The British Library has acquired a set of original sketches and drafts by Sir Edward Elgar for one of his best-known compositions, the Introduction and Allegro for strings. Elgar completed the work in February 1905 and conducted the first performance a few weeks later. In 1930 he tore these particular sketches out of one of his sketchbooks and gave them to a friend.

Years later, the sketchbook from which he tore them, which contains sketches for some of his other works, was donated to the British Library. We are delighted that we can now reunite the torn-out pages with the sketchbook, almost 100 years after Elgar removed them.

 

A page from the newly acquired sketches for Elgar's Introduction and Allegro

 

Identifying the origin of the sketches

Elgar often jotted down tunes and other musical ideas into a bound sketchbook. He would then expand and rewrite his ideas, sometimes copying them from one sketchbook to another, and gradually turn them into fully-formed musical works.

When we were alerted to the existence of the Introduction and Allegro sketches last year, we suspected that they came from one of Elgar’s many sketchbooks. It wasn’t clear which one, though. An initial clue came from the distinctive rubber-stamped page numbers on the sketches. The same type of numbering is found in Elgar’s ‘Sketchbook V’, now in the British Library.

Crucially the page numbers on the torn-out pages fill gaps in the pagination in this sketchbook. What clinches the connection, though, is the way that two pages from the Introduction and Allegro sketches fit exactly with stubs of the pages that were left behind in the sketchbook when they were torn out.

 

Torn-out pages fit exactly with the stubs of the pages remaining in the sketchbook.

 

Torn-out pages fit exactly with the stubs of the pages remaining in the sketchbook.

 

Elgar’s gift of the Introduction and Allegro sketches

Once Elgar had finished composing a work, he no longer needed the sketches and drafts created during the process of composition. He would sometimes give these to friends as mementoes. On 6 November 1930 he gave the Introduction and Allegro sketches to his former pupil Frank Webb. Webb recorded this gift in a faint pencil note on the first of the pages:

Given me by EWE [i.e. Edward William Elgar] Nov 6/30 (Torn out of his Sketch book) Sketches for the Introduction & Allegro

Frank Webb’s son Alan later published his own memories of Elgar, recalling that:

On occasion he [Elgar] would visit my father in his office. Once he pulled some manuscript sheets out of his pocket and said: ‘Here, would you like these?’ ‘These’ were sketches for the Introduction and Allegro for Strings.

The pages must have been folded up to fit into Elgar’s pocket, and they appear to have remained tightly folded ever since. They have now been acquired by the British Library, via Christie’s Private Sales, from the descendants of Frank Webb.

The musical content

We already held some very fragmentary sketches for the Introduction and Allegro, as well as the manuscript of Elgar’s final version. The newly acquired sketches and draft material fill a gap between these, chronologically, and shed light on how Elgar composed the work.

Many of the musical themes found in the final version are in place in the sketches, though they are mostly written in short score (i.e. on two staves) and not yet in the order in which they appear in the final version.

One particular melody in the Introduction and Allegro is known as the ‘Welsh tune’. Elgar was inspired to compose it after hearing distant singing while on holiday in Wales. This theme appears several times in the manuscript: as a single-line tune, a melody with lightly sketched harmony and fully harmonised in a setting for strings. Elgar used this string setting in the final version of the piece.

 

Orchestrated version of the ‘Welsh tune’ from the Introduction and Allegro sketches.

 

Making the material available

For preservation reasons the newly acquired pages will not be physically reattached to the sketchbook. However, researchers will be able to view all of the material together in the Library’s Rare Books and Music Reading Room. We will also be digitising it and ‘virtually’ reuniting it online.

The sketchbook has other missing pages, which were also torn out before the Library acquired it. Perhaps these will also come to light one day.

 

Notes

Alan Webb’s reminiscences of Elgar, ‘Some personal memories of Elgar’, are published in An Elgar Companion, ed. Christopher Redwood (Ashbourne: Sequoia Publishing, 1982), pp. 168-174.

The sketchbook from which Elgar tore the Introduction and Allegro material has the British Library manuscript number Add MS 63157. The new acquisition has been assigned the number MS Mus. 1964. Preliminary sketches for the Introduction and Allegro are found in Add MSS 63153, 63154, 63156, 47903. The final full score is numbered Add MS 58015.

 

Sandra Tuppen
Head of Music Collections

 

We recently embarked upon a new project in Music Collections to catalogue the papers of Paul Hirsch (1881-1951), as part of the Unlocking Hidden Collections initiative. Hirsch's extensive library of historical printed music and music-theoretical books forms an important cornerstone of the BL's music collections, but the correspondence and papers relating to the collection and the collector had not previously been fully catalogued.

Hirsch was a German industrialist whose youthful passion for bibliography, music, and rare books fuelled a collecting hobby that resulted in a world-class library of scores and music-related books.[i] The library was acquired by the British Museum in 1946, but had initially been based at Hirsch’s home in Frankfurt, where it was made accessible to scholars and musicians and frequented by visitors from around the world. In the summer of 1936, Hirsch relocated both his family and his library to Cambridge, evading the efforts of the Nazi authorities to confiscate the collection, and for the next decade, the collection was housed in Cambridge’s University Library.[ii] The relocation had been facilitated by the musicologist Edward J. Dent, then Professor of Music at Cambridge, who later spearheaded a fundraising effort to enable the library to be acquired for the nation. Increasing financial pressures meant that Hirsch had no choice but to sell his collection, which by then totalled around 18,000 items; while he had received offers from American institutions, he wished for the collection to remain intact, and, importantly, to remain in the country that had become his home.

Once at the British Museum, Hirsch’s Music Library was given pride of place in the Music Room, where Hirsch was allocated a desk to work. Hirsch formed close working relationships with several members of Museum staff, many of whom were also prominent scholars of music bibliography; his correspondence with Alec Hyatt King, then Superintendent of the Music Room, demonstrates a close and enduring relationship as colleagues and friends. King wrote several articles to publicise the Hirsch collection and to emphasise its particular strengths; he also oversaw the creation of a British Museum catalogue of the collection.[iii] Following Hirsch’s death in 1951, King continued to visit Olga Hirsch, who sorted her husband’s professional papers and donated them to the British Museum in 1962-3. Olga Hirsch had her own antiquarian specialism – decorated papers – and formed a collection that also travelled from Frankfurt to Cambridge before eventually being bequeathed to the British Museum; the Olga Hirsch Collection of Decorated Papers now occupies shelves adjacent to Paul Hirsch’s collection, deep in the basements of the BL’s St Pancras site.[iv]

It is Paul Hirsch’s professional papers that form the basis of the current cataloguing project, which will take around 4-5 months. The papers include extensive correspondence with academics, librarians, publishers, booksellers, performers, and other professional contacts, alongside records of Hirsch’s acquisitions and other business-related papers. An earlier project at the Library led to the creation of a handlist and summaries of parts of the collection, as well as an illuminating Brio article by Nick Chadwick that puts forward his observations and highlights.[v] The current project involves working through the full 36 boxes, listing all correspondents and briefly summarising topics of discussion, checking for any data protection and conservation issues, lightly reordering (to enhance existing alphabetisation and other sequences), creating detailed catalogue records, and rehousing the papers. The research interest of these papers is already known, and many scholars have consulted the boxes over the years, but full online catalogue records will greatly improve accessibility and searchability.

Map of Frankfurt am Main, with Hirsch’s Music Library highlighted. From Mitropa Zeitung, 137 (Nov 1926), 4-5.

Networks and friends

Even the first six boxes (correspondence A-G) contain a veritable who’s who of early-20th-century Anglophone and German musicology and music bibliography. Hirsch kept carbon copies of his outbound letters, meaning that many full exchanges are preserved, and we see that he received a constant influx of bibliographic and research queries on everything from the mechanics of early printing to discrepancies in Beethoven editions (a lot of those!) to sources on 19th-century ornamental bindings. No matter who asked – and many queries came from students – Hirsch did his very best to help, pointing his correspondents in the direction of obscure additional sources, offering his own expert opinions, and, if he possessed a relevant volume, facilitating loans. His knowledge and passion for his subject shines through, as does his appetite for frequent Schubert tidbits sent from the likes of Otto Erich Deutsch, Max Friedländer, and Karl Geiringer. Hirsch also appreciated beautiful handwriting, sometimes praising his correspondents’ penmanship while apologising for his own typed replies (he suffered with several longstanding health issues, and typing was less of a strain).

Snapshots of beautiful handwriting from correspondents Albert Gans (top) and Edward Croft-Murray (below).

Letters to and from fellow antiquarians – both dealers and collectors – reveal both the transactional and personal dimensions of Hirsch’s collecting practice.[vi] A sustained correspondence with the antiquarian bookseller Martin Breslauer runs from 1928, when both were active in Germany, to 1940, when Breslauer died suddenly in London, having re-established his firm there in previous years. These papers contain invoices and receipts, auction lists, insurance valuations, and special offers, but also provide considerable detail of their changing personal and business circumstances as both navigated emigration. Hirsch’s friendly and empathetic nature comes across well in correspondence with the organologist and collector Adam Carse, in which the pair share experiences of parting with their collections. In 1947, Carse wrote: ‘I have given my collection of old wind instruments to the Horniman Museum, and feel rather at a loss without them. But I was very anxious that they should never be dispersed or leave this country, and feel sure that I have done the best thing’. Hirsch responded: ‘Being without your “hobby” you will experience the same feelings which I have occasionally being without my music library. Still, like you, I am happy that it has found such a fine home’.

Naturally, there is a lot of material relating to the exodus of Jewish musicians, musicologists, and booksellers from Nazi-occupied Europe. There are glimpses of networks of musicians updating each other on the fate of mutual friends: for instance, as Hirsch informs correspondents on his brief internment in 1940, various replies give updates on attempts to secure Egon Wellesz’s release.[vii] While evidently comfortable in Cambridge, and happy with his new musical and bibliographic communities, Hirsch made occasional reference to the precarity of his status in Britain: having spotted an error in a Times article, he wrote to his correspondent, ‘I would rather – still being an alien, alas! – not write to the Editor during the war’. He was also concerned about descriptions of his library’s relocation, and lightly criticised Richard Capell in 1937 for a paragraph about ‘the dramatic departure of the collection from Frankfurt’, noting that ‘it may be possible that I get into trouble with the German authorities on account of this, if I or any member of my family would eventually like to pay a visit to Germany’.

Hirsch’s emigration inevitably changed his collecting practices, and from the late 1930s he drastically narrowed his collecting remit for financial and political reasons. Having received an unsolicited volume of Deutsche Volkslieder from the Cambridge bookseller Bowes & Bowes in 1940, he attempted to send the book back, writing: ‘since war started, I told all firms who had arranged to deliver continuations of subscribed works to me to stop all deliveries, as I did and do not want any money to go to German firms directly or indirectly now’. Further research into items in Hirsch’s collection will allow us to better understand his international networks of antiquarian booksellers and collectors, and to trace genealogies of ownership, collection, gift, and trade across the rich object-histories of individual scores and books.

Tracing women’s activities

The reach of Hirsch’s network of correspondents is considerable, and cataloguing these papers will draw attention to lesser-known names of mid-century musicology and music librarianship, including many women. Hirsch was clearly sympathetic to the additional barriers faced by women in entering the upper echelons of their professions, and often advocated and wrote references for his female colleagues (elsewhere, in one interesting letter to a prominent male musicologist, Hirsch gently accuses him of professional chauvinism, which is met with a slightly defensive reply). So far, I’ve enjoyed flurries of letters from Anna Amalie Abert about the music dictionary MGG; Jean M. Allan discussing Bach editions in advance of an exhibition at the Reid Music Library; Geneviève Thibault (Vicomtesse de Chambure) with queries relating to her project about early volumes published by Le Roy & Ballard; Sophie Drinker concerning a loan of early printed sources relating to Hildegard of Bingen; and Berta Geissmar on various topics including her in-progress memoir of music, society, and exile.[viii] I look forward to reaching ‘S’ and its promise of correspondence with Marion Scott and Edith Schnapper.

Hirsch’s mentorship and continued support of his former librarian and research assistant, Kathi Meyer-Baer, is a prime example of the good nature that shines through his correspondence. Meyer-Baer was a musicologist and bibliographer employed by Hirsch from 1922 until the library’s forced relocation; together, they published a meticulously-researched and beautifully-produced four-volume catalogue of Hirsch’s library.[ix] Also from a Jewish family, Meyer-Baer left Germany after Hirsch, moving first to Paris before settling in America. David Josephson’s extensive research into her life and work has documented her lifelong struggle thereafter to assimilate into anglophone professional networks of musicology and librarianship. Josephson writes compellingly of Meyer-Baer’s professional frustrations and of her dual disadvantage as a woman and as a Jewish emigrée, and he also notes the unrelenting kindness and professional counsel offered to her by Hirsch.[x] The BL papers were a major source for Josephson’s research, and his findings are borne out clearly in the lengthy correspondence between Hirsch and Meyer-Baer between 1936 and 1951. Hirsch offers advice and consolation, but also urges Meyer-Baer strongly to improve her written English or to have her articles translated by native speakers; he celebrates milestones in her family’s new American life, writes letters of recommendation, and mediates between Meyer-Baer and editors of journals interested in her work, but he also firmly encourages her to see beyond her reservations about North American bibliographic practice, and to persevere in the face of seemingly endless professional setbacks.

The Meyer-Baer correspondence is, at times, heart-breaking. More optimistic is the shorter but very animated series of letters between Hirsch and the folklorist and librarian Margaret Dean-Smith, who had ambitious ideas about the future of music librarianship in the UK. She writes several extremely long letters on everything from her research on Playford’s The Dancing Master to the minutiae of gramophone cataloguing, which Hirsch clearly appreciated: he replied to one letter, ‘I really do not know how to thank you [...] your letter reads like a novel’.[xi] In correspondence of the mid-1940s, the pair agree about the need for the establishment of professional societies for music libraries and archives (IAML, the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres, wasn’t founded until 1951). Reporting from a conference in 1944, Dean-Smith wrote:

My impression of English Music Libraries is that, while they contain great treasures, information about these treasures can only be obtained by putting some person to a great deal of trouble, the catalogues being either inadequate or almost non-existent. At the same time one is constantly told that there is no opening in Music Librarianship.

Another blog post at the end of this cataloguing project will highlight some further examples from the wealth of information held within these papers about Hirsch’s professional and personal networks. In the meantime, I’ll be enjoying working through the boxes of a collection so steeped in institutional history.

Frankie Perry, Music Manuscripts and Archives Cataloguer

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[i] For an overview, see Alec Hyatt King, ‘Paul Hirsch and his Music Library’, British Library Journal, 7/1 (1981), 1-11.

[ii] A talk by Nicolas Bell details aspects of the collection’s removal and relocation: ’Music and Exile: Evacuating the Hirsch Library from Frankfurt to Cambridge’, paper read at Cambridge: City of Scholars, City of Refuge (1933-1945), Trinity College, Cambridge, 5-6 March 2020. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ0AzmP0KtE.

[iii] Catalogue of Printed Music in the British Museum: accessions. Part 53, Music in the Hirsch Library [compiled by Alec Hyatt King and Charles Humphries] (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1951). On the status of Hirsch’s collection within the music collections of the British Museum more broadly, see ‘The Music Room of the British Museum 1753-1953. Its History and Organization’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 79^th session (1952-1953), 65-79.

[iv] See Mirjam M. Foot, ‘The Olga Hirsch Collection of Decorated Papers, British Library Journal, 7/1 (1981), 12-38.

[v] Nick Chadwick, ‘The Hirsch correspondence: some preliminary observations’, Brio, 45/1 (2008), 60-67.

[vi] Chadwick provides particular detail on Hirsch’s correspondence with Otto Haas and Max Pinette, see ibid, 60-62.

[vii] For instance, a postcard from H. C. Colles on 21 September 1940 notes that ‘Emmy Wellesz is very anxious about Egon, not yet returned though most strenuous efforts have been made. It is all very complicated’. On the matter of exile, Chadwick’s article points to a particularly moving exchange of letters with Richard Friedenthal concerning Stefan Zweig, following Zweig’s death in 1942; see ‘The Hirsch correspondence’, 64.

[vii] Berta Geissmar, The Baton and the Jackbook (London: H. Hamilton, 1944).

[ix] Paul Hirsch and Kathi Meyer-Baer, Katalog der Musikbibliothek Paul Hirsch (vols 1-3, Berlin: M. Breslauer, 1928-1936; vol 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947).

[x] See Josephson’s article, ‘“Why then all the difficulties!”: A life of Kathi Meyer-Baer’, Notes, 65/2 (2008), 227-267, and monograph, Torn between cultures: a life of Kathi Meyer-Baer (Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2012).

[xi] Hirsch remained keenly interested in Dean-Smith’s research, and purchased single issues of the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society in order to read a substantial article by Dean-Smith and Alex Helm; in an unusual run of slightly grumpy letters with the journal, Hirsch objects to the its inflexible and very high pricing structure.

The Elizabeth Poston Manuscripts (MS Mus. 1877) have recently been fully catalogued as part of the 18-month ‘Archives of Women Musicians’ project. A future blog post will provide an overview of the collection, but as the year draws to a close, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share some of Poston’s Christmas music.[1]

To begin in an obvious place: Poston’s Penguin Book of Christmas Carols (1965) and Second Penguin Book of Christmas Carols (1970) still grace many music stands come Christmas time.[2] Poston was a meticulous musicologist and editor, and her introduction to the first book demonstrates the breadth of research that went into the project. Her colourful, distinctive prose also reveals the strength of her passion for carols and for their histories of adaptation, arrangement, and – indeed – ‘maltreatment’.^[3] For Poston, the Victorian revival of interest in carols was both a blessing and a curse: it revitalised the genre, but also gave rise to some of the repertoire’s ‘dreariest of travesties’, replete with pious, moralising words and ‘turgid’ music. She was particularly offended by ‘the sad case’ of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ – that is, John Mason Neale’s ‘deplorable’ addition of a ‘ponderous moral doggerel’ to a 13th-century melody, which she felt ‘debase[d] a splendidly gay and virile dance tune’.^[4]

Covers of Penguin Carols volumes

Across her long and multifaceted career, Poston arranged carols for many occasions and purposes, and we may infer that the ones she adapted several times were particular favourites. Many of these were medieval in origin: she made multiple arrangements of the 13th-century ‘Angelus ad virginem’, for instance, which she described as ‘a tune as enchanting and irresistible in its gaiety as the dancing angels of Fra Angelico’s Paradiso’.^[5] Some of her arrangements followed this impulse to dance, while others went in a different direction entirely. In her music for the BBC Third Programme’s ballad cantata The Nativity – broadcast on Boxing Day 1950 – ‘Angelus ad virginem’ is heard as a gentle, floating tenor line, soon embellished by a florid solo alto before melting into sparkling, serene polyphony. The score is dedicated to Ralph Vaughan Williams, who shared Poston's enthusiasm for carols and encouraged her work (he also edited and arranged many himself). Poston’s tribute manifests musically, too: it opens with an arrangement of the same carol – ‘The truth sent from above’ – that begins Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on Christmas Carols.

Two arrangements of ‘Angelus ad virginem’, from Liturgy of Love, MS Mus. 1877/1/1/83 (top), and The Nativity (1950), MS Mus. 1877/1/1/32 (below). Poston's music remains in copyright until 2058 and extracts are reproduced here under the 'fair dealing' exceptions in UK law. 

Poston was Music Supervisor for the BBC European Service during the Second World War, and for decades thereafter regularly contributed music for dramas and features broadcasts on the Third Programme and Home Service (and, later, Radio 3, Radio 4, and BBC Television). In her knowledge and interest in medieval and Renaissance literature and music, Poston found kindred spirits in Third Programme producers like Terence Tiller, Raymond Raikes, and Douglas Cleverdon, with whom she collaborated extensively on new radio adaptations of early drama. Following her work with Tiller on The Nativity (1950), Poston wrote music for several further BBC nativity dramatisations, including for Raikes’s A Nativity for N-Town (1962), which was based on plays from 15th-century Lincoln and for which Poston created a score based around carol arrangements. She also composed the score for the third instalment, The Nativity, of John Barton’s The First Stage series – a ground-breaking survey of the development of early English drama. It was broadcast on Christmas Eve 1956, and the front of an autograph score is shown below with cuttings from the seasonal Radio Times issue pasted on.

Cover of autograph score of The Nativity (First Stage Series), with Radio Times cuttings, MS Mus. 1877/2/2/53

Poston worked with Tiller and Cleverdon on The Wakefield Second Shepherd’s Play, first broadcast on 26th December 1947. Her incidental music – scored for flute, oboe d’amore, harp, string quartet, and SATB soloists – was mostly original, but incorporated an arrangement of Peter Warlock’s carol ‘Tyrley Tyrlow’.

Performance direction and excerpt from arrangement of Peter Warlock, ‘Tyrley Tyrlow’, MS Mus. 1877/1/1/18

Friends and dedications

Poston was a close friend of Warlock, and she was greatly affected by his premature death on 27th December 1930. In a heartfelt BBC broadcast on Warlock in 1964, she commented on her continued remembrance and celebration of the composer at Christmas time: ‘Warlock’s carols [...] are in a class of their own. Christmas, the season of his death, is the season at which he still lives’.^[6] Poston’s Two Carols in Memory of Peter Warlock, published by Curwen in 1956, comprise English-language arrangements of the Basque carols ‘Praise our Lord’ and ‘O Bethlehem’. In the latter, Poston draws out a metrical and rhythmic affinity between the carol and Warlock’s ‘Pieds en l’air’ (Capriol Suite), incorporating a gentle homage to her friend’s melodic line in the arrangement’s second verse.

‘O Bethlehem’, from Two Carols in Memory of Peter Warlock, showing incorporation of melody from ‘Pieds en l’air’. MS Mus. 1877/1/2/4/9

Poston’s ‘gift for friendship’ – to borrow the phrase used in Madeleine Davies’s Church Times profile – is abundantly clear in the paratexts of her scores, which very often include dedications to family, friends, and colleagues from the worlds of music, broadcasting, and the church. The earliest original carol in the BL’s collection is titled ‘Salve Jesus, little Lad’, and signed ‘E.P., Xmas 1924’. The 19-year-old composer dedicated the carol to ‘C. P.’ – surely her mother, Clementine Poston, with whom she lived until the latter’s death in 1970. A new edition of this carol has recently been published by the charity Multitude of Voyces, who are also the copyright holders and are able to help with enquiries about any of the composer's music.[7]

Opening, dedication, signature and date of ‘Salve Jesus, Little Lad’, MS Mus. 1877/1/4/2

The image below shows the opening of the beautiful, melancholic carol ‘Sheepfolds’, composed in 1957 and published in 1958. The manuscript here shows a pencilled-in dedication above the title, in Poston’s hand, reading ‘To Donald Ford, if he likes it!’. Below the title, presumably in Donald Ford’s hand, it reads ‘(Which he does, immensely!)’. Such layering of meaning onto her manuscripts suggests so much about Poston’s social networks and compositional processes, which researchers can explore more easily now that the material is fully catalogued and available to BL readers.

‘Sheepfolds’ is a setting of a poem by Madeleva Wolff, who was a prolific poet, religious Sister, and President of Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. Poston’s autograph scores are accompanied by brief but illuminating correspondence between Poston and Wolff. On receiving a manuscript copy in early 1958, Wolff wrote to Poston:

I write to tell you how deeply touched I am with the poignant setting that you have made [...] We are devoted here at Saint Mary’s to Nativity Plays, to mimes based on the scriptures. You have written to our very hearts and have touched the themes most dear to us. Please know how happy we shall be to use your sensitive interpretations of great moments in the spiritual life of the world.^[8]

Opening and dedication of ‘Sheepfolds’, MS Mus. 1877/1/4/32

Poston was a committed Christian and found constant compositional inspiration in the religion’s calendar and ritual. She was also passionate about writing and arranging accessible, singable music that took its words and source materials seriously – as illustrated in this recording of ‘The Lamb’, and in the recordings of many of the pieces discussed here on the recent disc of Poston’s carols and anthems by the musicians of St Albans Cathedral. These selections have given an impression of the breadth and depth of Poston’s work, but they barely scratch the surface even of the seasonal contents of the BL’s Elizabeth Poston Manuscripts – there’s much to explore beyond the famous ‘Jesus Christ the Apple-Tree’.

Opening of ‘Jesus Christ the Apple-Tree’, MS Mus. 1877/1/4/45

References

[1] An overview of the Poston collection, alongside a report on the ‘Hidden Collections’ project of which it was part, is also forthcoming in Frankie Perry and Loukia Drosopoulou, ‘Archives of Women Musicians: A “Hidden Collections” Cataloguing Project at the British Library', Brio, 61/2. The musical and literary works of Elizabeth Poston remain in copyright until 2058. The charity Multitude of Voyces is the official representative of the composer’s copyright and enquiries should be directed to [email protected]. Images have been reproduced here under the exceptions to copyright detailed at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright.  

[2] ‘Christmas’ is being used here as a shorthand to cover the general season spanning Advent to and beyond Epiphany.

^[3] Elizabeth Poston, ed., The Penguin Book of Christmas Carols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), especially ‘Introduction’, pp. 9-18, and ‘Notes of the carols’, pp. 21-32.

^[4] Ibid., 9; 15; 25.

^[5] Ibid., 10.

^[6] Elizabeth Poston, ‘Dispelling the Jackals’, broadcast BBC Third Programme, 1964, reproduced in John Alabaster, Elizabeth Poston: catalogue of works with biographical context (Stevenage, Herts: The Friends of Forster Country, rev ed., 2022, ©transferred to Multitude of Voyces 2022), 187-192: 192. Neither Alabaster’s reproduction, nor the reproduction in Peter Warlock: A Centenary Celebration (1994) give the exact date of broadcast, but the BBC Programme Index (genome.ch.bbc.co.uk) shows that Poston produced and presented a series of programmes about Warlock running 1964-1965.

[7] The new edition renders the title ‘Salve Iesus’, following orthographic advice. Further information about the charity’s Poston project can be found here: https://www.multitudeofvoyces.co.uk/elizabeth-poston/.

^[8] Letter from Sister M. Madeleva Wolff to Elizabeth Poston, 14 March, 1958. MS Mus. 1877/1/4/32.

Frankie Perry, Music Manuscripts and Archives Cataloguer

To mark The National Lottery’s 30th birthday celebrations this year we have put together a blog post about the archive of the Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS), acquired by the British Library in 2002 thanks in part to a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, alongside generous donations from other individuals and trusts. This post highlights some of the treasures found in the RPS archive and the research that the archive has sparked since its acquisition by the Library.

The RPS and its archive

The Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS) was founded in 1813 as the Philharmonic Society of London by a group of 30 professional musicians with the purpose ‘to promote the performance, in the most perfect manner possible, of the best and most approved instrumental music’. It continues today as a busy charitable organisation devoted to ‘creating opportunities for musicians to excel, championing the vital role that music plays in all our lives’. The Society began by establishing an annual concert season which included music by the greatest composers of the time, with new commissions from composers like Beethoven, Cherubini, Mendelssohn, Dvořák, and Saint-Saëns, some of whom were also invited to conduct their own works. The Society also has a long history of inviting distinguished performers to perform at its concerts, among them figures like Clara Schumann and Pablo Casals. You can find out more about the RPS’s impressive history and current activities on the RPS website and through the selected literature in the ‘References’ section below.

Over the years, the performing and administrative activities of the RPS resulted in the formation of a considerable archive (now British Library RPS MS 1-417). This contains over 270 manuscript scores, including many composer’s autograph manuscripts of works performed by the RPS, alongside dozens of volumes of letters and important administrative documents up to 1968. The latter include a series of 20 minute books in which the proceedings of meetings of the Directors of the RPS were recorded. These minute books are full of valuable information about the running of the Society, its financial affairs, the planning of each concert season, the commissioning of new works, matters raised by its members, and much more.

One such minute book records the commissioning of a new symphony from Beethoven in November 1822 and the Directors’ decision to offer Beethoven £50 for this. Notes of the meeting show that they hoped to receive it by March 1823, in time for performance during the 1823 concert season. This became Beethoven’s famous Symphony no.9 and the manuscript in the RPS archive is known as the ‘London manuscript’.

    ‘Resolved that an offer of £50 be made to Beethoven for a M.S. Sym[phon]y. He having permission to dispose of it at the expiration of Eighteen Months after the receipt of it. It being a proviso that it shall arrive during the Month of March next.’ 

A page from a Minute book in the RPS Archive recording the offer of £50 to Beethoven for the commission of a new symphony (3rd paragraph from the top). British Library RPS MS 280, f.2.

The manuscript that Beethoven sent to the Philharmonic Society in 1824 of his Symphony no.9 was a copy prepared by three music copyists under his supervision. The manuscript includes numerous minor corrections and annotations in Beethoven’s hand, alongside markings arising from the first London performance.

The opening of the 4th movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no.9 in the RPS manuscript. British Library RPS MS 5, f. 91.

In 2021 the Library held the exhibition Beethoven: Idealist. Innovator. Icon, which included a number of collection items from the RPS Archive, including the London manuscript of the Ninth symphony. This was displayed alongside Beethoven’s autograph manuscript (on loan from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin) for the first time in the UK.

The RPS Archive also includes 47 volumes of letters from numerous British and European composers and musicians who corresponded with the RPS. Among them, one from Tchaikovsky following his visit to Britain in 1893. The composer had conducted his Fourth Symphony at a Philharmonic Society concert in May that year and wrote to the secretary, Francesco Berger, of his eagerness to return to conduct a new symphony he was working on (that was his Sixth, but Tchaikovsky died later in the year before another visit could be organised).

Letter from P.I. Tchaikovsky to the RPS Secretary Francesco Berger. British Library RPS MS 366, f. 165.

The archive includes much more too, from concert programmes, posters and official notices through to a number of objects. Among them are a tuning fork and numerous ivory counters with Directors’ and other members’ names on them.

This tuning fork in the RPS archive is dated 1896 on the fork. It was mounted on a wooden base and kept inside a wooden box. British Library, RPS MS 327 B.

These ivory counters were issued to Directors and other members of the Philharmonic Society, probably instead of tickets to concerts or to indicate attendance at meetings. The name of the director/member was given on one side of the counter with the other displaying ‘Philharmonic Society’. British Library RPS MS 326.

Such a wide-ranging archive has provided plenty of scope for research of different kinds over the years, and indeed it has been a frequently-consulted addition to the British Library’s collection both onsite and online (the entire RPS archive was digitised in 2013 for the Gale database, Nineteenth Century Collections Online). As well as material relating to famous composers and performers, the archive also offers insights and glimpses of other individuals. People like Joseph Harris, copyist of the instrumental parts for the first London performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, who we hear from in letters describing his work (he said that the Ninth was “the longest & most difficult thing I ever copied… yet the most beautiful Composition”).

The 19th century was a period in which the ‘business’ of music making and the act of concert going became increasingly established in ways we can still recognise today. The wealth of detail in the RPS Archive has allowed researchers to map this change through the seemingly prosaic but essential processes documented in minute books, financial ledgers and other administrative documentation. Being able to preserve the archive here at the British Library is especially beneficial because of the connections with other collections held here, be it those of individuals who worked with or for the Society, or of other concert organisations. Together, such collections help to provide a rich and vivid picture of music making and concert life from the 19th century onwards. 

Chris Scobie, Lead Curator Music Manuscripts and Archives

Loukia Drosopoulou, Curator Music

References

The Royal Philharmonic Society: The History and Future of Music. https://royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk/assets/files/RPS_A5_History_booklet_08_revised.pdf

Leanne Langley, ‘A Place for Music: John Nash, Regent Street and the Philharmonic Society of London’, Electronic British Library Journal, 2013. https://doi.org/10.23636/1057

Cyril Ehrlich, First philharmonic: a history of the Royal Philharmonic Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1995.

Most directors of cathedral music would probably consider their energies amply enough absorbed by the demands of choir and organ and liturgy, but a few years into his tenure at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Dr. John Stainer (1840–1901) found duty beckoning him away from the choir-stalls and organ-loft to the belfry in the north-west tower.  Here, in the mid-1870s, over 160 years after the cathedral’s completion, there still hung no full peal of bells for change-ringing, only the solitary service-bell.  (The three clock bells chiming faithfully over in the south-west tower were entirely separate: what was lacking were bells to celebrate Sundays, feast-days and great occasions.)  It was a situation incompatible with civic and national pride, and a problem which now fell to Dr. Stainer, at least in part, to remedy.  With the other members of the newly-formed Bell Committee, he set about creating cathedral music of an altogether different kind.

John Stainer: ‘A genial, good-natured, likeable man’

John Stainer, c. 1878. Reproduced in Lock and Whitfield, ‘Men of mark: a gallery of contemporary portraits of men distinguished in the Senate, the Church, in science, literature and art, the army, navy, law, medicine’ (London: Sampson Low, 1876-1883). British Library RB.23.b.7030.

Stainer, a native of London who had sung as a boy treble at St. Paul’s, had been appointed organist and Director of Music in 1872, aged 32.  He is generally acknowledged to have made considerable improvements to the Cathedral’s musical standards while remaining, as one description has it, ‘by all accounts […] a genial, good-natured, likeable man whose industrious personality engendered respect in others.’ [1]  He was also a composer in his own right: ‘God so loved the world’, from his oratorio ‘The Crucifixion’, is still sung regularly in Holy Week. 

Campanology must presumably have been relatively unfamiliar territory for him, but his ‘industrious personality’ he nevertheless threw into the work of the Bell Committee.  Three years were to suffice for the necessary fund-raising and the commissioning of a brand-new peal of twelve bells.  Tuned to the key of B flat and weighing thirteen tons in all – at the time the world’s heaviest peal of twelve, and still second only to the bells of Liverpool Anglican Cathedral – they were cast at the (still-extant) foundry of John Taylor & Co. in Loughborough, carried gingerly to London, hoisted into the north-west belfry through a gap apparently left specifically for that purpose by the ever-prescient Sir Christopher Wren, and rung for the first time on All Saints’ Day, November 1st, 1878. [2]

Enter H. R. Haweis, foe of ‘din and discord’

Such a prominent change to London’s soundscape was bound to attract much attention and comment.  One figure who could be counted upon to offer an opinion was the Rev. Hugh Reginald Haweis (1838–1901), the charismatic, go-ahead vicar of St James’s, Marylebone.  A veteran of the Italian War of Independence and an early advocate of the Sunday opening of museums and galleries, he had made a name for himself by arguing controversially that spiritualism was compatible with Christianity, and, even more controversially, by actually attending séances.  Amidst all this he still found time for music, and in particular for a keen interest in bells.  His expertise, though amateur, was well-respected – he had been the author of the article ‘Bell’ in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published earlier that year [3] – and indeed, when it came to bells, he was a hard man to please: ‘I question whether there is a musically true chime of bells in the whole of England, and if it exists, I doubt whether any one knows or cares for its musical superiority.’ [4]  He was convinced of the tonal supremacy of Belgian bells, writing repeatedly of the ‘relief’ afforded him by visits to ‘the old cathedrals of Belgium, with their musical chimes and their splendid carillons’. [5]  ‘Willingly do I escape from the din and discord of English belfries to Belgium, loving and beloved of bells,’ he declared.[6]

H. R. Haweis, c. 1888. Reproduced in J. Waléry, ‘Our celebrities: a portrait gallery’ (London, publisher unknown, 1888). British Library 1764.e.5.

So he could certainly be expected to take an interest in the tintinnabulary developments at St. Paul’s, and to wish to see and hear the new peal at closer quarters.  Just over a week before the inauguration, John Stainer wrote to him with a personal invitation.   ‘Our formal opening will take place at 5.30 on Nov[ember] 1st but if you will mount the tower with me at 11 on that day you shall have the bells struck for your own special benefit.’ [7]  Stainer also sketched out a musical stave indicating the pitches of the new bells, along with their respective weights.

Letter from John Stainer to H. R. Haweis, 22nd October 1878. British Library MS Mus. 1928. Reproduced with permission. You may not use the material for commercial purposes.

Haweis pronounces his verdict

As it turned out, Haweis did not have to wait that long to carry out his inspection, nor Stainer to find out his verdict.  On 29^th October, a letter from Haweis appeared in the Times: ‘Fresh from a tour in Belgium, with the sound of the Mechlin [Mechelen] and Ghent bells still ringing in my ears, I ascended, with note-book, candle, and muffled hammer, the side tower of St. Paul’s Cathedral, in which twelve new bells have just been placed by the munificence of the City companies […]’.  (A pause to point out that ‘For eight years I have pleaded the cause of bells and carillons in England.’)  Having first excoriated the flatness of Big Ben at the Palace of Westminster (‘hoarse, cracked, and gong-like […] the scourge of the neighbourhood’), the new peal at St. Paul’s he merely damned with faint praise.  ‘It is as good as most in England,’ he wrote. ‘Ten years ago it would have been passed by architects and bell committees with applause – will probably be so passed now – and the newspapers may speak of the “superb new peal” and its “mellow silver tones”, the cost, and so forth – and indeed it is quite as good as I expected and as expensive as needs be.’ [8]

But after six hours in the belfry he had discovered a more fundamental flaw: the bells were out of tune.  ‘I am quite clear that the radical imperfection of the octave and a half as it now hangs will appear whenever the first attempt is made to ring a tune on the first seven and last five of St. Paul’s bells.’ [9]  He also believed that they had been hung in such a way as to damage the tower when ringing.

Whether Haweis returned on the morning of the 1^st November to take up Stainer’s invitation, or what passed between the two men if he did, is not known.  But that evening the Cathedral was ‘crowded to the doors’ for the inauguration, with thousands more gathered in the churchyard and down Ludgate Hill to hear the first peal rung by the Ancient Society of College Youths, the City of London’s foremost bell-ringing society.  (The Society is well-named in that, tracing its foundation to 1637, before the Great Fire, it is older than the cathedral itself, as well as most of the City’s churches.) [10]

The west front of St. Paul’s seen in N. D’Anvers, ‘Some Account of the Great Buildings of London’ (London: Marcus Ward, 1879). Autotype photograph by Frederick York (1879). The change-ringing bells hang in the north-west tower on the left.

A regular ‘ding-dong’ in the Times?

In subsequent days Stainer and other members of the Bell Committee wrote to the Times in defence of their work.  Stainer took Haweis to task on the question of tuning.  It was not a question of pitch but of timbre, he argued; all bells sound several secondary tones as well as the principal one, and Haweis must, moreover, have been striking the bells in the wrong place.  ‘The only place where a bell should be struck is on the sound bow itself […]  Would Mr. Haweis test a [Stradivarius] violin by bowing it below the bridge?  […]  When properly tested on the sound-bow, there will be found a remarkable purity of tone throughout the St. Paul’s peal […]  They are in excellent tune, and capitally hung.’ [11]

Haweis returned to the letters page on November 14th, the tenor of his argument unaltered.  The bells were sharp, he was sure of it, and in any case, if the ear has an impression of sharpness, it scarcely matters whether timbre or pitch is the technical cause: ‘It is no more apology for sharp bells to say that they seem sharp when they sound sharp, but are really “excellently in tune,” as Dr. Stainer says St. Paul’s bells are, than to tell me that my boot is a comfortable fit although it seems to pinch […]’ [12]

A lasting legacy for Londoners

Other committee members continued the debate in subsequent editions, but Haweis, never to be persuaded, was to maintain his lamentation of the deficiencies of both St. Paul’s and Westminster belfries, notably at a Royal Institution lecture the following February. [13]  Stainer, for his part, seems to have been content to let the bells speak for themselves.  At any rate, he had given enough satisfaction to Dean and Chapter to be entrusted with the installation in the south-west tower, three years later, of ‘Great Paul’, at sixteen tons the United Kingdom’s largest working bell, and the second-largest ever cast in this country. [14]  He was knighted for his services in 1888, but in the same year had to resign his position owing to failing eyesight.

Stainer and Haweis died within three months of each other in 1901.  The bells, of which Stainer had predicted ‘Londoners will some day be proud’, rang on, Sunday in and Sunday out, gradually embroidering themselves into the life of the City. [15]  ‘And neighbouring towers and spirelets joined the ringing / With answering echoes from heavy commercial walls, / Till all were drowned as the sailing clouds went singing / On the roaring flood of a twelve-voiced peal from Paul’s,’ John Betjeman was to write in 1955, by then recalling the Sunday morning soundscape of the pre-Blitz City. [16]  Many of the bells he was remembering had been first silenced by wartime conditions, then destroyed in the bombing of their churches — but, almost miraculously, those of St. Paul’s had survived, and to this day ring out for half an hour before three services on Sundays.

But Haweis’s ultimate wish, one to which Stainer had expressed sympathy, is yet to be fulfilled: the installation of a carillon in the south-west tower of St. Paul’s: ‘I still hope,’ he had written, ‘to see Dr. Stainer […] seated there at a noble carillon clavecin of 40 Belgian bells, whose melodious tongues will then utter aloud the open secrets of the great Tone-Poets, while the crowd below […] shall be rapt in wonder […].’ [17]  A project, perhaps, for some future Director of Music.

Dominic Newman, Manuscripts Cataloguer

MS Mus. 1928, a newly-catalogued collection of various musicians’ letters, is now available for consultation in the Rare Books & Music Reading Room.

References

[1] Dibble, J.  (2004, September 23).  ‘Stainer, Sir John (1840–1901), musicologist and composer.’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 25 Oct. 2023, from https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-36234.

[2] St Paul’s Cathedral, ‘The bells’, web article.  Retrieved 26 Oct. 2023 from https://www.stpauls.co.uk/bells.

[3] Baigent, E.  (2004, September 23). ‘Haweis, Hugh Reginald (1838–1901), author and Church of England clergyman’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 25 Oct. 2023, from https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-33763.

[4] Haweis, H. R., Music and Morals (London: Longmans, 1872), p. 389.

[5] Ibid., p. 377.

[6] Ibid., p. 387.

[7] Letter from John Stainer to Hugh Reginald Haweis, 22 Oct. 1878.  British Library MS Mus. 1928.

[8] Haweis, H. R., “The New Bells Of St. Paul’s.” The Times, 29 Oct. 1878, p. 8.  The Times Digital Archive, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CS135052125/TTDA?u=blibrary&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=6035918d. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.

[9] The Times, 29 Oct. 1878, ibid.

[10] “The Bells Of St. Paul’s.” The Times, 2 Nov. 1878, p. 8. The Times Digital Archive, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CS135314274/TTDA?u=blibrary&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=74c6b84b. Accessed 26 Oct. 2023.

[11] The Times, Nov. 7th, 1878.

[12] Haweis, H. R. “St. Paul's Bells.” The Times, 14 Nov. 1878, p. 11. The Times Digital Archive, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CS185777006/TTDA?u=blibrary&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=48be56ae. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.

[13] The Times, 10 Feb. 1879.

[14] “The Bells Of St. Paul’s.” The Times, 2 Nov. 1878, ibid.

[15] Stainer incidentally has another musical legacy in London: Stainer Street, near his birth-place in Southwark.  This street is unusual in being enclosed along its entire length by a long brick tunnel-like arch holding up the platforms of London Bridge station.  The arch is effectively a barrel-vault and creates, appropriately enough, a church-like acoustic.  Into this space, which is now part of the station concourse, an old church organ was installed in 2022; at the time of writing it is available for anyone to play free of charge.

[16] John Betjeman, ‘Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Street Station’, in Collected Poems (London: John Murray, 1985), p. 270.

[17] The Times, 14 Nov. 1878, ibid.

Two events at the British Library

Join us at the British Library in November for two events marking Gustav Holst’s 150th anniversary – including a special performance inside the Rare Books & Music Reading Room! 

Gustav Holst: An Archival Legacy 
Wednesday 20 November 2024, 14.00-16.30, Foyle Room, British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB (tickets are free, but please contact [email protected] to book a place)   

150 years on from his birth (and 90 years after his death), Gustav Holst is celebrated for several very famous pieces of music – among them, The Planets. But much of his work remains little known, and his life still awaits the thorough exploration given to some of his contemporaries. In this event, we put the focus on the archival sources – manuscript scores, notebooks, letters – and their potential to provide new insights into the composer, his music and those who helped to support him in his work.

Laura Kinnear (Curator, Holst Victorian House, Cheltenham), Judith Ratcliffe (Archivist, The Red House, Britten Pears Arts) and Chris Scobie (Curator, Music Manuscripts & Archives, British Library) delve into their respective collections to showcase the range of material preserved. Holst’s early life, his creative process, his musical influences and the role of his daughter, Imogen, in preserving all this material will all be discussed. We are also delighted to be joined by Holst specialist Philippa Tudor, whose research into Gustav, Imogen and Isobel Holst has drawn on archival collections far and wide.

Notebook in which Holst kept a note of works composed. Add MS 57863, ff. 24v-26

Looking at the archival sources reveals hidden stories and can challenge received wisdom – ultimately providing a means to reassess the legacy of this unique composer of the early 20th century today.  

The afternoon will also include performances by musicians from the Royal College of Music, where Holst himself was a student, performing the Terzetto for flute, oboe and viola alongside a suite for solo viola by Imogen Holst. 

Tickets are free, but please book by emailing [email protected].    

Gustav Holst: An Archival Legacy

PROGRAMME
14.00  Welcome (Sandra Tuppen, Head of Music Collections, British Library)
14.05  Holst's early life and the collections at the Holst Victorian House, Cheltenham (Laura Kinnear)
14.25  Holst's creative process and the collections at the British Library (Chris Scobie)
14.45  Holst's archive, legacy and the collections at The Red House, Aldeburgh (Judith Ratcliffe)
15.05  BREAK (tea and coffee provided)
15.25  Researching Gustav, Isobel and Imogen Holst (Philippa Tudor)
15.50  Performances:

                Imogen Holst: Suite for Unaccompanied Viola  (1930)    
                Gustav Holst: Terzetto (1925)

            (Aisha Goodman, viola; Zoë Borseth Rasmusssen, flute; Ross Williams, oboe)

16.20  END

 

Letter from Gustav Holst to Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1903. BL, Add MS 57953

Holst’s Planets: A Celestial Remembrance 
Sunday 10th November 2024, 15.30, Rare Books & Music Reading Room, British Library (tickets available via the British Library website) 

Before that, a very special concert on Sunday 10 November will feature Holst’s most famous piece, The Planets, performed in the composer’s version for two pianos by Simon Callaghan and Thomas Kelly. The British Library’s Rare Books & Music Reading Room, usually a quiet space of course, will be filled with cosmic sound for the occasion – from the imposing menace of ‘Mars’ to the mystical music of ‘Neptune’.   

Part of the manuscript of Holst's 'Jupiter' written out for two pianos. Add MS 57881, f. 20

There are some especially nice connections here: Gustav Holst was a regular user of the old reading room at the British Museum for one thing, spending time there in his study of Sanskrit. Many of Holst’s music manuscripts were donated to the British Museum (now British Library) by his daughter, Imogen, too. Among them are autograph, or part-autograph, scores of several of the movements from The Planets written out for two pianos (the autograph full scores of most movements are at the Bodleian Library in Oxford). This reflects the way that Holst worked at the time: producing a continuous draft of a work on four staves, so that it could be played on two pianos. After he had heard this, he would set to work on the orchestration, annotating the score with his intentions – a good example of which can be seen above.  

For more information and to book tickets, please visit: https://www.seetickets.com/event/holst-s-planets-a-celestial-remembrance/british-library/3190448  

This is the first in a series of concerts to be held in the Rare Books & Music Reading Room, the others are: 

Medieval women in song, Sunday 1 December 2024, 15.30: https://thebritishlibraryculturalevents.seetickets.com/event/voice-trio-medieval-women-in-song/british-library/3190586  

Take Five: The five viols of Fretwork play five centuries of music, some of it in five, Sunday 12 January 2025, 15.30: https://thebritishlibraryculturalevents.seetickets.com/event/fretwork-take-five/british-library/3195325  

Following the cyber-attack on the British Library last year, staff have been working behind the scenes to restore access to the Library’s digitised manuscripts. The Library has now made an initial batch of 1,000 digitised manuscripts available online. Among them are about 60 music manuscripts. 

Major English music manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are included, along with two Bach treasures from the eighteenth century. A highlight is the keyboard manuscript My Ladye Nevells Booke (MS Mus. 1591). 

‘My Ladye Nevells Booke’. MS Mus. 1591, f. 1r.

This manuscript dates from 1591 and contains music by the English composer William Byrd. The manuscript was probably a gift from Byrd to Elizabeth Nevell of Hambledon in Buckinghamshire.  Byrd evidently composed some of the pieces especially for her, and her family’s coat of arms is included at the front of the book. Elizabeth seems to have had an abiding interest in music. Under her later married name of Lady Periam she was the dedicatee of music by Thomas Morley.   

The music in My Ladye Nevells Booke was copied out in a beautiful calligraphic style by the ‘singing man’ and scribe John Baldwin. This elaborate style of writing was very suitable for a manuscript being presented as a gift.  Baldwin was also the scribe of another newly available manuscript, the Baldwin Commonplace Book (R.M.24.d.2).  This was his ‘file copy’ of almost 200 sacred and secular works, by various composers. It is written out in a much plainer style. 

Another highlight among these digitised music manuscripts is the so-called Henry VIII Manuscript (Add MS 31922). This was compiled in about 1518 and contains music composed by Henry VIII. The other music in the manuscript is also likely to be repertoire that was performed at Henry’s court. There is no evidence that the King owned the manuscript himself, though. It may have belonged to a noble individual associated with the court. 

‘Pastime with good company’ by Henry VIII. Add MS 31922, ff. 14v-15r.

 

Also included from the sixteenth century is the Mulliner Book (Add MS 30513), a collection of over 100 pieces for keyboard compiled by Thomas Mulliner. Seventeenth-century composers featured in this first batch of digitised content include William Lawes and John Eccles. There are also several miscellanies containing music by many different composers. 

Finally, a small number of music manuscripts from the eighteenth century are included.  The highlights are two manuscripts of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, written in his own hand. They are the second book of Bach’s ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’ (Add MS 35021) and his cantata ‘Wo soll ich fliehen hin?' (Zweig MS 1). 

J.S. Bach, autograph manuscript of the Prelude in C major, from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II. Add MS 35021, f. 1.

 

As further digitised music manuscripts become available online, we will post updates about them here. You can browse a list of all currently available on the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts pages. 

To mark the 150th anniversary of the Royal Musical Association (RMA) and its upcoming Annual Conference at Senate House (University of London) and the British Library, we have put together a blog written by Leanne Langley, former RMA Vice-president, about the RMA archive held at the British Library.

55 manuscript volumes make up the British Library’s (BL) Royal Musical Association Papers, 1874-1971, catalogued as Add. MSS 71010-71064.  Gathered with the benefit of some serendipity, these were presented to the Library by the RMA in 1983, 1989 and 1992. They complement a small number of RMA-related papers from the 1930s and 40s already held by the BL (Add. MSS 56236 and 59670). 

Large as it is, this archive doesn’t cover the Association’s entire 150-year history: a substantial tranche of more recent Council minutes (March 1950 onwards) and other matter remains in the RMA’s possession and is set for assessment and accession in due course. But the current Papers do cover a very large part of the RMA’s distinguished history, offering an unrivalled look into the nation’s oldest learned society for music.  Founded in London in 1874 as the Musical Association, ‘for the investigation and discussion of subjects connected with the art and science of music’, the organization flourished independently of British higher education until the late 1940s. Its ‘Royal’ prefix, presented by George VI in 1944, conveyed high symbolic status at a crucial moment, while all along, genuine prestige accumulated through the Association’s fostering of solid research.   

From 170 members in 1874-75 to a current membership of more than 1400, the Association has maintained its venerable position and unique character among music scholarly organizations. It publishes two journals and a monograph series, sponsors study days and two annual conferences, supports new work by young and mature investigators including musicologists, music analysts, ethnomusicologists, composers and practitioners (in and beyond academia), and promotes intellectual exchanges with colleagues in all corners of the globe. Strong historical links with the British Museum/British Library, moreover, make the Papers’ location especially apt.

As a former RMA Council member, Journal reviews editor and vice-president, I was looking forward to our sesquicentenary in 2024 when, in 2015, the Council asked me to consider writing a history of the Association. Since the RMA Papers had never before been examined as a whole, it made sense to embark on a study of this rich resource for that purpose. But could I sustain a systematic search through 55 hefty volumes?  Meetings, membership and finance records, scrawly handwriting and repetitive correspondence doesn’t sound like the stuff of riveting history; key information would have to be excavated and the context amplified before any narrative could amount to more than a dutiful summary.

Balloting list for the election of Council and Officers at the RMA’s 1901 Annual General Meeting. British Library Add MS 71033, f. 43

Lo and behold, discovering more about the real (historical) people on every folio and seeing why they ran things as they did – who their friends and colleagues were, what they were up against, what they were aiming to achieve both as a group and in their own researches: all these intersecting lines prompted more questions.  I soon looked forward to the many long days it would take, over several months, to absorb details in the Papers and to find logical connections explaining the RMA’s trajectory, and its people as distinctive scholars. I persisted with the challenge.         

Without exaggeration I can say that the exercise has been eye-opening, not only for what the Papers contain, but for the outward paths they point, the actions and reactions they document. The RMA was small, but never intellectually isolated from scholars in other fields or from music in public life; its membership was once diverse in ways that have recently begun to disappear; and its dedication to music research was always intended to benefit wider society and improve public discourse. These findings open new ways to appreciate the RMA’s achievement. Illuminating how ‘musicology’ only gradually, belatedly, became professionalized in the UK and how its local character differed from that in Europe and the USA, the Papers also affirm that British musicology influenced, and in turn was marked by, those separate and eclectic traditions. 

The Papers themselves are divided into two main parts: Minutes and Official Papers (Add. MSS 71010-71035, vols. 1-26); and Correspondence (Add. MSS 71036-71064, vols. 27-55).

RMA Minute book for 1874-75. British Library Add MS 71010

The first part is subdivided by content type: eight Minute books, 1874-1950, and a ‘Standing Instruction book’ of 1901-33; seven volumes of Membership records and attendance registers, c. 1874-1970; six volumes of financial papers, c. 1927-84; and three mixed volumes of printed announcements, the Articles and Memorandum of Association, sessional arrangements and project reports, 1898-1971. The Papers’ second part, even more extensive, consists of thousands of letters arranged alphabetically by writer, Anon. to Zwingli. Although strictly ranging across 1898-1971, this material is concentrated in the 1950s and 60s, owing largely to the care of the RMA Secretary at that time, Nigel Fortune, whose skilled management contributed markedly to a lift in the standing of British musicology.

Among many intriguing items, the following examples give an idea of topical scope:

• early news clippings reacting to the Association’s founding
• menus and programme cards for ‘Annual Dinners’ (the earliest from 1898)
• drafts of Annual Reports with financial and member information
• attendance registers for specific paper meetings
• committee reports and letters (from 1938) recommending fruitful new areas of research that might be taken up by younger scholars
• copies of the Home Office letter to E.H. Fellowes, 24 August 1944, conveying the King’s grant of permission to use ‘Royal’ in the Association’s name
• design and launch plans, at the V&A, for the RMA’s Musica Britannica (MB) edition in 1951, coinciding with the Festival of Britain (prefaced by complaints from Encyclopaedia Britannica over supposed illegal use of the name ‘Britannica’)
• a telegram from the King’s private secretary, congratulating the RMA on the publication of their first three volumes in the MB series
• extensive correspondence with printers, book agents and reprint companies, shedding light on the business of scholarly journal publishing (the Association acted as its own publisher for 111 years and benefited from the international reprint bonanza of the 1960s)
• documentation of Joseph Kerman’s plans for a facsimile edition of Beethoven’s ‘Kafka’ Sketchbook in association with the RMA and the British Museum in 1970.

 

Concert programme for the RMA’s 1898 Annual Dinner. British Library Add MS 71033, f.11

Many more subtle details, for example involving decision-making and future research directions, are also present, whether buried in minutes, post-paper discussions, letters or articles.  Some are associated with celebrated scholars, critics and librarians, from John Stainer, William Barclay Squire and E.H. Fellowes to Sylvia Townsend Warner, Edward J. Dent and Frank Howes; from Francis Galpin, C.B. Oldman and Anthony Lewis to Thurston Dart, A. Hyatt King and Denis Arnold. But many other good ideas came from members less well known, some of them far-flung.   

As a spur to one’s historical imagination, raising issues not previously appreciated, there is nothing so effective as full immersion ‘in the archive’. It can provide a spark to further work and new understanding. For helping me grasp a richer view of the Royal Musical Association’s long history, I am glad I said ‘yes’ to these Papers.  

Leanne Langley