In the last year we digitised nearly 40 manuscript volumes from the Royal Music Library, including autographs by Agostino Steffani, J.C. Bach, Alessandro Scarlatti, and other composers.

Among the manuscripts digitised are 24 volumes with works by Agostino Steffani (1654-1728), who served as Kapellmeister and diplomat at the court of Duke Ernst August of Hanover from 1688 until 1703. The manuscripts in the Royal Music Library, some of which are in his own hand, are thought to have been brought from Hanover to England by King George I. They include numerous volumes with Steffani's chamber duets and operas, which survive in their original bindings.

The original leather binding of volume X of Agostino Steffani’s 13-volume set of vocal duets, and folio 59r with the opening of the duet ‘Gia tu parti’ in Steffani’s own hand. British Library R.M.23.k.18.

The volume with the 1st Act of Agostino Steffani’s opera La superbia d’Alessandro (1691) in its original leather binding. British Library R.M.23.f.12.

All surviving volumes of Steffani’s 13-volume set of vocal duets at R.M.23.k.13-20 have now been digitised, with volumes R.M.23.k.16-20 available to view via our Archives and Manuscripts catalogue and Universal Viewer. The operas by Steffani that have been digitised include the Hanoverian operas La Superbia d’Alessandro, Orlando Generoso and Henrico Leone (the latter is available to view on our Digitised Manuscripts portal).

Other manuscripts that were digitised include autographs by Johann Christian Bach (1735-1782), music master to Queen Charlotte from 1763 to 1782, including his 3-act opera Artaserse from 1761 (R.M.22.a.18-20), and two Te Deum in D major (R.M.22.a.14, R.M.22.a.15) and Magnificat in C major  (R.M.22.a.11 and R.M.22.a.13).

Opening page of J.C. Bach’s Magnificat in C major in the composer’s hand. British Library R.M.22.a.13, f.1v.

Also digitised is a volume with 12 autograph symphonies by Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725) (R.M.21.b.14).

Opening page of Alessandro Scarlatti’s Sinfonia Prima & Concerto grosso con due flauti. British Library R.M.21.b.14, f.1r.

Other highlights include autographs by Francesco Bianchi (1752-1810), and François Hippolyte Barthélémon (1741-1808), the opera Semiramide by Francesco Araja (1709-1770), and volumes with operatic arias and duets by Steffani, Pietro Torri (1650-1737), and Benedetto Marcello (1686-1739).

Title page of Francesco Araja’s opera Semiramide riconosciuta stating his position as 'Maestro di Capella' at the court of Empress Anna Iovanovna at St. Petersburg in 1737.

The volume is preserved in its original velvet binding and with the note ‘this volume belongs to the Queen 1788’ on the flyleaf which we find marked on a number of volumes in the Royal Music Library that belonged to Queen Charlotte. British Library R.M.22.a.6.

Alongside the digitised autograph Handel manuscripts in the Royal Music Library, the digitisation of these volumes is helping to highlight examples of well-represented composers in this collection and their autograph manuscripts, and also preserve manuscripts that survive in their original, and quite often fragile bindings.

The British Library is delighted to be part of an innovative new project that seeks to develop digital tools and methodologies to help capture the history of live performance.

The Internet of Musical Events: Digital Scholarship, Community, and the Archiving of Performances (InterMusE) is a two-year project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council UK as part of the UK-US New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions programme. Led by Professor Rachel Cowgill, from the University of York’s Department of Music, it brings together an interdisciplinary team of musicologists, archivists, computer scientists, and performance providers from the University of York, the Borthwick Institute for Archives, Computational Foundry at Swansea University, the British Library, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The project arises from longstanding recognition of the challenges associated with the documentation of, and access to, collections of performance ephemera, for which the British Library is a key repository in the UK. Live musical events play a vital role in community life across the globe, yet they often leave only faint traces on the historical record, even in modern times. Sources can be tantalisingly incomplete, confusingly inconsistent, and often scattered between different archives and collections, if preserved at all. While some ensembles, venues and music societies have documented their histories (the Proms Performance Archive being one notable example), the picture is fragmented with no common standards of description or connection between related online resources, or efforts to archive data.

InterMusE will make possible new ways of capturing and, crucially, linking different forms of data around musical events to form a dynamic, open-access digital archive. The research team will work with a diverse range of concert materials including programmes, posters and other ephemera held at the British Library, the University of York’s Borthwick Institute for Archives, the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Linen Hall Library (Belfast), the Royal College of Music, and three former chapters of the British Music Society (BMS): Huddersfield Music Society, the British Music Society of York, and Belfast Music Society. The richness of the resulting data will offer unprecedented opportunities to collect, analyse, and visualise information about musical events and how they have shaped and been shaped by community life over the past century. The digitised data will be used to create a series of online, open-access portals that can be linked with existing collections, resulting in a widely accessible digital archive of musical events.

Huddersfield Music Club: Programme for concert given by the Amadeus String Quartet on 12 October 1953.

Central to the project is the ambition to equip performing arts organisations and their communities with tools to help promote and enhance their own musical histories and traditions. This is particularly significant as communities begin to recover from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the project’s Lead Researcher, Professor Rachel Cowgill states:

'The experience of living through a global pandemic has, for many, greatly increased the value of music at precisely the time the ‘live event’ has fallen victim to strictures on social distancing and lockdown. InterMusE addresses some of the key challenges emerging for the arts and humanities in post-Covid times, investigating the mutually sustaining relationships between live music and communities and harnessing the capacity of digital technologies to enable collaboration and engagement with members of the public.'

InterMusE will combine computational digital-archiving methods with more accessible, community-focussed approaches such as oral-history interviews, audience reminiscences, and citizen research. This will not only facilitate engagement between particular musical societies and their audiences, but also create a new layer of evidential material for studying the impact and community significance of performance events in the 20th and 21st centuries. As Hilary Norcliffe (Archivist of the Huddesfield Music Society) commented, “Concert attendees are often keen to express their views about what they have heard and experienced but currently there is no means of recording these thoughts. This project offers the means for members of the society to add personal comments, views, reminiscences and materials, whilst also following their own lines of inquiry, thus enriching the archive.”

For more information, see the project website: https://intermuse.datatodata.org/

     

At the turn of the 19th century, British perceptions of revolutionary France and the Napoleonic wars were tied to myriad graphic, literary, and musical expressions. Between soldiers returning home, parading volunteer regiments, and theatrical renditions of war, the multiplicity of these imaginings were transformed and transported through print at a remarkable speed. After appearing in the London gazette, official news from the continent would go on a multimedia journey: passing through detailed (though often inaccurate) accounts in national and provincial newspapers; enduring the scrutiny of pamphlets and journals; being subjected to judgement in sermons; and set in public memory through the mockery of satirical cartoons.

Printed music was better placed than other media to incorporate military images because the large format of music publications meant that there was ample space on the title page for additional decoration. Taking advantage of the fashion for all things military, music publishers rushed to produce commemorative editions of battle music. In the months following The Battle of Camperdown (11 October 1797) Music publishers Joseph Dale, Longman & Broderip, and Corri, Dussek & Co. produced commemorative works celebrating the victory. They used the textual and graphic elements of the score to shape them into military souvenirs.

The cheaper editions (selling for between 1s 6d and 2s 6d), such as Joseph Dale’s, featured a standard unadorned title page. As was the practice with most editions of battle music, Dale fashioned the score into a commemorative object by including a date on the title page. This set these editions apart from other printed music of the period as publication dates were usually omitted to prevent later reprints seeming old or out of fashion. This shows that publishers considered the publication date to be part of the commercial appeal of these editions, so they were not concerned by the ephemerality this imposed on the printed object.

British Library g.138.(11.)

Longman & Broderip’s edition of Britannia by Daniel Steibelt (1765 - 1823) dresses the title in British imperial iconography, with a laurel wreath crossed with flags of the British empire. The naval scene at the foot of the title page captures the moment when the British flagship Venerable inflicts the final blow on the Dutch flagship Vryhied. Camperdown saw Duncan celebrated for his bravery and leadership, having taken his flagship into the heart of the action and in difficult waters. By using this moment at the battle’s climax, the score immortalises Duncan’s bravery and Britain’s naval dominance.

British Library g.138.(3.)

The celebration of Duncan was not only due to his perceived courage but also the sheer extent of his victory. Within three hours of the start of the battle, Duncan was not only able to report a British victory but also the capture of eleven Dutch ships. Music publishers Corri, Dussek & Co. chose to show this side of the battle in their commemoration, avoiding the engagement itself and focusing on the outcome. Their chosen image emphasised the ‘Total Defeat’ of the Dutch fleet by showing their captured ships in tatters, being towed back to Britain, the punctured sails and post victory setting reminiscent of Thomas Whitcombe’s painting of the battle (1797).

British Library g.138.(13.)

The commercial opportunities that arose around the Napoleonic wars were not limited to events happening abroad, but also covered celebrations at home. In 1798 Corri, Dussek & Co. published the descriptive piece A Complete & exact delineation Of the Ceremony from St. James’s to St. Pauls: … to return thanks for the several Naval Victories obtained by the British Fleet over those of France, Spain, & Holland. The naval thanksgiving (1797) enlisted the full theatricality of public spectacle, involving the monarchy, government, members of the army and navy, and ordinary Britons lining the streets accompanied by bespoke music written by J. L. Dussek (1760-1812). The score provided an audio-visual reproduction of the event: it contained music written for the procession and church service and captured the visuality of the occasion through an ‘elegant Frontispiece’, which is unfortunately now lost. 

George III conceived the event to rival the civic ceremonies of revolutionary France in an attempt to promote a sense of national unity in Britain. This impact, however, was limited to those who lived near enough to London to attend the ceremony. The success of the occasion relied heavily on newspapers and periodicals circulating accounts to other parts of the country, but Corri, Dussek & Co.’s musical edition was unique in its capacity to deliver both the visual and audial spectacle to those who had not witnessed the event. This edition gave people who did not live in London the opportunity to experience and take part in the patriotic symbolism of the ceremony from afar.

The hype surrounding military victories provided a market for commemorative print in the short term, capitalising on spikes in patriotic sentiment and the celebrations linked to the events. In this context music scores became collectable objects alongside commemorative pottery, porcelain, and medals, together projecting idealised images of war and victory. They helped to facilitate celebration by reminding purchasers of important dates in the national calendar and providing the music with which to celebrate them. The graphic and textual additions to printed music meant that scores had commercial value beyond their musical content and appealed to the conspicuous consumption of print buying audiences, the visually idealised militarism of the title pages allowing Britons to fulfil their patriotic duty through purchasing the score.

Dominic Bridge, Collaborative PhD student, University of Liverpool and British Library

We are pleased to announce a number of new subscriptions to our Music e-resources offer this year, as well as changes to remote access for some of our existing subscriptions:

Remote access to RILM and RIPM (full text)

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text contains more than 200 full-text journals, many of which are not available anywhere else online, with content spanning 50 countries and 40 languages. The full-text content encompasses all disciplines related to music including: Ethnomusicology; Jazz studies; Musicology; Pedagogy; Performance; Popular music and Theory. It also covers interdisciplinary subjects, such as: Archaeology; Dance studies; Dramatic arts; Literature; Philosophy; Psychology; Therapy.

Thanks to a kind offer by RILM we are pleased to offer this resource to our users until 30 September 2021.

The resource is available in all reading rooms (please note our reading rooms are currently closed) as well as via remote access to registered readers, and can be accessed via Explore.

RIPM Preservation Series: European & North American Music Periodicals (Full Text)

This new RIPM series is a collection of unique and rare full-text music titles, which complements RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals, which the Library also subscribes to. The resource includes over 100 titles of music periodicals published in Europe and North America ranging from the early 19th century to the middle of the 20th century.

This is a new subscription which is available in all reading rooms. The resource is also available via remote access to registered readers until 30 September 2021, and can be accessed via Explore.

BabelScores

This is a new subscription which offers access to an online Library of contemporary music. The BabelScores catalogue contains music in full score by composers of the last 40 years and includes audio and video content for some of the music scores, and also short composer biographies and work descriptions.

This resource is currently only available in our readings rooms but we are working towards making it available remotely in the future.

Our existing subscriptions to the Index of Printed Music and Music Index are now also available remotely to registered readers.

For any enquiries on how to search and use these e-resources please contact our Music Reference Team.

Beethoven's monument in Bonn. Illustration in Erinnerung an L. van Beethoven und die Feier der Enthüllung seines Monumentes zu Bonn am 10., 11. und 12. August 1845. General Reference Collection DRT Digital Store 785.h.31.

In Spring 2020, music cataloguers working from home were temporarily without access to the British Library catalogue. Our Collection Metadata colleagues were able to supply us with some exported files of catalogue records to work on, and we chose to have sets of records with Ludwig van Beethoven as composer. While our normal work of cataloguing new acquisitions was suspended, due to the closure of the Library site, we set to work improving the quality of these Beethoven records, as a way of working productively at home, and also of celebrating Beethoven's anniversary year in a practical way. The work  complements other departmental activities to mark the anniversary such as the online Beethoven exhibition on Discovering Music, which was launched last month.

About 2000 amended records have now been loaded back into the catalogue. Although there is more work to do, this is a big step towards improving our representation of Beethoven's works.

Authority control

The work we did was in the area of Authority Control. This is the practice of giving an entity (for example a person, work or subject) a formal, standardised identity in the form of a text string, which is used to draw together all occurrences of the same entity.

For the Beethoven records we improved these identities for work titles. For example, in this basic ‘legacy’ catalogue record the uniform title was updated:  

The publisher's title appears at the top of the record. Further down is the "uniform title" (or "preferred title"), constructed by a cataloguer. This is the authority-controlled version of the title, which in this case also holds the secret of exactly where in Beethoven's opera this piece of music comes from. It also identifies it with all the other editions and arrangements of this excerpt, not only in the British Library, but in any other institution using the same international (NACO) standard. It does this in the traditional library way, by being a left-anchored text string, located in a background alphabetical index. The title elements are presented in a conventional order and form. The NACO conventions are essentially those laid down in the mid- to late-20th century Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. However, the principle of bringing works together under a standardised title goes back a long way, and can be seen in older, printed catalogues.

Historic headings

Images from The catalogue of printed music in the British Library to 1980. London: K.G. Saur, 1981-1987.

The Catalogue of Printed Music (1981-1987) was based on older catalogues dating back to the 1840s. When the printed volumes of the Catalogue of Printed Music were converted to machine-readable cataloguing, its headings were imported into the records as uniform titles. Over the years, as records for new acquisitions were created and imported, a variety of different "uniform" titles for the same work have proliferated in the catalogue, complicating the process of searching for a particular work. Aligning all these with the NACO standard is an ongoing task, and this is the work we were continuing in the case of Beethoven.

What does this mean in practice?

The major outcome is that, if a user now locates and searches on a standard NACO uniform title, all instances of the work will be retrieved, because we have replaced the variants which formerly would have confused the search.

For example, the standard title "Concertos, piano, orchestra, no. 1, op. 15, C major" will now retrieve all the publications of the work, having replaced variants such as:

"Piano Concerto No. 1. Op. 15"

"Concerto, piano, orchestra, no. 1, op. 15, C major"

"Concertos. Piano. No. 1"

Similarly, "Bagatelles, piano, WoO 59, A minor" has replaced variants such as:

"Bagatelle, Wo0 59"

"Für Elise. K.-H. 59"

"Für Elise".

The future of uniform titles

Our current cataloguing standard, RDA (Resource Description and Access), allows for traditional uniform titles, but prefers a different, linked data approach. The online environment in which library catalogues now operate requires more sophisticated manipulation of data elements than can be provided by uniform title text strings, which were designed for printed and card catalogues. Also, the implication that there is a single, universally "correct" way of expressing the title of a work, with other versions treated as variants, is something which RDA, as an international standard, encourages us to move away from.

Future library systems will be able to present works and their relationships in a way that is both clearer and more nuanced. Making our data as consistent as possible now will help enormously with this future development. In the meantime, we hope that anyone looking for the works of Beethoven in the British Library's catalogue will find their search a much better experience.

Caroline Shaw, Printed & Manuscript Music Processing & Cataloguing Team Manager

We are pleased to announce a new Discovering Music space on 19th-century music, which launches now with an exhibition celebrating the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth.

The exhibition features 27 collection items, including several manuscripts in Beethoven’s own hand, as well as articles written by experts in the field, and much related content!

Find out more about the composition history and context of some of Beethoven’s most celebrated works, including his ‘Pastoral’ and Ninth symphonies, his violin concerto, and several of his piano and chamber music works.

The opening of Beethoven’s Symphony no.9 in D minor op.125. RPS MS 5

The space also offers insights into Beethoven’s compositional processes that formed his music, for which evidence may be found in his intricate and notoriously difficult to decipher sketchbooks.

Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony sketchbook. At the bottom of the page Beethoven has written: 'Sinfonia caracteristica oder Erinnerungen an das Landleben' (‘Characteristic symphony, or memories of country life’). Add MS 31766.

Folio 87r from the ‘Kafka’ sketch miscellany showing the opening of a sonata for mandolin and keyboard WoO 47. Add MS 29801.

The space also features collection items reflecting Beethoven’s career as a keyboard performer, personal items such as his tuning fork; as well as collection items reflecting both the inspiration and consolation he found in nature and the mental and physical struggles arising from his debilitating loss of hearing.

Beethoven’s cadenza for the last movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor (K. 466). Beethoven is known to have admired Mozart’s D minor concerto, and it is possible that he performed it in a benefit concert for Mozart’s widow, Constanze, in 1795. Add MS 29803

Also featured on the space are People pages for musicians that Beethoven collaborated with as well as famous literary figures who inspired his music, such as Goethe and Schiller.

This single leaf of sketches contains Beethoven’s initial musical ideas for the song ‘Die Trommel gerühret’ from his incidental music to Goethe’s play Egmont. Zweig MS 8.

You can explore our Beethoven holdings further by visiting our Digitised Manuscripts and Explore catalogues of printed, audio and manuscript music.

When Henry Purcell died (on 21 November 1695 - 325 years ago today) he was probably one of the best-known composers in England – honoured with a burial at Westminster Abbey no less. But a reputation will only take you so far, and the fact that his music lives on all these years later is thanks in part to it being preserved in sources that have been interpreted and reinterpreted over time. 

 

Autograph manuscript of Henry Purcell's Sonata in F major (Z. 810). BL Add MS 30930, f. 37v.

 

This evidence of Purcell’s music comes in different forms, from scores in the composer’s own hand to printed editions produced for wider circulation. A multitude of manuscript copies, made for all sorts of purposes, enriches the story even more – often giving us a sense of the ways in which the music was actually played by the composer’s contemporaries, and therefore how people would have known it. Later sources can also demonstrate the various routes of dissemination and transformation his music has taken in the centuries since, reflecting changing tastes and viewpoints over time. From 19^th -century manuscript copies of Dido and Aeneas to Michael Tippett’s and Benjamin Britten’s arrangements, these all tell us something about how Purcell and his music has been understood – and provides a context for how we interpret it today.

 

Autograph manuscript of Benjamin Britten's realisation of the Purcell sonata in the first image above.  BL Add MS 60626, f. 1r.

 

Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) - finding printed and manuscript musical sources

Last month the new RISM UK catalogue was launched, providing everyone with the ability to search for the location of pre-1850 printed and manuscript music sources in libraries, archives and other repositories around the UK (for more information, see our blog post announcing it here). A quick search for Henry Purcell shows that plenty of material can be found all around the country. In fact, Purcell is the composer with the second highest amount of material preserved in British institutions, second only to Georg Friedrich Händel (excluding the ubiquitous Anonymous). Among more than 2,500 results are around 150 autograph scores. The posthumously published collection of Purcell's songs, Orpheus Britannicus, is particularly well represented as well, with copies of the first and second volumes of the first edition (1698 and 1702) in 19 and 21 institutions respectively - and with the second, expanded, edition of 1706 to be found in a whopping 28 institutions.

 

The first edition of 'Orpheus Britannicus', a posthumously published collection of Purcell's songs (1698). BL G.100.

 'Ah! Belinda' as printed in Orpheus Britannicus. The first part of Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas to appear in print. BL G.100.

 

The RISM UK catalogue is a subset of the international catalogue, and this provides a perspective on the transmission of Purcell's music around the world – with material preserved all over Europe as well as in Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States. The Library of Congress (US-Wc) holds the largest number of Purcell sources outside of the UK, and in fact around a dozen of these sources are printed editions that can only be found there. The Royal Conservatory of Belgium (B-Bc) also houses a significant amount of music by Purcell, largely thanks to the music collector Guido Richard Wagener (1822-1896): in the manuscript anthologies with shelfmarks 25590, 14981 and 15139 one will find sonatas, keyboard pieces, and overtures by Purcell.

 

 

Purcell at the British Library

25 years ago the British Library put together an exhibition to mark the 300^th anniversary of Purcell’s death, and it’s great to see that a digital trace of that can still be found online – now almost a historical source in its own right! At the time of the exhibition in 1995, a relatively recent acquisition was the newly discovered autograph manuscript of Purcell’s keyboard music (MS Mus. 1). This was digitised along with two other major manuscript sources in Purcell’s own hand in 2012 – a blog post from the time provides a bit more information about these important volumes. Since then we have also digitised the autograph score of Purcell's ‘The Yorkshire Feast Song’ (Egerton MS 2956).

A particularly stormy passage in the autograph manuscript of 'The Yorkshire Feast Song' (Z. 333). BL Egerton MS 2956, f. 13r.

There have also been several new Purcell-related acquisitions since that volume of keyboard music in the 1990s – copies of songs from 'The Fairy Queen', for example, as well as contemporary copies of the songs 'She who my poor heart possesses' (Z. 415) and 'Cease anxious world' (Z. 362) (Mus. Dep. 2016/52).

The most recent acquisition came last year. This is a substantial volume of music mostly for the flute or for the violin and includes what is the only known source for Purcell’s Sonata in G minor (Z. 780). It is currently awaiting attention from our conservation team, but this seems a good time to introduce it and to provide a sneaky peak inside.

 

Henry Purcell, Sonata in G minor (Z. 780), as copied by Edward Finch. BL MS Mus. 1851.

The volume had passed through the hands of several collectors in the course of the 18^th and 19^th centuries and had been last seen in the early years of the 20^th century, when an edition was made of the Purcell piece, very much in the style of the time.

 

Frederick Bridge's 1903 edition of Purcell's Sonata in G minor (Z. 780).

After failing to sell in an auction in 1935, the manuscript disappeared. Despite attempts by Thurston Dart and others to reconstruct the original Purcell piece (free from the idiosyncrasies of the early 20^th -century edition), the volume’s whereabouts remained a mystery until 2012, when Peter Holman found it at Spetchley Park.[1]

The volume is known to be the work of two people: William Armstrong (d. 1717) and Edward Finch (1664-1738), both well-connected personalities in musical life of the 1600s and early 1700s. Not much is known about William Armstrong but he certainly played viola in the orchestra in the early days of the Italian Opera at the Haymarket theatre, around 1710, and we know he undertook work as a copyist for various theatres in the early 1700s too. Edward Finch was from a wealthy family and, among other things, seems to have been a proficient player of wind instruments. In particular he was a relatively early adopter of the ‘German flute’, predecessor of the modern flute (the recorder, known then as the ‘common flute’, or 'English flute', had been more popular before that). As part of the volume is in the hand of Armstrong, and the other in the hand of Finch, it has become known as the ‘Armstrong-Finch’ manuscript. The volume is dated 1691 at the beginning, but it is clear that Finch was still adding to it up to at least 1720.

William Armstrong's inscription at the front of the volume. BL MS Mus. 1851.

 

A sonata copied by Armstrong and Finch's characteristic sign-off, from Christmas 1717.

Besides the Purcell piece, the volume as a whole is of interest especially because of the connections between Finch, Armstrong and some of the prominent musicians they would have known and whose music is represented in the volume – from Purcell and Gottfried Finger to Francesco Geminiani a bit later. Given these connections, it is also a important source of information about all sorts of other things, from the use of ornamentation at the time, to the establishment of the flute as a popular instrument in professional and amateur circles. We hope, as Peter Holman says at in his introductory article to the manuscript, that it will “continue to yield up its secrets for a long time to come”.[1]

 

Chris Scobie (Curator, Music Manuscripts, British Library) and Jennifer Ward (Editor, RISM Zentralredaktion)

 

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References

[1] Holman, Peter (2012). 'A Purcell manuscript lost and found'. in Early Music. 40/3. pp.469-487.

We are pleased to announce a PhD placement opportunity to work in Music Collections on the project:

The Royal Music Library: understanding provenance and collecting practices

About the PhD placement scheme:

The scheme is open to current PhD students and offers an opportunity to work on a 3-month project in a specific area under the supervision of Library staff, and enables students to broaden their skill set, engage with research outside the academic context, and experience different career paths.

About the project

The Royal Music Library consists of music collected by several generations of the Royal Household, reflecting the musical tastes of its successive members. It contains about 1,000 volumes of manuscript music and 4,500 volumes of printed music, dating from the late 16th to the early 20th centuries. Among the many treasures are 97 volumes of Handel’s autograph manuscripts, and scores by Purcell, Steffani, J.C. Bach and Mendelssohn. With a few notable exceptions, such as the provenance of the Handel manuscripts, little is known regarding the provenance of the majority of the music, in terms of when it was acquired and by whom.

The PhD placement student will undertake a bibliographical study of selected parts of the Royal Music Library collection. Findings will improve understanding of its provenance and the collecting practices of members of the royal household, particularly George III, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria.

The project will help to improve the Music team’s work in curating and promoting this collection through agreed outputs emanating from the research, which will include metadata enhancement; writing content for online exhibitions and blogs; and using digital tools to analyse and visualise the collection.

How to apply

Full details about the project, the PhD placement scheme, and how to apply can be found here:

https://www.bl.uk/news/2020/october/phd-placement-adverts-2020

The deadline for applications is 5 pm on Friday 18 December 2020.

For any enquiries about the PhD placement scheme or project please contact the Research Development team ([email protected]) in the first instance.