Music Publishing and Collecting: Essays in Honor of Donald W. Krummel.
Jones, Peter Ward
This collection of nine essays honors the sixty-fifth birthday of Don
Krummel and a career devoted to music bibliography. Krummel's own
many distinguished studies are recorded in a bibliography of his
writings at the end of the volume, and the essays reflect many of his
interests, although the sphere in which he has made some of his most
important contributions - music printing - is not represented. Of four
essays on music publishing the outstanding one is Nicholas
Temperley's examination of "The Hymn Books of the Foundling
and Magdalen Hospitals." A complementary study to his earlier
article "The Lock Chapel and Its Music," (Journal of the Royal
Musical Association 118 [1993]: 44-72), it completes a survey of music
at these London charitable institutions, and Temperley's
unravelling of the bibliographic complexities of the various editions of
their associated hymn books is masterly. The present reviewer has been
able to re-date several of his own library's editions as a result.
Temperley does not confine himself to bibliographical matters, but also
provides an invaluable study of the background and musical practices of
the two institutions.
A very different subject is tackled by James Coover in a survey of
the five-generation London bookselling and publishing business of
William Reeves, which dates back to 1825. Coover has had the benefit of
interviews with the last member of the family, the fifth William Reeves,
who is still gradually disposing of the accumulations of his forebears.
For many years it was the principal London firm dealing in ordinary
secondhand music and held a vast stock, but it was also responsible for
important new publications, including periodicals such as The Musical
Standard and The Strad. Coover has done a notable service in securing
many details of the firm's history for posterity before it goes out
of existence. Historians find that for all too many music businesses
tantalizingly little information is available, and even Coover admits
that there are many areas of the Reeves enterprise on which he has not
been able to shed light.
Still in the publishing section, William Lichtenwanger offers a clear
and detailed summary of the history of music copyright in the United
States, and Mark McKnight uses a statistical sample to analyze the
genres of nineteenth-century American instrumental sheet music. Although
part of his purpose is to chart "the emergence of an American
musical identity" (p. 97) it is not obvious that this has been
achieved. Experience would suggest that all the genres (cotillion,
polka, waltz, variations, etc.) listed by McKnight are equally common in
contemporary British imprints, which would argue for the similarity of
British and American taste at this period, rather than revealing any
specific American trends.
Peggy Daub opens the section on music collecting with an admirable
study of the musical portion of the library of George II's wife,
Queen Caroline, based on a catalogue discovered at Windsor Castle. Part
of the library survives among the British Library's collections,
and Daub has managed to identify a good number of its volumes. Despite
the Queen's love of music - we know that she was a fine singer in
her Hanoverian youth - the general character of the music library
remains that of a typical royal accumulation rather than the creation of
an active collector.
Richard Macnutt contributes to the early history of the Paris
Conservatoire's library with translations of fascinating
correspondence concerning acquisitions from Italy in the first decade of
its existence, while Calvin Elliker details the activities of Josiah
Kirby Lilly in his collection and successful advocacy of the music of
Stephen Foster. Music librarians will be particularly grateful to Oliver
Neighbour for his revelations of some of the less obvious quirks in the
Catalogue of Printed Music in the British Library to 1980, 62 vols.
(London: K. G. Saur, 1980-87), and known by the acronym CPM. His
intimate acquaintance with its idiosyncrasies - he had overall
supervision of CPM's creation from the old guardbook volumes -
enables him to perform a unique service. All too often such knowledge of
past institutional practice remains in the head of an individual.
Fortunately Neighbour (like his predecessor as music librarian, the late
Alec Hyatt King) has ensured that his own insights into the history of
the British Library's music collections will outlive him.
Finally James Fuld and David Hunter combine to produce a list of
collectors who have also contributed to music bibliography, among whom
Fuld himself is an illustrious example. To define "collector"
and "music bibliography" in such circumstances has proved
rather troublesome, and the authors have ended up with a substantial
number of excluded categories in order to keep the article to manageable
length. Nevertheless, there is still a fascinating array of names from
Sebastien de Brossard to Alan Tyson, and it is particularly useful to
have the present location of their collections given where known. A
small error has crept into the entry on Genevieve Thibault (Comtesse de
Chambure). It was not the whole of this famous library that was sold at
auction in 1993. Many items had already been bequeathed to the
Bibliotheque nationale, and it is only the residue that has been
appearing in an ongoing series of auctions beginning in 1993. It is a
pity that Walter Harding, whose fine collection is acknowledged in the
introduction, has been excluded on the grounds that he did not publish
on the basis of it. His unique first-line index of English song,
1600-1850, to which he devoted countless hours, and whose coverage
extended even beyond his own very comprehensive collection, has proved
of immense value to numerous scholars in the twenty years it has been
available in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It deserves to rank as a
monument of music bibliography, even if unpublished.
These very diverse articles offer a worthy tribute to Don Krummel,
providing much to enlighten all with an interest in the bibliographical
side of music. The volume has been meticulously edited with no more than
a couple of "typos," which its honor- and's eagle eyes
are sure to have picked up.
PETER WARD JONES Bodleian Library, University of Oxford