"Questions and discussion, part 2" in "Music librarianship in America, Part 2: Music librarians and music scholarship" The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Wolff, Christoph. 1991. "Questions and discussion, part 2" in "Music librarianship in America, Part 2: Music librarians and music scholarship". Harvard Library Bulletin 2 (1), Spring 1991: 70-76. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42661664 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Open Access Policy Articles, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#OAP 70 Questions and Discussion, Part 2 ChristophWolff, Chair WOLFF:Our topic, "Music Librarians and Music Scholarship," is as important as it is sensitive, and it's very good that not just this session but the entire symposium is largely devoted to this central aspect. Aren't we all, in fact, sitting in the same boat? Professional, organizational, even philosophical trends have unfortunately created some boundaries. As Harold Samuel pointed out, fewer and fewer musicologists attend Music Library Association meetings because those meetings have become concerned primarily with technical matters. There is also the arrogant scholar who looks down on the library as a service department. But sitting in the same boat means serving one another in the best possible way. Consider the universal phenomenon of stuff-in-a-box, as Suki Sommer referred to it earlier. There is ample opportunity for hands-on cooperation between librarians and scholars, especially in this area, as two recent examples will demonstrate. In April 1989 I was asked to survey the Philip Spitta estate in the university library ofI,6dz in Poland. The material had been sit- Christoph Wolff is William ting in boxes for forty-six years and had not been accessible to scholarship. I will Powell Mason Professor of not belabor the point here; the discoveries are described in the December 1989 issue Music, Curator of the Isham of Notes.1 Memorial Library, and Acting Closer to home and only one week before this symposium, Peter Wollny, a Director of the University Library at Harvard University. graduate student in musicology at Harvard, telephoned me at home to ask whether He is the author, with Hans- I knew a cantata, "Merk auf, mein Herz." I replied that I didn't, but I had seen a Joachim Schulze, of the multi- reference to it and an incipit of the music. It is listed in Wolfgang Schmieder' s Bach- volume Bach Compendium: Werk- Verzeichnis under Anhang 163. Wollny, who is working on a Wilhelm ana lytisch-b i bl i ograph isches Friedemann Bach project, informed me that the piece, which is identified in the Repertorium der Werke Johann Schmieder catalog and the Bach-Gesellschaft edition as lost, was here at Harvard. SebastianBachs. How did he locate the work, which does not show up in any Harvard catalog? It happened to have been among some stuff-in-a-box. The box contained uncataloged materials that came to the library from George Benson Weston, a Harvard profes- sor ofltalian language and literature, who left his music collection to the Univer- sity in the 1950s. The collection contains very important materials, particularly some related to Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and therefore W ollny had every reason to take a closer look at the papers. From a pile of late nineteenth-century transcrip- tions he pulled out some eighteenth-century manuscripts, among them a score and a complete set of parts for the eight-part Christmas motet, "Merk auf, mein Herz," by Johann Christoph Bach (1642-1703; figure 1). The manuscripts had never been described because they had not been accessible to scholarly investigation. We established quickly-in fact, in less than five minutes' time-that the copyist was 1 Christoph Wolff, "From Berlin to l.6di: The Spitta Collection Resurfaces," Notes,46 (1989), 3n-327. Questions and Discussion, Part 2 71 Figure 1. First page of Johann Christoph Bach's Merk auf, mein Herz, in a manuscript score by Johann Christoph Altnikol, a copyist for ]. S. Bach. 72 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN Johann Christoph Altnikol,J. S. Bach's principal copyist in the 1740s and later his son-in-law, and that the paper is the same as that used for the second half of the score of Bach's B-minor Mass and for some other Bach pieces. It could then be readily determined that these were performing materials used in Leipzig by the Thomaner Choir in the mid-174os, and that the piece was actually part of the Altbachisches Archiv, a collection of music by Bach's ancestors in which the composer became particularly interested during that time. So, what do we learn from this? Stuff-in-a-box is useful to musicologists only if librarians keep it in the first place, and then only if we know of its existence. At the same time, librarians need scholars to help identify the stuff-in-a-box. We are indeed sitting in the same boat. LEONARDBURKAT (Danbury, Conn.): When I was a librarian at the Boston Public Library, it was common knowledge that Professor Weston had a number of music manuscripts by members of the Bach family, including obscure works, not well cataloged, of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. I cannot imagine how that box of music from Weston's collection could have gotten into the hands of any librarian in any library who knew anything about Weston without being opened and carefully examined upon receipt, even if the library couldn't afford to process the contents and make them available. I wonder if there is a reason, if not an excuse, that the box just sat there. OcHS: While I don't know the answer, I can guess: this material came to Harvard at a time when there was no music librarian-there were just generallibrarians, and they could not deal with it properly and adequately. This incident proves how urgently we need music librarians in our libraries. PRUETT:Coming from the Library of Congress, I am a bit reluctant to comment on unopened boxes! As I have told many people since joining that institution, the magnitude of the problem is simply enorn1ous: we keep discovering stuff in boxes, not only in the buildings on Capitol Hill, but also in various warehouses that we have. I would, however, make one slight plea to those who discover great trea- sures in boxes, that they temper their reactions and not readily assume that the material discovered has been scandalously neglected by ignorant library staff. Although such may be the case, there are very good reasons in many instances why things have stayed in boxes. ALEJANDROPLANCHART (University of California at Santa Barbara): Since we are continuing our discussion of boxes, I will relate one story from south of the bor- der. In 1925 when the Escuela Superior de Musica in Caracas was being remodeled, a trunk that had been sitting in a space underneath a staircase was moved and opened. The trunk had apparently been sitting there since r 800-the Escuela had been in the same building since the eighteenth century. In that trunk was found what is now the entire surviving corpus ofVenezuelan colonial music, including the Mass of Jose Angel Lamas and all the music we have of Cayetano Carrefio- Masses and motets. It had literally been hidden there, apparently during the War of Independence, by blocking and plastering the stairs. When the plaster was removed during the remodeling, the trunk was found. So there are reasons that things like this happen. Questions and Discussion, Part 2 73 A different issue is the one raised by Professor Slim and exemplified by the loss of this painting for seventy-odd years. We desperately need to encourage auction houses and those who cater to private collectors (who tend to be very secretive) to do very careful cataloging. And unless auction houses and private collectors make materials available to responsible scholarship for a certain amount of time, we will constantly be saddled with the problem of primary source materials remaining improperly identified and inaccessible to scholars. One of the most painful cases involved a private collection that contained the central sources of old Roman chant at Santa Cecilia, to which scholars were denied access with the excuse that the material was about to appear in facsimile. Completion of the facsimile edition took over a quarter of a century. In the meantime, however, thanks to John Connolly, who managed to get a bootleg microfilm, a number of people could have access. One mission of music librarians should be to preach to private collectors on the morality of denying access to crucial information to responsible scholarship. Paul Henry Lang, in a r 9 50s editorial, castigates an unknown New York collector who had refused access to a Mozart autograph for work on the Neue Mozart Ausgabe.2 That sort of practice is still very much with us. It is an area in which music librar- ians, and librarians in general, can have a positive effect in creating a different cul- tural atmosphere. MAURICEPRESS (London): I am not utterly convinced by Leo Balk that publishers have as a real goal getting information to musicologists. Doesn't profit come first? BALK:In planning publishing projects we have to consider their usefulness, and if there is some financial gain to be derived, then they are worth doing. If projects are not well received they aren't done again.