigismund Cousser (1660–1727) call for a reassessment of this serenata’s provenance, situating it in either England or Ireland between Cousser’s arrival in London on Christmas Day 1704 and the end of Queen Anne’s reign in 1714. Over the course of the two decades he resided in Ireland, from 4 July 1707 until his death, Cousser was responsible for the composition and musical direction of one ode and more than twenty serenatas, the majority of which were commissioned by the viceregal court at Dublin Castle for state celebrations of the reigning monarch’s birthday. Taking printed librettos, contemporary newspaper reports, Cousser’s own commonplace book and two further surviving manuscript scores as its primary evidence, this study seeks to establish a likely location and occasion for the performance of the ‘William III’ serenata within Dublin’s musical life during the early eighteenth century. In their choice of terminology, compositional style and performance practices, Cousser’s serenatas, which may have incorporated elements of theatrical staging and dancing, reveal his extensive Continental experience, and they can be seen to have functioned in part as an operatic substitute, presumably reflecting the limited financial resources of Dublin high society.

Es existiert kein Musikautograph von Arcangelo Corelli

A manuscript score of two movements of Corelli’s Concerti Grossi Op. 6 kept in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, taken to be the only preserved autograph of the composer’s work, was most probably produced by an eighteenth-century South German or Austrian organist, who put together a set of parts.

Music for church, stage and salon

A very welcome growth in the number and quality of recordings of the works of Giovanni Paisiello has become evident in the last few years. A keen collector will have experienced no difficulty in acquiring CD and even DVD sets of 15 and more of his 80-odd operas, several of them in alternative recordings. This interest has now spread to Paisiello's sacred music as well, hitherto hardly an area that the gramophone companies, or indeed musicologists, had even begun to explore properly. The batch of recordings that awaits me this quarter includes three works by Paisiello: the reasonably familiar short opera La serva padrona (1781), admittedly less often heard than Pergolesi's setting of the same libretto, and two major settings of material from the New Testament, Paisiello: Passio di San Giovanni (Capriccio 60133, rec 2006, 58′), a manuscript score of which at Assisi is dated 1785, and Paisiello: La Passione de Gesù Cristo (CPO 777 257–2, rec 2001, 96′), composed in 1783 and a setting of an old text by Pietro Metastasio. As he was moving towards completion of the commission, Paisiello wrote from St Petersburg to the aged poet, requesting new verses for a closing quartetto concertato to bring the text up to modern requirements. The poet was unable to comply with the invitation to renovate a poem written more than 50 years earlier, and in fact died a few weeks later.

L’activité de composition comme exploitation/construction de situations. Anthropologie cognitive de la composition d’une oeuvre musicale par Philippe Leroux

Compositional activity as exploitation and construction of situations. A cognitive anthropological approach to the composition of a musical work by Philippe Leroux. Expert musical composition has been poorly studied as a cognitive phenomenon. In this paper we reconstruct the dynamics of a composer’s situated cognition during his current interaction with his environment when composing a new work for ensemble, voice and live electronics : Apocalypsis (2006). Data were collected in the course of 14 ‘ interviews within situation simulation through material traces’ with the composer, Philippe Leroux, all along the genesis of the piece. By using numerous traces – at hand during the interviews – of his composition activity (drafts, sketches, manuscript score, computer data, diary, etc.), Leroux was able to retrieve the course of his different compositional operations. We stress upon the relationship between writing, re-reading and inner listening during preparation and score writing. Different kinds of re-reading activity were observed : local re-reading, re-reading at a prefined and strategic moment, re-reading at a predefined but difficultuous moment, re-reading resulting from an artistic crisis. These categories and the characteristics of their fulfillment emerge from an in-depth analysis of the composition of a formal articulation between two contrasted parts of a movement. This approach to music cognition strives at both taking into account the singularity and irreproducibility of the composer’s cognition, and managing scientific standards of discussion and generalization procedures. The paper finally opens to a future extension of this method and results toward others compositional and artistic activities.

Before Corroboree: Toward a clearer perspective of the early music of John Antill

John Antill became recognized as a significant Australian composer with the appearance of his ballet suite (later ballet) Corroboree which was first performed when the composer was in his early forties. His earlier work was very little known during his lifetime save for the opera Endymion, performed in 1953 and reputed to have been written in 1920 when the composer was sixteen. Since Antill’s death in 1986, further light has been shed on his considerable activity as a composer in the years before the composition of Corroboree—especially since the lodgement of the Papers of John Antill (1904–1986) in the Australian Manuscript Collection in the National Library of Australia. This comprehensive collection comprises the bulk of Antill’s surviving manuscript scores, together with a very large collection of memorabilia. This collection is the main source for the present article. It is the years up to and including the late 1930s and early 1940s—the time when Antill began to be occupied with the composition of Corroboree—that is the central focus of this article. Its aims are twofold: first, the establishment of a reliable chronology of Antill’s compositions during these years, including the radical revision of some dates hitherto suggested for such works as Endymion and other early theatre works; and second, to gain some clear perspectives of the early evolution of Antill’s style, from the post-Romanticism of the earliest extant works to the more astringent styles of those works written closer to the time of the famous ballet.

The Second Muse of Gerard Manley Hopkins

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) pursued music intermittently throughout his short life. He was not only a composer but also an ad hoc theorist. Hopkins’s compositions, like his poems, remained almost entirely unknown during his lifetime. His theories about music and his compositions were distributed in the same way as the poems, as apercus in his letters to friends, with the manuscript scores enclosed. The purpose of this essay is to attempt a composite picture of Hopkins the musician.

Polymath of the Baroque: Agostino Steffani and His Music (review)

Reviewed by: Polymath of the Baroque: Agostino Steffani and His Music Stuart Cheney Polymath of the Baroque: Agostino Steffani and His Music. By Colin Timms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. [xviii, 422 p. ISBN 0195154738. $99.00.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliography, index. Colin Timms has synthesized much of his life's scholarly work in his biography of Agostino Steffani (1654–1728), and readers interested in Italian and German music of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially the widespread phenomenon of Italian dramatic music imported into Germany, owe the author a debt of gratitude for elucidating so clearly the life and works of one of the period's principal figures. If anyone were to write this book it would have to be Timms, whose work over thirty-seven years has frequently centered on Steffani's chamber vocal works and other genres. The author has already written at least sixteen studies on the composer's biography and music, along with producing editions of the music; among these are groundbreaking works on Steffani's chamber duets (including Timms's Ph.D. dissertation), operas, correspondence, and Handel's indebtedness to Steffani's secular and even sacred vocal works. The British Academy recognized Polymath of the Baroque by awarding it the 2004 Derek Allen Prize. Part 1 (chapters 1–5) provides the biographical portion of the book, with a chapter each on Steffani's early life in Castelfranco and Padua, his professional tenures in Munich, Hanover, and Düsseldorf, and finally his position as Apostolic Vicar of North Germany. Timms draws on an impressive command of a multitude of historical sources, including manuscript scores; libretti; letters by the composer, his patrons, and observers; extensive archival resources in Hanover, Munich, Rome, Venice, and Würzburg; and a wide array of historical studies written since the mid-eighteenth century. This means that the few speculations Timms necessarily makes in order to fill in significant gaps in the biography are highly informed. Part 2 (chapters 6–9) examines the music in four chapters, divided between the composer's sacred works, two chapters devoted to the operas, and his chamber works. Specific examples of Steffani's music, along with their place in each genre's tradition, are clearly explained. Timms writes fluidly and engagingly in both parts of the book, each of which requires specialized approaches to the subjects at hand. Three useful appendices follow. Appendix A presents a small group of documents in their original Italian or German, including an autobiographical letter by the composer. Appendix B is the first published catalog of Steffani's musical output, which will prove to be one of the most useful aspects of the book; its twenty pages organize the works by genre and provide information on the principal manuscript and printed sources, including some modern editions. Each of Steffani's sixteen operas is broken down in Appendix C by such features as overall dramatic structure, types of vocal scorings, arias and their subtypes, instrumental involvement in arias, and key-relationship statistics for the recitatives. An extraordinarily gifted singer, Steffani was taken at age twelve from Italy to Munich, where he was to spend twenty-one years in the service of the elector of Bavaria. He later spent fifteen years in Hanover, six in Düsseldorf, and most of his remaining nineteen years back in Hanover. Owing to his musical and especially diplomatic activities, Steffani was unusually well [End Page 827] traveled; besides his principal cities of residence, he lived and worked in Venice, Rome, Paris, Turin, Vienna, Brussels, The Hague, Herten, Leipzig, Dresden, Heidelberg, Brunswick, and Florence. In 1722 Steffani retired to Padua near his native Castelfranco, but was persuaded back into ecclesiastical duty in 1725 and returned to Hanover. His wide travels produced another impressive list, that of the several prominent musicians with whom he crossed paths: his teachers Johann Caspar Kerll and Ercole Bernabei, plus Gaetano Berenstadt, Jean-Baptiste Farinel, John Ernest Galliard, George Frideric Handel, August Kühnel, Carlo Pallavicino, Johannes Schenck, Silvius Leopold Weiss, and probably Arcangelo Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti. Steffani lived during a period when many significant musical, literary, and religious positions in Catholic Germany were held by Italians. Rather than attempting to...

Who Died? The Funeral March in Beethoven's Eroica Symphony

The story of Beethoven's Third Symphony, the Eroica, has long gripped the public imagination. The composer intended to dedicate this work to Bonaparte and then, in May 1804, ripped up the title page upon hearing that Napoleon had declared himself Emperor. In the past two centuries, many theories have been presented to explain the work's assumed programmatic content, in particular, the significance of the second movement, entitled in the manuscript score of 1804 simply “Marcia funebre.” In 1998, Walther Brauneis repeated the most commonly held explanation in the recent literature—that Beethoven had written this Trauermarsch in C minor as an allusion to Bonaparte's heroic Grande Armée1—and then elaborated upon a new theory, first presented by Peter Schleuning, that when the work was initially published (the orchestral parts on 29 October 1806 with the title “Sinfonia Eroica composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand Uomo” and the orchestral score in London in March 1809 with the title “Sinfonia Eroica composta per celebrare la morte d'un Eroe”), the Funeral March was meant to honor Prince Louis Ferdinand.2 This Prussian prince had been killed on 10 October 1806 while fighting against Napoleon's troops. He was a close friend of the symphony's new dedicatee, Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz, who is thought to have influenced the work's 1806 title. In the luxurious book on Beethoven published in Prague in 2000, Jaroslav Macek agreed with Brauneis that the 1809 title most likely referred to the Prussian prince's heroic death.3 But, Louis Ferdinand was very much alive when Beethoven composed the C-minor Marcia funebre in 1803. In this essay I would like to address the question: Whose death inspired Beethoven to compose this tragic slow movement in the first place?

‘Mr Harris’s Score’: A New Look at the ‘Mathews’ Manuscript of Handel’s ‘Messiah’

The manuscript score of Handel’s Messiah copied by John Mathews, now in the collection of Archbishop Marsh’s Library, Dublin, incorporates musical material derived from early sets of performing partbooks, but also includes references to a score (now lost) that was owned by James Harris of Salisbury, an amateur musician who was an acquaintance of the composer’s. From these references it is possible to reconstruct many features of the musical content of Harris’s score. Recently published correspondence between Harris and John Christopher Smith, Handel’s principal music copyist, has revealed that Harris borrowed the composer’s own performing materials for Messiah in 1743 and 1744, apparently with a view to performance in Salisbury. The ‘Salisbury’ partbooks to which Mathews refers as one of his sources may therefore have greater authority than has previously been supposed, as reflecting the music of Messiah as it stood after Handel’s first London performances.

The Madrigals of Michelangelo Rossi (review)

Michelangelo Rossi. The Madrigals of Michelangelo Rossi. Edited with an introduction by Brian Mann. (Monuments of Renaissance Music, 10.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, c2002. [Acknowledgments, p. ix; 6 plates; introd. (biography, the madrigals, the sources, bibliography), p. 1-37; crit. commentary, p. 39-53; the edition (editorial principles, transcriptions), p. 55-225; index of compositions, p. 227. Cloth. ISBN 0-226-50338-0. $150.] Michelangelo Rossi's reputation among twentieth-century scholars and musicians has long rested on his keyboard music collected and published in the volume Toccale e correnti d'intavolatura d'organo e cimbalo sometime in the 163Os in Rome. The daring harmonic language of many of these pieces fostered an early-and lastinginterest in his music, even in times when almost nothing was known about their author. Two toccatas and three correntes, for example, exist in concert arrangements for piano by Bela Bartok (first published in 1930 by Carl Fischer; reissued, along with other arrangements and an introduction by Lazlo Somfai, in XVII and XVIIl Century Italian Cembalo and Organ Music Transcribed for Piano [New York: Fischer, 199O]). During his lifetime, Rossi (1601/2-1656) was best known as a virtuoso violinist, hence the nickname Michelangelo del Violino. As a musician at the service of Cardinal Maurizio of Savoy, Taddeo Barberini (Pope Urban VIII's nephew), and Francesco I d'Este, he also wrote a substantial amount of vocal music, including two operas, Erminia sul Giordano (1633) and Andromeda (1638, the music is lost), and two books of unpublished five-voice madrigals, published for the first time in the volume here under review. It is a much awaited and needed edition. The most remarkable feature of Rossi's madrigals is their audacious chromaticism, which was certainly inspired by the example of Carlo Gesualdo (ca. 1561-1613). As argued by Alexander Silbiger (Michelangelo Rossi and His 'Toccate e Correnti', Journal of the American Musicological Society 36 [1983]: 18-38), it was the harmonic experimentalism of the Gesualdine model of that probably served as a compositional laboratory for the bold instrumental idiom for which Rossi would be remembered three centuries later. As far as we know, Rossi's thirty-two madrigals that have come down to us were never published during the composer's lifetime. They are preserved in an undated manuscript score of uncertain provenance that is now housed in the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library at the University of California, Berkeley (MS 176). This is the main source of Brian Mann's carefully prepared and handsomely realized edition, which also includes a description of five incomplete manuscript sources regarded as peripheral to the Berkeley score (with the sole exception, perhaps, of a set of partbooks in the Conservatoire de Musique in Montreal). Variant readings are listed in the commentary on the individual compositions, and the small editorial comments placed at the foot of the score are quite unobtrusive. Sensibly enough, the editor did not follow the irregular barring of the manuscript but opted for regular measures of whole notes. On the other hand, given the highly chromatic character of the music, Mann did decide to retain the system of accidental notation found in the Berkeley score, in which a sharp or a flat alters only the note it precedes. The edition of the music is preceded by an extensive essay on Rossi's life and works. Of particular interest is the section on the circulation of the in the early seventeenth century, in which Mann, taking his cue from Lorenzo Bianconi (Music in the Seventeenth Century, trans. David Bryant [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987]), discusses the progressive editorial decline of the genre and the emergence of a niche market increasingly tied to the academic culture of the time. In this context, Rome would seem to have provided a particularly fertile environment also thanks to a devotee of the polyphonic madrigal such as Cardinal Antonio Barberini (p. …

Forgery in the Music Library: A Cautionary Tale

In 1920s and 1930s celebration of four anniversaries--the centennial of birth of Stephen Foster (1826-1864), bicentennials of births of George Washington (1732-1799) and Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791), and sesquicentennial of founding of United States--increased interest in related antiquarian artifacts, and brought musical contributions of two Pennsylvania composers to attention of a general audience. (1) While increased knowledge and pride in American musical tradition resulted, anniversaries also inspired unscrupulous dealers to take advantage of a new market for old manuscripts. Their fraud is still having repercussions today. As one of centers of American musical activity in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Pennsylvania was renowned for illustrious composers--Francis Hopkinson, Stephen Foster, William Henry Fry, and Francis Johnson to name just a few--and celebrated organizations like Mendelssohn Club, Musical Fund Society, and Philadelphia Orchestra. By 1930s, their accomplishments had become part of state's history, and their documents began to be collected by libraries, museums, and antiquarian dealers. Among dealers in Philadelphia were Harry Dichter, brothers Henry and Paul Woehlcke, Charles Nagy, and Charles Weisberg, who was owner of a rare-book store on Walnut Street called Folios. Weisberg was considered one of Philadelphia's most colorful characters and was nicknamed the Baron due to his meticulous appearance. (2) While a student at University of Pennsylvania, he had been proclaimed a master mind, with a remarkable faculty for concentration, an excellent memory, unusual command of English language, keen perception, and extreme facility in development of new habits. (3) By time he left Penn (he never graduated), he had achieved best scholastic record in university's history. In mid-1930s, he was using that intelligence to con art connoisseurs and collectors, selling some $2,258 worth of nonexistent rare books and prints to people and institutions all over United States. His activities did not extend just to fanciful texts; Weisberg also passed dozens of forged checks, and he doctored otherwise insignificant editions of books with faked signatures of such American luminaries as Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Katherine Mansfield. (4) Most fortuitously, he purchased a significant amount of old paper and documents from Philadelphia Custom House sale in 1938. His involvement in tampering with materials acquired from that sale led to entire contents (some forty tons of genuine documents, including many significant records of United States history) being viewed as of questionable authenticity. (5) Yet as audacious as these frauds may seem, Weisberg's greatest confidence scheme involved music manuscripts. THE MUSICAL FUND SOCIETY (MFS) Founded in 1820, Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia is oldest music society in continuous existence in United States. To support its activities, society acquired a significant collection of printed and manuscript scores dating from late eighteenth to early twentieth century. (6) Among items society collected was a group of manuscripts by Francis Hopkinson, signer of Declaration of Independence, designer of American flag, poet, satirist, inventor, and one of America's first composers. (7) On 16 February 1933, MFS board authorized purchase of thirteen Hopkinson manuscripts for $5,000 (later reduced to $3,500) from Hungarian emigre Charles J. Nagy. (8) Two years later, on 8 February 1935, Dr. Edward Brooks Keffer (9) reported to MFS board that he had submitted Hopkinson materials purchased from Nagy to manuscript specialist Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, (10) who believed they were not genuine. In a letter written immediately after board meeting, secretary of MFS, Spencer P. …

Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East 1500-300 b.c. (review)

Reviewed by: Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East 1500–300 b.c. Charles E. Jones Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East 1500–300 b.c. By Olof Pedersen. Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press, 1998. xxii, 291 pp. $42.00. ISBN 1883053-390. Assyriology is the study of the languages, histories, and intellectual legacies of those ancient cultures whose literate members wrote their words on clay tablets in scripts we call cuneiform. Initial decipherment of these ancient scripts and the families of languages they record was accomplished barely a century and a half ago. Some of these languages, such as Akkadian, Sumerian, Ugaritic, and Hittite, are more or less well understood and are the subjects of burgeoning corpora of philological and linguistic scholarly apparatus. Others such as Elamite, Hurrian, Urartian, and Hattic remain poorly understood. Assyriology is a young field. On the other hand, the traditions that these languages and scripts represent are ancient. The earliest readable Sumerian texts date from the end of the fourth millennium B.C.E., and the last known Akkadian text is dated in the middle of the first century C.E. The intervening three millennia cover substantially more than half the span of recorded human history. It is a curiosity of history that virtually nothing of these ancient written traditions survives in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim written traditions. Not a single cuneiform text was collected, copied, transcribed, or described in the monastic traditions of Europe or Western Asia. Before the Enlightenment, the significance of these ancient cultures was understood solely with respect to their appearance in and significance to the stories of the Bible. As a consequence, Assyriology has developed an intellectual tradition in which the ancient manuscript has been the primary focus of scholarship. The training of students focuses on the details of reading broken and incomplete manuscripts and of assembling masses of manuscript material into slightly more coherent textual editions. In the case of compositions representing ancient literary or intellectual traditions such editions might have dozens or scores of manuscripts, dating over a span of hundreds or thousands of years. It is nevertheless the case that each manuscript is also understood to have (or to have once had) an archaeological context. Cuneiform tablets are never, or almost never, found in isolation. That documents discovered in proximity to one another are related is an assumption made by early archaeologists working in Mesopotamia. This assumption was soon borne out by internal evidence such as the colophons on literary tablets from Assurbanipal's library identifying them by things such as copyist, source, composition, and date. Similarly, documents such as letters and legal texts found together were soon proved to show internal unifying characteristics such as date and personnel mentioned. Many, perhaps most, of the very many cuneiform texts acquired not by legitimate excavation but by illicit digging and the [End Page 322] antiquities trade can also be assigned contexts based on script, date, genre, and content. The title under review is a fascinating and entirely successful compendium of the data relevant to the attributes of known archives and libraries together with the documents assigned to them. Based on a thorough knowledge of the huge corpus of text publication and archaeological literature, the author carefully and precisely describes the characteristics of more than two hundred individual archives and libraries ranging in size from a few documents to tens of thousands. He includes general characterizations of each archive or library; specific arguments for the assignment of particular texts to one or another archive or library; assessments of the philological and archaeological data supporting the assignment; and, whenever possible, architectural plans and details indicating their find spots. The author is himself an accomplished Assyriologist, and the section on archives and libraries from the city of Assur (pages 132-43) reflects his years of study on the documents from that site. The introductory chapter is a welcome replacement for the old standard assessments of libraries and archives in the Mesopotamian world (Møgens Weitmeyer, Babylonske og assyriske arkiver og biblioteker [Copenhagen: Branner og Korch, 1955] and the initial chapter of Ernst Posener, Archives in the Ancient World [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972]). This book is...

American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library (review)

American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library. http://memory.loc.gov/. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress. Requires standard web browser; for audio: requires RealAudio player with 14.4kbps or faster Internet connection, MPEG2/layer 3 (.mp3) player, or WaveForm (.wav) player; for highest quality images some collections require Tagged Image File Format (.tiff) viewer. It is appropriate that, in this bicentennial year of the establishment of the Library of Congress, we review the library's gift to the nation--a digital multimedia library named the American Memory Project (AMP). The aim of the project, to have over a million items on the site by this anniversary year, has been achieved. AMP has been growing rapidly since 1995, and now has over seventy fully digitized collections. Its contents range from manuscript letters to baseball cards, daguerreotypes to digital photographs, wax cylinder recordings to commercial jazz recordings, music manuscript scores to printed sheet music, and film clips to motion pictures. This wealth of resources is intended for researchers, students, teachers, and the public at all levels. The materials are drawn not only from the Library of Congress, but from a variety of institutions across the country. To date, approximately $60 million from both public and private sources has been spent on the project. Private donors include both individuals a nd corporations; noteworthy are Ameritech's three-year competitive grants. These funds provided support for institutions nationwide. Of the seventy collections, eighteen contain music or are music-related, with seven more music-related collections in preparation. This review concentrates on these eighteen collections. Collections The wide variety of topics included in AMP is reflected in the music collections. There are sheet music collections from Duke University (Historical American Sheet Music) and Brown University (African-American Sheet Music) from the same period, 1850-1920. Other sheet music collections include Music for the Nation, American Sheet 1870-1885, a collection of sheet music originally submitted for copyright registration during the post--Civil War era, and We'll Sing to Abe Our Song, a collection devoted to President Lincoln and the Civil War. This collection spans the period from the presidential campaign in 1859 to the centenary of Lincoln's birth in 1909. The sheet music collections generally include scanned scores in their entirety; some, such as the We'll Sing to Abe Our Song, also transcribe the lyrics separately. Cover art is scanned in color where the original was in color. At present, there are no sound recordings of the music to go with the scores. In addition to sheet music, there is a c ollection of nineteenth-century song sheets, America Singing, which contains only lyrics and no music. AMP is rich in ethnographic collections with multimedia access. These include: Gold, Sidney Robertson Cowell's WPA California Folk Project; Southern Mosaic, John and Ruby Lomax's recordings from their trip to the southern states; Hispano and Culture from the Rio Grande, Juan Rael's documentation of religious and secular music of Spanish-speaking residents of rural northern New Mexico and southern Colorado; the American Folklife Center's Indian Music, which presents traditional Omaha Native American music; and Alan Jabbour's Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier, performed by octogenarian Henry Reed of the Virginian Appalachians. Another ethnographic collection, 'Voices from the Dust Bowl, though not primarily a music collection, also contains some music. The collection documents the everyday life of residents of Farm Security Administration migrant work camps in central California in 1940 and 1941 through audio recordings, photographs, manuscript materials, publications, an d ephemera collected during two field trips. …

Global physics

Now that I have the opportunity and responsibility to read the scores of manuscripts sent to The Physics Teacher, I realize what a significant place this journal has in the hearts of physics teachers worldwide. Although most articles come from U.S. authors, a quick look through back issues makes it clear that we are a worldwide community that continually works to improve how we all teach our subject. Indeed, this month’s issue is devoted substantially to contributions from our international colleagues.

Rural Ruses: Illusion and Anxiety on the Russian Estate, 1775–1815

Among the scores of unpublished manuscripts in fond 89 (“Bolotovykh”) of the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg is a partially filled album spanning a forty-year period from the early 1780s to the early 1820s. One of the many long-term projects of the multitalented memoirist, landscape designer, and agronomist Andrei Timofeevich Bolotov (1738-1833), the album was initiated at Bogoroditsk, the crown estate where he worked as bailiff from 1776-1797, and continued to garner new contributions for several decades after he retired to Dvorianinovo, his estate and birthplace in northern Tula province. It has been summarized by one of the few scholars who has studied it as “an extremely interesting mirror of provincial byt.” The pretty and seemingly mimetic reflection of rural life that it provides is deceptive on a number of levels, however: for on the Russian estate during this period— and, as it turns Out, on the pages of the album itself—there is a good deal more going on than first meets the eye.