02 September 2016
Setting Shakespeare to Music
The British Library's popular exhibition Shakespeare in Ten Acts closes on 6 September 2016. Over the years, the Bard has had a profound influence on music. Our holdings reflect this, with music contemporary to Shakespeare, new music composed for Shakespeare and music inspired by Shakespeare all to be found in our extensive music collections.
One particular gem is our manuscript of Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream (Egerton MS 2955). Composed in 1843 as a result of a royal commission from Friedrich Wilhelm IV, it comprises the music for the famous Scherzo, Notturno and Wedding March movements (pictured below). The manuscript itself dates from around 1844 and is a piano arrangement of these well-known excerpts in Mendelssohn's own hand.
Felix Mendelssohn's 'Wedding March' for A Midsummer Night's Dream (Egerton MS 2955, folio 12 verso)
We're also in possession of the sketches and libretto for Richard Wagner's Das Liebesverbot, an opera based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Both form part of the extensive Zweig Collection (Zweig MSS 104 and 119).
Sketch for Richard Wagner's Das Liebesverbot (Zweig MS 104, folio 1 recto)
From September 1839 to April 1842, Wagner spent a rather miserable two-and-a-half years in Paris. He was forced to earn a living by making arrangements of operatic selections and by musical journalism. This unhappy period also saw the composition of his opera Das Liebesverbot, which was accepted by the Théâtre de la Renaissance in March 1840. However, the work was a resounding flop, with the second performance cancelled because of backstage fisticuffs. Two months later, the theatre was forced into bankruptcy and the work was never again performed in Wagner's lifetime.
Full digital versions of the sketches and libretto of Wagner's Das Lieberverbot are available, and Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream is on our wishlist for digitisation. In addition, if you don't think you'll be able to get to the British Library to catch the Shakespeare exhibition before it closes, fear not - a wealth of Shakespeare-related material can be found on our Shakespeare web pages.
05 July 2016
Can you handle our Handel?
Well, yes you can - and now from the comfort of your own home or office!
An eye-watering 16,500 images later, digitisation of our world-famous collection of Handel autograph manuscripts is complete. From Acis and Galatea to Zadok the priest (and everything in-between), all of your Handel favourites are now at your fingertips.
Muse over Messiah, revel in an organ concerto or simply browse the collection and discover something new. To find out more, search for "handel" at www.bl.uk/manuscripts.
'Halleluja chorus' from Handel's Messiah. R.M.20.f.2, f. 100r. Browse the whole manuscript online.
03 June 2016
Peter Kennedy Archive
As part of an AHRC Cultural Engagement project grant awarded to City University and partially funded by the National Folk Music Fund, ethnomusicologist Andrew Pace, has engaged in a project to catalogue thousands of paper and photographic files from Peter Kennedy’s collection of British and Irish folk music held at the British Library.
This month we have launched a unique website - www.peterkennedyarchive.org - in which listeners can retrace the chronology and geographical routes of Kennedy's extensive field recording activity. In the text below, Andrew describes the project and walks us through the website's main features.
Peter Kennedy was one of the most prolific collectors of British and Irish folk music and customs from the 1950s up until his death in 2006. Working closely with other collectors of his generation, such as Alan Lomax, Sean O’Boyle and Hamish Henderson, he recorded hundreds of traditional performers ‘in the field’, including Margaret Barry, Fred Jordan, Paddy Tunney, Harry Cox, Frank and Francis McPeake and Jack Armstrong. In 2008 his collection came under the care of the World and Traditional Music section of the British Library.
I’ve been working on Peter’s sizeable collection periodically since 2010, cataloguing thousands of audio tapes and photographs of traditional performers and uploading some of this material to Sounds. In fact, just this month an additional 500 photographs and 70 audio recordings from Peter’s collection have been added to the existing collection available online.
However, Peter’s paper files, comprising song texts, scores, contracts, draft manuscripts and a large amount of correspondence between himself and performers, collectors, institutions and enquirers, hadn’t been catalogued. This is the task that I’ve been undertaking since January. All of these papers will be uploaded to the Library’s catalogue in due course.
Amongst these papers I discovered 31 reports written by Peter for the BBC’s ‘Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme’, a project on which he was working during the 1950s. Across 180 typewritten pages, Peter describes his daily itinerary recording traditional performers around the UK and Ireland between 1952 and 1962. Full of anecdotes and insightful information about the musicians he recorded - including confirmation of when and where he recorded them - these documents reveal a great deal about Peter’s fieldwork during this period.
I decided to use these reports as the basis for a new website which brings these narratives together with all of the audio recordings and photographs from Peter’s collection that have been digitised so far: www.peterkennedyarchive.org.
These reports feature ‘hotspots’ placed over the names of the more than 650 musicians that Peter recorded during these trips. Clicking on the name of a performer reveals any sound recordings or photographs taken of them by Peter on that particular day that are available to view and listen to on Sounds. Additionally, links to entries in the British Library’s catalogue are provided for any related material that hasn’t yet been digitised, such as Peter’s tapes or BBC transcription discs.
What makes this website unique is the way it contextualises recordings and photographs of performers with Peter’s own notes about them. Whilst the British Library’s catalogue is useful as a search tool, it doesn’t reveal how a collection was formed and developed – and it doesn’t tell us very much about who created it. This new website gives us a better idea of what’s in this collection by refocusing attention on Peter as a recordist and reconstituting his material into a form that better resembles how he created it.
I hope www.peterkennedyarchive.org will prove useful to researchers and musicians alike and encourage more people to explore Peter’s collection at the British Library. As more of his field recordings are digitised and attached to the site, it should become an increasingly valuable resource
- Andrew Pace
Find out more about the work of the British Libary's Sound Archive and the new Save our Sounds programme online.
Follow the British Library Sound Archive @soundarchive and the British Library's World and Traditional Music activities @BL_WorldTrad on Twitter.
27 October 2015
Curatorial vacancy in the Music Collections
We recently advertised details of a vacancy that has arisen in the British Library’s music department. The post will have a particular focus for exploring digital opportunities with music materials, but will also involve working with the Library’s rich heritage music collections in manuscript and print format. The post will require a mix of musicological and professional library-based skills and experience, as well as technical knowledge relevant to digital humanities in the field of music. The closing date is 1 November, and interviews are scheduled for 16 November in London. For further details please see the Vacancies section of the Library’s website: http://www.bl.uk/.
07 July 2015
Thea Musgrave - a new performance and a PhD opportunity
A few years ago the British Library acquired the archive of Thea Musgrave. We are now collaborating with the University of Glasgow to offer a PhD studentship on "The music of Thea Musgrave: an analysis based on the archival sources". Now in her 80s, Thea Musgrave remains very active as a composer, and her latest work Voices of our Ancestors will be premiered on Thursday 9 July at the City of London Festival by the Choir of Selwyn College Cambridge.
Photo: Christian Steiner
The studentship will be offered under the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme in conjunction with the British Library, London. This exciting opportunity will require the researcher to divide his or her time between the University of Glasgow and the British Library. The student will be expected to assist with the cataloguing and interpretation of the archive, and will be invited to participate in other aspects of the British Library’s activities. A supervisory team from both institutions will oversee this work and full research training (including archival research skills) will be offered. The team will include Dr Martin Parker Dixon (Music) and Dr Simon Murray (Theatre Studies) from Glasgow University, and Richard Chesser, Head of Music at the British Library.
The studentship is funded for three years to commence in October 2015 and covers tuition fees at the Home/EU rate, due to funding. Home students and EU students who have lived in the UK for 3 years prior to the award will also receive a maintenance bursary (stipend) of £14,057 (2015/16 RCUK rate). In addition, the student is eligible to receive up to £1,000 a year from the British Library to support travel directly related to the doctoral research, and will be given use of a desk and computer in the Music department of the Library and access to staff catering facilities. All AHRC Collaborative PhD students automatically become part of the UK-wide Collaborative Doctoral Partnership development scheme which will provide training in a range of skills needed for research within museums, archives, galleries and heritage organisations.
Informal enquiries are welcome. Please write to Dr Martin Parker Dixon ([email protected]) in the first instance.
A page of sketches for Thea Musgrave's new work, Voices of our Ancestors
We see four interconnected questions as providing the stimulus for developing and integrating original research into Musgrave’s oeuvre:
- Thea Musgrave follows a fairly typical pattern of British composing of the period in that she is concerned to synthesise new continental techniques of serialism and aleatoricism with more traditional academic preoccupations of long-term tonal planning and modal harmony. With this, for example, she follows the same trajectory as the composers of the more heavily researched Manchester School. A comparative analysis of Musgrave’s technical via media – for which a study of the sketches would be indispensable – would provide an intimate portrait of the cultural and intellectual tolerances and ambitions of post-War Britain.
- Another significant parallel with the Manchester School is Musgrave’s impulse towards drama and theatre, both in terms of writing for the stage, but also working with movement and spacialisation to affect ‘dramatic-abstract’ scenarios in her instrumental works. It would be important to contextualise her theatricalisation of musical form, and her concept of the dramatic against theatre practices and theories of the day. Musgrave has been described as essentially an operatic composer and it is important to substantiate this insight by discerning the representational, theatrical or narrative elements of her musical language. We stress that the concept of ‘theatre’ must not be treated naively or ahistorically, and this is why the investigation of this key aspect of Musgrave’s oeuvre needs to be carried out in collaboration with Theatre Studies.
- A broader approach to her technique would attempt to discover the origins of her notion of compositional professionalism and work ethic, and her tactfulness and practicality towards the technical limitations of musical performers. These are principles that she has generally wanted to impress upon her students. Musgrave has very successfully managed the ‘business’ of compositional production at a time when commissions for new music were not easy to come by. Because she settled in the USA in the early 1970s, her life affords the opportunity to consider the different working conditions, expectations and cultural positions of the American and the European composer as they attempted to build a career within the economy of new music during the latter half of the 20th Century.
- A further question relates to how her compositional career-building in the post-War context was shaped, hampered, or indeed boosted by gender and national identity. Early in her career, Musgrave seems to have benefitted enormously by being identified as Scottish at a time when Scottish musical institutions needed to champion homegrown talent. This identification does not sit easily with her more modernist and international positioning. And while a good proportion of her music has Scottish themes, there is no overt nationalist sentiment in her work. It is also impossible to ignore the fact that she is very much treated as a woman composer, even though she would rather be considered a ‘composer’. Susan McClary notes that Musgrave is one of many successful female musicians who is quick to rebuff any association with feminism. This tension must be explored.
In all of these areas of enquiry we anticipate that close study of the manuscript materials will underpin the research findings. It may then be appropriate for a catalogue description of the archive, taking account of the compositional processes as revealed in the source materials, to form an appendix to the thesis. By this means the student’s contribution to the Library’s catalogue can form part of the overall evaluation of the PhD.
For further details of how to apply for the studentship, please see http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_408759_en.pdf
Applications should be submitted by Friday 17th July 2015, and interviews will take place in early August.
18 December 2014
'Earliest' polyphonic music discovered in British Library
This blog has been quiet for a while, but plenty has been going on in the meantime. See the BBC News website for a report on a BL music manuscript presented to Henry VIII by the famous music scribe, spy and double agent Petrus Alamire, which has been recorded complete for the first time - and which reached no. 2 in the charts in the week it was released! We've just published the complete choirbook on our Digitised Manuscripts site, and you can read more about it on the BL Medieval blog. Also see our European Studies blog for a fascinating account of the circumstances surrounding the first performance of Offenbach's La Belle Hélène, exactly 150 years ago.
Meanwhile, reports emerged yesterday in the press (including here and here) of the discovery in the British Library of the earliest piece of polyphonic music. Can this strange coded message really rewrite the history of choral music by shifting the earliest known harmony back by more than a century? Let’s take a closer look…
Harley MS 3019, fol. 56v
The music consists of a brief inscription written in the blank space at the end of a short manuscript of the life of the fourth-century bishop Maternianus of Riems, written down in the early tenth century. When the manuscript was received as part of the Harley Collection in 1753, nobody paid any attention to these scribblings: the fact that our predecessors chose to deface them with the British Museum stamp is regrettable, but also provides clear evidence that they were not thought to have any significance.
The music was discovered by Giovanni Varelli, a doctoral student at Cambridge, while he was working at the British Library on an internship under the Leonardo da Vinci Programme from the University of Pavia. Giovanni was systematically working along the shelves looking for medieval
musical notations in order to add details to the British Library's Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts when he stumbled upon this page completely by chance. At the bottom of the page, on either side of a tear in the parchment which was already present before the text was written, are two short chants notated with neumes characteristic of the early tenth century, in a style known to modern scholars as Palaeofrankish notation. The first chant is an antiphon in honour of St Boniface, an English missionary who established Christianity in many parts of Germany. The second, 'Rex caelestium terrestrium', is a more generic plea for salvation. This in itself was an exciting discovery, as the number of surviving manuscripts of this very early notation is very limited.
More interesting, though, are the strange patterns of vertical lines with dashes on their tops and circles on their bottoms:
Closer inspection reveals that these symbols represent two separate voice parts - the upper part (shown with horizontal dashes) is the melody of the first chant notated at the bottom of the page, and the lower part (shown with circles) is a separate melody to be sung in harmony with the chant melody - a practice known as organum. The pitches are shown in much the same way as modern notation, by their height on a stave: the only difference is that the stave-lines have been ruled in the parchment with a dry point, so are virtually invisible. The letters on the left show the height at which each note is written, from a up to g, and the vertical lines link the two notes to be sung together. When both voices sing the same note, the two lines converge. The curved sign, on the third note from the right in the excerpt above, shows a liquescent syllable in the text, signifying that the letters m and n should be hummed with the mouth closed: these signs are also found in conjunction with the letters r, t and -gn-, showing some sort of semi-vocalised performance. So in fact this newly invented notation of the tenth century conveys some details which are more subtle and sophisticated than can be shown in the standard modern staff notation of more than a millennium later. Giovanni Varelli has succeeded in transcribing this piece into modern notation:
Everything suggests that these unusual signs were written at the same time as the chant along the bottom of the page, in the early decades of the tenth century. In fact, as Giovanni has shown in a more detailed article about this discovery, this invented system of notation is very similar to a scheme found in a contemporaneous music theory treatise, in a manuscript at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 7202 (images available on the Gallica website). Other comparable schemes for showing two- and three-part polyphony are found in other music theory manuscripts of the tenth century, and even the ninth. What makes this discovery in the British Library manuscript so exciting is that it does not form part of a theoretical treatise: it is direct evidence of an actual tradition of performance, rather than being presented as a theoretical possibility. And in that respect, it stands a century earlier than the manuscript formerly considered to represent the beginnings of polyphonic music outside theoretical writings, the Winchester Troper.
So, within this very particular frame of reference, this is the very first music manuscript in the history of harmony in the Western tradition, and draws our knowledge of the practice of this tradition back from around 1000 to around 900.
13 November 2014
Calling all PhD students with a music-related topic!
The British Library's Music Open Day for Doctoral Students will take place on 30 January 2015.
These Open Days allow students to learn about our collections of printed and manuscript music and sound recordings (including classical, pop, world and traditional music), to find out how to access them, and to meet our curatorial staff as well as other researchers in their field. In addition to an understanding of the Library’s collections, students gain a wider introduction to the information landscape in their field, and research opportunities opening up in the digital information environment.
This event is aimed at new PhD students, as well as Masters students who are planning to continue their research at doctoral level. Numbers are limited and, as these events are very popular, we do encourage early booking. Places cost £5.00 and this includes lunch.
Book directly using this link or see our website for details of all events taking place at the British Library.
The Institute of Musical Research will provide discretionary travel bursaries, up to £20, for students coming from outside London – further details will be provided nearer the time.
23 September 2014
A Donizetti Discovery
The British Library's Stefan Zweig Collection of musical, literary and historical autograph manuscripts includes many well-known treasures, but there are other pieces which have proved more difficult to identify. When Stefan Zweig bought a manuscript of Gaetano Donizetti from a dealer in Milan in 1938, he thought that he had acquired a piece for string quartet. He did not pursue the matter further, and the manuscript remained unknown until it was presented, with the rest of his collection, to the British Library in 1986 by his heirs.
In an article just published in the Electronic British Library Journal, Christopher Scobie has identified the music in this manuscript for the first time. A look at the clefs at the opening of the piece makes it clear that contrary to Zweig's initial assumption, the piece is not for string quartet but for piano duet.
At first the music appears to be a conflation of two pieces: the opening 'Larghetto' section is known from Anna Bolena, the opera that made Donizetti's name on its premiere in December 1830, while the following 'Allegro' is part of the overture to his much less successful opera Il diluvio universale, which was first performed earlier in the same year. In fact, as the article shows, both sections were originally used for Il diluvio universale, but after Donizetti had recycled the 'Larghetto' in Anna Bolena, he composed a new opening for the first overture, which was used in its revival in 1834 and ever since.
Some questions remain about exactly when and for what purpose this manuscript was written, and various proposals are made in Christopher Scobie's article. The complete manuscript is available on our Digitised Manuscripts website, and see our earlier blog post for a list of other music-related articles in the British Library Journal.
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- Conserving creativity – the case of Beethoven’s ‘Kafka’ sketch miscellany
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- Digitised Music Manuscripts
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