Music Library Reading Room Notes
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Music Library Reading Room Notes Issue no.2 (1999-2000) University Libraries The University of the Arts Compiled by the Music Library Staff Mark Germer: Music Librarian Lars Halle & Aaron Meicht: Circulation Supervisors A Note on Music Imagined p. 2 Philadelphia’s Musical Legacy p. 3 by Marjorie Hassen The New Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: First Impressions p. 15 by Mark Germer The University of the Arts . 320 South Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19102 http://www.uarts.edu University Libraries: http://library.uarts.edu A Note on Music Imagined by Music Library Staff References are common to the sustained- poser’s struggles in his late masterwork -often explicit--literary inspiration that lies Doktor Faustus (1947), which earned for at the heart of numerous musical works Mann something less than the gratitude in the Western canon, from absoute Ber- of Schoenberg. lioz’s Harold en Italie to Britten’s Metamor- phoses. Composers are assumed to have assimilated the texts they set in songs, With these intersections in mind, the UA choruses, and operas, mining them for Music Library has begun a modest ef- the opportunities they present for musi- fort to identify and acquire worthy literary cal expression and formal coherence. But works that demonstrate the fascination there is an equally diverse and extensive with music on the part of contemporary tradition of exploring musical themes, in- fiction writers, especially when they have cluding the very meaning of human mu- interacted in some notable way with the sic-making itself, in Western literature. history of music. Among modern works with powerful commentaries on matters musical are Thomas Bernhard’s fictional- The musical components of the short sto- ized remembrances of Glenn Gould (The ries of E.T.A. Hoffmann--praised in his day Loser, 1983); Michael Ondaatje’s attempt as both a writer and a composer--are well to account for one of jazz’s mysterious appreciated, if remembered now mainly founders, Buddy Bolden (Coming Through thanks to the dramatization of three tales Slaughter, 1976); and Herbert Simmons’s in a comic opera by Offenbach. But the evocation of a figure resembling Miles use of fiction as a peg on which to hang Davis (Man Walking on Eggshells, 1962). meditations on style in music, the nature There are more to be (re)discovered. One of creativity, or the role of the musician in new work, Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music society reaches back at least to the phi- (1999) will even be issued in conjunction losophe Denis Diderot (in Le Neveu de with a compact disc containing music Rameau, of ca. 1760) through the poet that plays a role in the novel’s plot! Eduard Morike (Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag, 1855) to Romain Rolland’s Jean- Christophe (a work of 1916 that won its author the Nobel Prize) and Franz Werfel’s Verdi (1924, rev. 1930)--the last of which has even been given partial credit for the rebirth of interest in a hitherto neglected musical genius. Perhaps the most infa- mous example of musical fiction is Thom- as Mann’s imagining of a modernist com- Philadelphia’s Musical Legacy: Collections of Historic Interest in The University of Pennsylvania’s Libraries (Part 1) by Marjorie Hassen Editor’s note: The music librarian of the organist, and composer. His Seven Songs University of Pennsylvania, Marjorie Has- for the Harpsichord or Forte Piano, pub- sen, has kindly allowed us to reprint, in a lished in Philadelphia in 1788, includes shortened version, her fine introduction to a dedication to George Washington, in some of UPenn’s archival holdings. This which the composer asserts, “I cannot, I article, through its focus on primary docu- believe, be refused the credit of being the ments, provides much on the subject of first native of the United States who has Philadelphia’s music history that is not oth- produced a musical composition.” The Li- erwise available. For the full version, with brary’s copy of this publication was Hop- numerous plates and facsimiles, see The kinson’s own--a gift of the patriot’s direct Penn Library Collections at 250 (University descendent, Edward Hopkinson Jr.--and of Pennsylvania, 2000). is part of a sixteen-volume collection pre- sented to the University between 1948 and 1950. Pennsylvania’s Quaker settlers had little interest in music; it was, rather, William Penn’s hospitality to other religious groups The Hopkinson Collection, as it has come that ensured the establishment of a musi- to be known, includes printed and manu- cal life in the Colony. From its early days the script music amassed primarily by Fran- most populous city, Philadelphia sheltered cis (1737-1791), but also by his grand- a thriving community of immigrant musi- son Oliver (1812-1905). At the heart of cians, and over the course of the eigh- the collection are three volumes of ho- teenth century, as musical performances lograph music manuscripts, copied by extended from the church to the concert Francis Hopkinson for his own library: a hall, the city became one of the principal songbook fragment containing sixteen centers of music in the New World. works primarily for voice and keyboard (dated 1755 in Hopkinson’s hand); forty- six works for keyboard (copied ca. 1763); Public subscription concerts were pre- and a volume of 115 Lessons for key- sented in Philadelphia as early as 1757, board (copied ca. 1764). It is unknown organized chiefly through the efforts of a whether Hopkinson himself was respon- native son, Francis Hopkinson. Hopkinson sible for the many arrangements that are was a member of the first graduating class present in these volumes, but it is clear, of what was then the College of Philadel- given the breadth of the collection, that phia--later the University of Pennsylvania. he was familiar with the forms and styles A lawyer by profession and a signer of the of European vocal and instrumental mu- Declaration of Independence, he was also sic of his day. His transcriptions include an accomplished amateur harpsichordist, popular dance and march tunes as well as works by the leading English and Con- est American music benevolent society in tinental composers of the eighteenth continuous existence. century, among them Karl Friedrich Abel, Thomas Arne, Arcangelo Corelli, Frances- co Geminiani, George Frideric Haendel, The musical climate in Philadelphia at the Johann Adolf Hasse, Domenico Scarlatti, time of the Society’s founding was en- John Stanley, and Johann Stamitz. gagingly described by the organization’s first Secretary, the attorney and amateur musician, John K. Kane. Looking back These manuscript volumes are supple- from the midpoint of the century, he re- mented by thirteen volumes of printed membered: music that preserve an extraordinary com- pilation of contemporaneous American and European editions. Here too, nearly The state of music in those days, and all the important composers of the eigh- musical taste!--Hupfeldt used to give teenth century are represented. Among his “Annual Concert,” the crack musi- the works that date from the elder Hopkin- cal phenomenon of the year, at which son’s time are several Haendel oratorios, he annually played his Concerto by arranged for voice, harpsichord and violin Kreutzer, while the ladies chatted and (London, 1784), and the solo string parts laughed in ancient tea-party fash- of some fifty concerti grossi of Domerico ion, and gentlemen stood upon the Alberti, Corelli, Geminiani, and Antonio benches with their hats on, or walked Vivaldi (London, ca. 1730), which were round the room to exchange compli- performed by Hopkinson and his friends ments and retail the last joke. at concerts in Penn’s College Hall during Yet we had our Quartette party, - his student years. three violins, all professional except Dr. La Roche, - a tenor or two, - and a couple of basses; ... and we A “gentleman amateur” of high social used to meet round at each others’ standing, Hopkinson frequently joined with houses of a Saturday night, fifteen or immigrant European professionals in both eighteen of us, to hear Haydn, Mo- private and public music performances, a zart, Boccherini, sometimes to bog- circumstance illustrative, in Richard Craw- gle over Beethoven, and then to eat ford’s words, of “the partipatory atmo- crackers and cheese, and drink por- sphere of music-making in colonial Phila- ter or homoeopathic doses of sloppy delphia” (see the article on Hopkinson in hot punch. We were a delightful little The New Grove Dictionary of American club, the elite of the time, and the Music (1986), v. 2, p. 421). This atmo- veritable germ of the Musical Fund. sphere continued into the early years of the nineteenth century and was the impe- tus behind the establishment, in 1820, of (From The Autobiography of the Honor- the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia able John K. Kane, 1795-1858 [Philadel- by a group of professional and amateur phia 1949], entry for 20 Jan. 1849) musicains--still held today to be the old- The Society developed out of these “quar- the Society’s bank vault were relocated tette parties,” adopting as its objectives to the Free Library of Philadelphia and, in “the relief of decayed musicians and their 1991, the complete collection (excluding families, and the cultivation of skill and the materials held by the Historical Soci- diffusion of taste in music.” And while its ety) was donated by the Society to the formal documents indicate that benevo- University of Pennsylvania Library. lent work was foremost in the minds of the Society’s founders, the level of musical activity within the organization throughout The documents that comprise what the first half of the nineteenth century sug- is known as the Records of the Musi- gests that its focus was in large measure cal Fund Society provide unique details the promotion of concerts.