>> Paul Sommerfeld: Welcome
to those of you who are here.
My name is Paul Allan
Sommerfeld,
and this is my colleague
Susan Clermont,
and we are music specialists
in the Music Division.
One of our projects we've
been working on for --
at least I have been
working on a couple of years.
And Susan's been working on
for many more years than that,
is with our early or
pre-1800 musical manuscripts
and imprints, and
getting them cataloged
and getting them reported to a
larger database that we're going
to talk about today so that
people know that we have them
and can use them for their
various research and work.
So we're going to walk through
some of the amazing things
that we have found over
the last few years,
and why we're doing
all of this work.
So I'm going to hand it over
to Susan to start us off.
>> Susan Clermont: All right.
About two years ago, the Music
Division re-established an
official partnership with RISM,
an international association
of top music scholars,
musicologists, and librarians,
who for the past 70 years have
been pursuing a singular goal,
to document what music
resources exists worldwide
and to determine where
they are located.
The acronym RISM stands
for Repertoire International
des Sources Musicales
or an international
inventory of musical sources.
The goals of RISM are not only
ambitious, but unparalleled,
perhaps in any discipline.
The next? A little bit
of the RISM history.
The need to initiate such
an impossible project really
of identifying all pre-1800
manuscripts and imprints
in the world and recording
who holds them first came
up after the first World War.
But it re-emerged
much more urgency
after the second World War
when sources were
particularly vulnerable.
Plans began in earnest to
create an inventory around 1949.
By 1952, there were
committee meetings comprised
of musicologists and librarians
that were held in Paris.
And by the following year,
the RISM organization
was established.
By 1960, the first
publications appeared, Series B,
which are anthologies of music.
In 1971, the largest undertaking
by RISM started comprising
of 13 volumes that list
all pre-1800 editions
of music published
by a single composer.
In 1978, the A2 Series started,
which was composers' manuscripts
and copyists as well.
Because of the inherent
issues and fluidity
with manuscript material,
this project was not destined
to appear in a book format, but
rather it appeared on microfiche
that was easily update,
and then it came
out as a CD ROM with
annual updates.
In 1997, Series A2,
the manuscripts,
appeared as an Internet
database, offered in 2008
by subscription through EBSCO,
and then it was free of charge
in 2010 through the
RISM offices.
In 2013, RISM data was
offered as open data,
in 2014 as linked open data, and
at this point, Series A1, A2,
and Series B are being all
merged into one single database
that is available online for
free, no subscription needed.
So everyone has access,
and they use it.
In 2015 also saw advances
in online reporting
for individual libraries.
And this is where we realized
that we needed to up our game
and step in and start
doing some reporting.
By 2018, Paul and I,
every week we sit down,
and we are actively reporting
things that have not shown
up in the RISM database.
RISM -- yea, we can keep that.
Right now RISM lists a little
over a million music
manuscripts,
close to 200,000 imprints, and
it represents 38,000 composers.
And that is growing
every day, every year.
There was a precedent for RISM.
It's not like the first time
that this idea came to light.
Robert Eitner was
a bibliographer
and musician, composer,
whatever.
He published a 10-volume set
called the Quellen-Lexikon.
It was epic.
He published it in 1900, and it
only covered European libraries,
about 200 European libraries.
But it was along the same
lines of what's there
and how do we find it?
Who holds different things?
So Eitner sort of
served as a model
and the philosophical backbone
of the modern RISM project.
But it did only cover
European libraries.
I want to point out a few things
where RISM intersects really
with the Library of Congress.
At its inception in the
1950s, many of the members
on the RISM committee envisioned
their new musical inventory
to closely follow
Eitner's model they said
and only include
European libraries.
But it's a credit to the Library
of Congress that we helped
to convince that committee that
it was crucial at this point
in time, in the mid-20th century
to include all libraries
worldwide,
not just European libraries.
And for the United States
to become a major player.
The Library of Congress was
successful in claiming a spot
as one of the six
premier national libraries
to lead the RISM project.
We had a reference librarian.
His name was Richard S. Hill.
He was the sole U.S.
delegate to participate
in the 1952 Paris meetings
when RISM was established.
He also served on the
Joint U.S. Committee.
After his death, our chief
Harold Spivacke filled
in for him and conducted
his duties.
In 1965, our Library took
over responsibilities
for the solicitation,
processing, and reporting
of all U.S. RISM entries.
We were it.
In 1985, however, the U.S.
RISM office was relocated
to Harvard University, and only
sporadic reporting of Library
of Congress resources
then continued
as new RISM publications
were being prepared.
Beginning in 2008,
staff research focusing
on our early music
sources revealed
that a very large percentage of
our holdings were still absent
from both the Library of
Congress online catalog
as well as in RISM sources.
Documentation of these
shortcomings and strategies
for correcting them ensued.
The urgency to report these
omissions became more critical
once RISM established this
subscription-free online
database because people could
see, they could look online
and say, I wonder who
has this particular item.
And if we're not
there, we're not there,
and we weren't being consulted
for our own materials.
That's why in 2018, Paul
and I decided we would start
correcting this omission.
Currently, the Library
of Congress has reported 19,000
items, 14,000 are imprints,
about 5,000 are manuscripts.
Many of these were
picked up as RISM.
If you have a digital copy
of something on your website,
they pick up on that
make a record for it.
So close to 4,000 of our digital
items have been linked to RISM.
Probably the most reported items
are operas, close to 3,000.
And the most underreported
items include chamber music,
sacred music, and all genres
of manuscript materials.
You can compare us with
libraries in Germany.
The library in Berlin has
reported 88,000 to date.
The library in Munich is
78,000, British library 74,000,
but we're not the lowest number.
I mean there are other libraries
that have reported less
than we have, and I think
it's all a matter of funding
and getting staff to
put in these reports.
What's left to report?
RISM estimates that today
their catalog contains 33%
of pre-1800 music manuscripts
that are extant worldwide.
And they say they have about
60% of extant pre-1800 imprints.
So it is not complete by any
stretch of the imagination.
And hopefully we will
help to remedy some
of that with our work.
I have a little aside.
This is Richard S. Hill.
He was the member of the music
reference staff who served
on the first RISM committee.
He was really one
of the prominent members
of that committee.
We have lots of correspondence
from the 1940s and 1950s
in his collection that
chronicles all of the work
that he did on behalf
of RISM and on behalf
of the United States really to
get this project off the ground.
This is an example of one of
the letters from Frederick Blume
who was the RISM Joint Committee
Chair writing to the Librarian
of Congress, Luther Evans
saying that he wants the Library
of Congress to take
that role as one
of six national libraries
worldwide to take the lead.
And this is one of
Richard Hill's letters.
He sent letters to hundreds and
hundreds of libraries across
and institutions across
the United States asking
to please send in
their information
so that he could do
the reporting to RISM.
Mr. Eitner.
Yes, we mentioned Robert Eitner
as having done the
Quellen-Lexikon.
He was also a composer,
and in the process
of researching Mr.
Eitner a little bit,
we found that we have the
only holograph manuscript
of Mr. Eitner's musical work.
It's an oratoria and
the title is Judith,
and we have just recently
reported Judith to RISM.
There are 26, I think, other
entries for Robert Eitner.
They're all German libraries,
and then there's the one library
in the United States with
the holograph manuscript,
which is ours.
I'll turn this over to Paul.
>> Paul Sommerfeld: So now
we're going to talk about
and share some of the many
things that we have found
in our reporting
that are interesting
for a variety of reasons.
So first, we're going to
talk about Willoughby Bertie,
Earl of Abingdon, a composer
from the late 1800th century.
So back in January
2019, Susan and I sat
down to report our
first batch of items
to RISM on a very cold day.
We'd selected and pulled
about a dozen items thinking
that we could breeze through
them in about two hours.
Famous last words.
[laughter] From the
card catalog,
Susan had found a couple of
pieces by Willoughby Bertie,
Earl of Abingdon, and
when we finally looked
at the physical items at this
meeting, it quickly became clear
that this bound volume that
we had, this one bound volume,
had more than one or two pieces
within it as we thought it did.
Suffice to say we spent
our entire two hour meeting
reporting over a dozen items
from that one bound volume alone
including a handful that weren't
in RISM at all, meaning that
they are potentially unique
to the Library's collections.
Our catalog records
didn't mentioned the miter,
meaning they were for all
intents and purposes hidden
from any kind of user discovery.
So in this, you can
see it's bound
with all of these other items.
There are capricios, minuets,
country dances, songs, hymns,
marches, and some of my favorite
are some more patriotic items.
There's the Convention March,
for it says Washington vet
up for the Constitution,
the American Militia,
the Marches of Thirteen Stripes.
Oh, go back up.
But all of these
different kinds of pieces
that we hadn't really
encountered before.
And even if they did have a
RISM record, there are only one
or two institutions typically
that report having these items
and we're often the only
non-European library
for many of them.
And it's unique items
like these are how we know
that we will continue to find
rare and valuable imprints
for years to come because there
are a lot of bound volumes
like this in our collections.
This is another example.
This is a copyist manuscript by
the composer Isabella Colbran
where there is bound with
several other works by others.
And again, we don't really
know what's in the volume
until we actually look at
it because a catalog record
in the cards might
have one piece written,
but there could be easily
a dozen more as we found
out on our very first
day of reporting.
So another really interesting
item that we found is
by the composer Ludovico
Grossi da Viadana
who was an Italian composer,
teacher, and Franciscan Friar
who lived from about
1560 to 1627.
He was one of the earliest
composers to make use
of figured bass,
which would come
to define much of
the Baroque era.
And the Music Division holds in
its collections several imprints
from the early 1600s that have
proofed particularly tricky
to report.
So how did this happen?
So part of our process as we
report to RISM is that we go
through the physical
card catalog card
by card alphabetically
seeing if there are items
that need to be reported.
So it can be very labor
intensive checking the
print-bound volumes of RISM, but
then also checking the database.
So I was working my way through
the letter V, as I started
at the end of the alphabet, and
Susan started at the beginning
so that we wouldn't be
constantly using the same
drawers and volumes
and information.
So while going through the
letter V, I found an item,
a record, for an early 17th
century piece by Viadana.
When I went to check
the database to see
if it had been reported, I
discovered something odd.
The Library had been
reported decades ago
as having just the [inaudible]
or voice five of a 1607 edition
of this piece, the Psalmi omnes,
one of three institutions
in the world.
But something was odd
when I looked at the card.
The card indicated it was
the second of two cards
for an item record, and
the first card was nowhere
to be found.
So I requested the
item to be pulled
and in the meantime
did some investigating.
First, I checked
our card catalogs
to our other card
catalogs, the title series.
We have a series in
the cataloging section
that duplicates what we have,
and then there's the shelf list
that just goes through what's
literally on the shelf in order.
All of those were also missing
the first card, and I needed
that card to figure
out what was going on,
that this was so weird.
Luckily, the reading room
still keeps a microfiche,
and you can see a scan of it on
the slide here, of the shelf,
the microfiche of the shelf list
that was made back in the 1950s.
So what you see on the slide
is card two of the card,
and then next to it is a
scan of the microfiche,
not even microfilm,
but microfiche,
that was made in the 1950s.
Luckily, I was able
to check that
and the first card was still
there when they scanned it
in the 50s, and that proved
incredibly illuminating
to figure out what had happened.
It became clear to me that one
of my previous colleagues had,
decades ago, looked only at this
card and not the physical item
to report our holdings for
this particular Viadana print.
Hence, while they reported
the Library as having V1369,
you can see with RISM the way
that they're given a
number to everything.
So there'll be the
letter for whatever letter
of the alphabet it
is, and then a number,
and then it's just sequential.
They had reported us as having
V1369, which is at the top
of the slide, and
a part of V1370.
But what I discovered was that
we actually had V1370, 71,
and 72, and that if they
had looked at the item,
and the full record of the
card, they would have figured
out what we actually had.
And why that's so rare and so
interesting is we are only one
of two libraries in the world
that has a full set of parts
for this particular piece.
The other library is in Bologna.
So you can see that's the
BC, that's their siglum,
BC is the designation
for their library.
And we're the only ones that
have a full set of parts.
And before everybody
thought we just had two parts
from a set of five.
So it's again an incredibly
rare item made even more rare
that we discovered simply by
reporting and having to check,
print various print microfilm
and online sources
to discover that.
So you'll see the
item is on the table,
but these are some scans
from the item itself.
It's a really lovely print.
So similarly there are composers
from the late 18th century
for whom we have significant
holdings of their works
that have been grossly
underreported to RISM.
One of those is Johann
Baptiste Wanhal.
The mention of late 18th century
Vienna frequently congers
thoughts of Mozart,
Hatdn, Beethoven,
but a Bohemian composer,
violinist, and teacher,
Wanhal remained active in
Austria throughout his life.
He moved to Vienna
in the early 1760s,
and he became a very
prominent composer
in Viennese circles
at that time.
He was very prominent
into verging Viennese
publish industry.
In the years that followed
after his move to Vienna,
Viennese publishers issued
over 270 prints of his music
and foreign publishers such as
Andre, the Hummels, John Bland,
and Robert Bremer helped spread
his music's reach providing a
model for the composers
who followed him in
the 19th century.
So he was really
at the forefront
of music publishing
right before it exploded
in Europe at that time.
And as we discovered we
have a lot of imprints
for him especially
his chamber music.
Beginning in the 1780s, he
realized that the market
for large symphonic works
maybe wasn't what it once was,
and so he started composing
and publishing a lot
of chamber music.
And so we have lots and lots
of songs, very strophic often,
of various topics
that he published
and were widely popular with
middle class audiences in Vienna
and throughout Europe
at that time.
Again, none of it reported.
So these are on the
table as well to see
after we're done talking.
Similarly, Johann Rudolf
Zumsteeg spent most
of his career in what
is now Southern Germany
around the city of Stuttgart.
He was the concert master
at the Wurttemberg Court
and he championed works
of other German composers
or Germanish composers,
especially Mozart's operas,
Don Giovanni, The Magic
Flute, Cosi fan tutte.
But he was also a
composer in his own right
and wrote a great number
of ballads in Lieder,
writing especially lyric
melodies and experimentations
with harmony that were
very influential on Shubert
in the coming decades.
And again, not reported.
We've now reported several
dozen pieces of these chamber
or small ensemble works
that nobody knew we had.
Several of them are possibly
unique to the Library
because we still have to create
new RISM records for them.
So it's again staggering,
the number of pieces.
And I have this one up here.
This one is one of my favorites.
It's called Die Bussende.
And really it's my favorite
because this lovely engraving
on the cover, I'll do
a close-up of that.
We have this woman playing her
lute looking rather unamused
or maybe even rolling
her eyes, with a skeleton
in the closet next door,
as two gentlemen walk in.
And it's in such
great condition,
probably because very few people
knew that it existed here.
But when you start to read
the text, the engraving starts
to make a bit more sense.
It deals with essentially a
woman learning to be penitent
and learning her place
because Die Bussende translates
as depenitent as well.
But it starts to make sense why
this particular engraving might
be on there, on the cover.
>> [ Inaudible ]
>> So that's part of when it
was acquired by the Library.
So one final composer,
oh there's a cover
or the first page of music.
The one final composer
as I'm going to hand it
over to Susan again is Peter
von Winter, who was a composer
who sort of bridged the
gap into the 19th century.
He composed a lot of operas.
Indeed he was primarily
an opera composer
who has significant
coverage in our collections.
And there are many of his opera
scores that we could discuss,
but I'm going to hand
this over to Susan to talk
about one particularly special
item that was reported recently
because it was reported
through her efforts.
>> And let me digress just for a
minute to tell you a little bit
about the providence of this
one manuscript that we have
out here that's by
Peter von Winter.
In 1902, a new set of guidelines
for the systematic development
of the newly organized
Music Division's collections
was instituted.
An opera immediately
received a considerable share
of attention because, "the
peculiar condition of opera
in the United States seemed
to demand that a center
of reference and
research be created
for the students of opera."
And that's a quote from
Oscar Sonneck in 1908.
Accordingly, a series of
want lists was compiled.
However, when it was determined
after a comprehensive search
that hundreds of items included
on the Music Division's
want list for operas
in full score were unprocurable
in manuscript or print version.
The option of contracting
copyists
to generate transcripts
was explored.
Efforts to identify
the locations of cities
and libraries that
held exact versions
of these scores was made.
And then to negotiate copying
permissions, costs, terms,
they were all initially led
by the Music Division Chief,
Oscar Sonneck starting in 1903.
And he had the full support
of the Librarian of Congress
who was an opera
buff, Herbert Putnam.
The project went for 25 years,
and about 700 transcriptions
were completed.
Most libraries were cooperative
except those in Italy.
They would not let us come
in and copy their materials.
One such transcript that
was made back in 1922
when the project was drawing
to a completion was Cora
and Alonzo by Peter von Winter.
I'll scroll down here.
There it is.
And you can see there
were certain criteria
if you look at the slide.
Mr. Sonneck wrote up all
of what needed to be done
for each copyist that
was doing the work.
He wanted it as close to
a facsimile as possible,
and at the very end, the copyist
was required to date this copy,
and sign their name to
it, and say which library
or which institution they
copied the manuscript from.
So this is an example,
Cora and Alonzo.
A little bit back
to Peter von Winter.
As Paul was saying, he's
a German opera composer.
He followed Mozart and
preceded Carl Maria von Weber,
so acting as a bridge
between the two
in the development
of German opera.
Winter was born in
Mannheim, and he played
in the Mannheim court orchestra.
He was a violinist.
He also studied with
Salieri in Vienna.
And in 1778, he moved to Munich
where he became the director
of the Court Theater at
which point he started
to write stage works, at first
ballets and then melodramas,
and Cora and Alonzo
is one of these.
It did get its premier
in 1778 in Munich.
The thing with this particular
opera is that the original
that we copied from was
really the only copy
of Cora and Alonzo.
And during the second
World War it was lost.
So our transcript is
the only copy of Cora
and Alonzo at this point.
There are other examples that
part of this transcript project
that the original items that we
copied back 100 years ago are
missing, and we hold
the only copy.
So we thought it was
particularly important to report
as many of these transcripts.
They don't quite fit the
criteria in some way.
RISM is supposed to be pre-1800,
and obviously this
transcript came from 1922,
but the opera itself
was from 1778.
So it does fit the bill.
And several of these were
reported, oh, maybe about five
or six years ago, there was
a spreadsheet that was sent
to RISM saying here are
all of these transcripts.
They haven't all
shown up on line yet.
Paul and I are going
to have to review
which ones did get reported,
which ones did not get reported.
There's a lot of
sorting to do with this.
But these really
need to go up there
because they sometimes
hold far more importance
than we anticipate.
Other copyists' manuscripts
are much better known here
at the Library.
Oh, this is the record
for Peter von Winter.
And you can see we've
reported Cora and Alonzo,
and you see at the very bottom
is the only library that's
listed as holding is
the Library of Congress.
So that one has gone up.
We did put that record in.
Okay. Another very underreported
category that's dear
to my heart are music
tablatures.
Carl Engel was our second
Music Division Chief
and he had a particular
interest in notation,
whether it was notations for
chance or tablatures for lute,
for organ, for whatever
instrument.
And he did a lot of collecting
of these particular materials.
Somehow when RISM reporting was
being done in the early days
for the Library,
these particular classification
numbers around M26 and M140
for tablatures, was ignored.
And no one knew we had them.
A lot of catalog records did
not make it online either.
So they were hidden.
Efforts now have
been made to create
or update our online catalog
records and to insert several
of these extremely rare
volumes into our digital queue.
So soon they should
be going up online.
We've also succeeded in having
several individual scans
included in the upcoming
publication and encyclopedia
of tablature, which is being
compiled under the editorship
from John Griffith, David Delata
[phonetic], and Philip Ventrix
as part of project Ricercar
at the Centre d'etude Superieur
de la Renaissance in tours.
It will comprise 400
examples of tablature
for some 40 instruments with
facsimiles, transcriptions,
and commentaries,
and the Library
of Congress will be included
in that encyclopedia.
One of the most outstanding,
I think,
examples of our tablatures
is a volume, --
it's my favorite volume
in the whole collection --
The Capricci a due Stromenti
by Bellerofonte Castaldi.
Castaldi was a lute
virtuoso, composer, poet,
an artist, and a radical.
He was like the Bob Dylan or
the Leonard Cohen of his day.
He was a rock god,
and he knew it.
His duos from his Capricci a
due Stromenti are for tiorba
and tiorbino, which is a
smaller version of the theorbo.
And Castaldi actually
invented the tiorbino
so that he could do his duos.
So he has his own
instrument there.
They're showpieces,
and he also did all
of the engraving
for this volume.
He had a friend who
had an engraving shop,
and asked if he could step in.
So he engraved the volume,
he decorated it with
his own artwork.
This volume came to us as a gift
from Suzanne Bloch, the daughter
of Ernest Bloch,
composer Ernest Bloch.
She was an early
music performer.
And she gave this to the
Library in the early 1980s,
and for some reason, because the
card catalog had already closed,
there was no card for
it in the catalog.
It didn't make it into
the online catalog,
and it certainly
wasn't reported to RISM.
No one knew we had Castaldi.
There were several researchers.
One did an entire dissertation
on this particular volume
of lute pieces and
searched the world
for this copy and
couldn't find it.
He only wrote about the copy in
France and the copy in Modena
where Castaldi was from.
Now he knows we have it.
He's coming back.
He's going to do a paper
about our Castaldi book.
Castaldi is a real, he's
a very colorful character.
He had the big preface at
the beginning of this book
where he talks about his life
and how it's a tragic
life, it's a dramatic life.
His younger brother was killed,
the other brother was
expected to avenge the death.
He bought a gun.
He shot himself in the foot.
He was lame.
He couldn't get any women.
He had to drink alcohol
because of the pain.
I mean, it's just
a great preface.
He's very, very colorful.
But the music --
it's wonderful music.
It's been recorded
and it's been written
about in the literature now.
But, one of my favorites.
[ Inaudible ]
I believe so, yea, because
they've recorded these pieces.
>> [ Inaudible ]
>> It's a smaller tiorbo.
It's an octave higher I believe.
I have two other examples.
I'm not going to get into
details with these, but again,
this is one, this
Barbetta is one
of three copies in the world.
We're the only U.S. library,
the other two are
European libraries.
As listed here, one in
Germany, one in Poland.
And there's a third
example of tablature.
We do have some tablatures
that are
in manuscript, quite
a few of them.
This one is particularly
wonderful.
This is organ tablature.
It was done around the 1590s.
I think the final
date on this is 1602.
And it's about 100 pieces of
this person's, Erasmus Hofer's,
favorite motets from
the 16th century,
and he entabulated them, and
he has them all in the book.
And about 25% of them are unica,
the pieces don't
exist anywhere else.
And we have this
particular book of tablature.
It's been studied.
It's been written about.
It's important.
It's not in RISM
yet, but we will get
to the letter H soon enough.
Another, let's see, yea, another
category is sacred music.
Let's skip ahead to one.
Yea. Our sacred music volumes
are very much underreported.
Anything in those
M2000s, it's hit or miss.
And Paul and I realize we have
a lot of work to do there.
We have one.
This one is a print edition
of hymns, Marian hymns,
that were published in
1647 in Czechoslovakia.
The composer's name is Adam
Michna is how he's usually
referred to.
He's a Czech composer,
poet, hymn writer, organist,
and choir leader of the
early Baroque era who studied
at the town's Jesuit Gymnasium.
The Jesuits were the leading
musical force in the Czech lands
in the 17th and 18th centuries.
And Michna seems to have become
one of their favorite composers.
Besides his musical creds,
Michna was also a tavern keeper,
and his compositions
are filled with popular
and vernacular illusions
as well.
Hymns are clearly
influenced by a strong
and long established tradition
of congregational
singing in Czech lands.
But nothing discoverable in
his background fully accounts
for the marked and
contemporary Italian influence
in his Latin church music.
We have one hymnal by
Michna, and it is part
of our collections and
will be reported in 2020.
It contains simple four and
five-part homophonic settings
of his own religious poetry
and several of the pieces
from this book have
remained in popular use
in Czechoslovakia to this day.
And there is, we have
not reported Michna yet.
You see it's only available
in two Czech libraries
worldwide, that's it.
>> [ Inaudible ]
>> We haven't made that, no.
Okay. Another example
of sacred pieces
and this is a big category.
This is a book, it's
called the Ephrata Codex.
It technically really
wasn't the first hymnal
of the Ephrata Cloisters,
but it's close.
The Ephrata Cloister
flourished in the first half
of the 18th century in
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
under the leadership of
Johann Conrad Beissel.
Much like a medieval monastery,
singing was an integral part
of their monastic life.
Beissel taught music
theory and practice of music
and oversaw all the
Brothers and Sisters
who produced beautifully
decorated books
that preserve their
musical canon.
Today, the Library
of Congress is one
of only three institutions
that preserved the music
of the Ephrata Cloister.
Our collection includes
about 15 books,
most of the in manuscript.
They span about 1739 to 1780.
This particular one, the one
that we call the Ephrata Codex,
has an inscription in it.
We believe that this one
at one point belonged
to Benjamin Franklin.
There's one example
of the music from it.
>> [ Inaudible ]
>> Lancaster.
Yes. Okay.
I am out of order here.
I am sorry.
Clementi, yea.
I might as well just
read from that.
Ninety-one musical imprints
by Clementi are reported
in RISM under the LC sigla.
However, we have well over
60 holograph manuscripts
by Clementi in our collections,
and none of them
have been reported.
Some of them haven't
even been identified.
Many are now in our
online catalog.
But there's a lot of work,
and I'm anticipating that Paul
and I will spend many two-hour
RISM sessions just trying
to figure out how
to report these.
Usually for manuscript
material, you're asked to put
in the incipits, which
we've learned how to do.
And so it's much
easier to figure
out if other libraries are
holding similar manuscripts
because we do have ability
to check the incipits
and to enter our own in, but
Clementi is soon to come.
We're on the letter
C. Oh, the Bach.
The Bach, yea, one of the --
I think I had mentioned
the Bach before --
one of the better known
manuscripts that we have here
in the Library, it's a
collection of the French Suites
by Johann Sebastian Bach.
At first when we got
the manuscript in 1924,
it was billed as
being, it was gift,
and they said this was
one of the originals.
It was in Bach's
hand, but it is not.
It is in the hand of
Johann Christoph Altnickol.
But that being said, it's
not any less important.
There are only six
complete manuscripts
of the Bach French Suites.
There is not a complete
holograph
of the Bach French Suites.
And all six of the
copyists' manuscripts,
this one in particular,
because it's a student
who Bach knew and
had in his home.
He probably copied
this particular example
from a manuscript that
was in Bach's home.
So it's got a lot of
significance to it
in the ordering of it.
It's an earlier manuscript
so there are differences
in the musical content
on this one.
We all know it here.
We know it well.
It's not yet reported in RISM,
but we are about
to do that as well.
>> So continuing
with manuscripts
that we've been reporting.
For many performing
ensembles, every year seems
to be a Beethoven year, but
the year 2020 has become
particularly star-studded,
celebrating the composer's
250th anniversary.
With this context in mind, Susan
and I decided at the beginning
of this year to tackle
the Library's lack
of reporting our significant
Beethoven holdings to RISM.
We had discovered that
none of our manuscripts
or imprints had been reported.
None. Now it does make
sense why this would be so,
as primarily a composer
of the early 19th century,
and most of Beethoven's works
fall outside the previously hard
cutoff date of 1800
for RISM reporting.
It used to be a very
hard pre-1800,
anything post-1800 was
outside the domain of RISM.
But with RISM's migration
to the online database
over the last several years,
many major institutions
have begun reporting their
Beethoven holdings.
We didn't want to be
left behind either.
The Music Division holds over
a dozen music manuscripts
and sketches in Beethoven's
hand,
and as of this past Thursday,
almost all of them
have been reported.
We have two more to finish.
Again, this work is
vital as many researchers
and performers alike use the
database as their primary means
to locate any imprints or
any manuscripts worldwide.
So these manuscripts that
we have include the complete
manuscript for the Opus 109
piano sonata, the sixth movement
of Opus Three Trio,
sketches from the Presto
of the Opus 130 string quartet,
sketches for his famous Opus
106 Hammerklavier piano sonata.
The list goes on.
But sketches for this last
work are of special importance,
the Hammerklavier sonata
because no complete manuscript
in his hand exist for the
work, and we have eight pages
of sketches for the third
and fourth movements.
And there are only a handful of
institutions that have sketches
for those particular movements.
And so a much larger ongoing
project is now to report the
over 400 first and early
editions, early imprints
of his works demonstrating
our work is quite never done.
Because with these Beethoven
imprints, there are a lot
of institutions reporting what
they have now, and we have one
of the largest collections of
the first and early editions.
And so now we're determining
what do we have specifically
and then to report it.
So these are just some
scans of some of the items,
and we do have them on
display as well to see
after we're finished speaking.
So then that leaves us at the
end here with what is the future
for our RISM reporting?
Well Susan and I have continued
to go through the cards.
I'm in letter T, she's in
letter C. We'll meet our way
in the middle at some point.
And we're now really
reporting manuscripts.
Our first year we focused
primarily on imprints,
just to get a handle on the
shear volume of the project,
but now reporting manuscripts
has added a whole new dimension
to continue on.
And we've really got a
workflow going now with many,
many more items to report.
We mentioned like the bound,
bound with volumes
like the Abingdon.
We have over 300 binders
volumes from the 19th century
that have many works in
them that easily fall
under RISM's original
parameters of pre-1800.
And maybe even one day
RISM will make its way
into the 19th century
with reporting
as so many other European
institutions are already doing.
So it's again, our
work is never done.
That this really isn't a
project that we'll complete,
but a workflow that
will become embedded
in the Library's practices.
So I think now what we'll do
is if you want to come forward,
we have a lot of these
materials on display
so you can take a look at them.
We can talk more specifics
about several of them,
and actually just get a
feel -- well, not a feel,
a look for the actual items.
So come on up.
[applause]