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  • 标题:Music Publishing and Collecting: Essays in Honor of Donald W. Krummel.
  • 作者:Jones, Peter Ward
  • 期刊名称:Notes
  • 印刷版ISSN:0027-4380
  • 出版年度:1996
  • 期号:March
  • 语种:English
  • 出版社:Music Library Association, Inc.
  • 摘要: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.
  • 关键词:Book reviews;Books

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
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