Some uncataloged musical resources in the Harvard Theatre Collection with a handlist for the bound music volumes.

The Harvard Theatre Collection includes a wide range of musical resources, of which the bound music volumes are a small selection. (1) The bound music collection generally complements other materials available through the Theatre Collection, including music and early publications related to minstrel shows, early American musical theater, songs from plays performed on American and English stages, and operatic works. Other Theatre Collection holdings of interest to music librarians and historians include a collection of materials relating to John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and the John Milton Ward collections which include materials gathered by other well-known collectors: Kurt Ganzl's operetta collection and Richard Macnutt's collection of librettos.

Guides to the collections include the library staff's 1998 Sheet Music Shelflist (compiled for internal purposes), which itemizes multiple collections of sheet music, primarily from the nineteenth century, grouped and sorted by different categories including composer, title, "opera airs," and "songsters." This article will briefly consider the materials found in the bound music collection and suggest possible directions for further research related to them, concluding with the handlist and, in an appendix, various indexes for locating material by characteristics such as composer, dramatic production, or place of publication. (2)

OVERVIEW OF THE BOUND MUSIC COLLECTION

Numbered XXXI in the 1998 Sheet Music Shelflist, the collection of bound music comes from a variety of sources. Some volumes were given directly to the Theatre Collection, other volumes came from Houghton Library or were removed from the old Music Library. (3) Approximately one quarter of the nearly four hundred volumes were numbered using a previous system. The older "Tawa" numbers have been maintained where present; all other volumes have been assigned temporary "Lowerre" numbers.

Some volumes are of interest individually, while larger groups of volumes are worthy of consideration for what they can tell us about the history of music publishing in the United States, and the history of musical taste and reception, particularly of European opera--or at least of its hit arias and themes--by American musicians. Many of these collectors of operatic repertoire were women whose performances were probably presented privately, and thus are not documented by newspaper reports or concert programs. In addition to piano and vocal music, the collection contains nineteenth-century music for flute and harp, instruments also popular with nonprofessional performers.

Some Volumes of Interest

Doubtless the best-known volumes from the bound music collection are the three Martha Custis Albums, containing piano and vocal music published by Alexander Reinagle in Philadelphia, manuscript copies of opera music by Giovanni Paisiello and Domenico Cimarosa, and miscellaneous songsheets dating from the end of the eighteenth century. (4) The collection also includes two English volumes of roughly the same date (Tawa 69 and Lowerre 274) that contain copies of significant selections of late-eighteenth-century London theater music published by Longman & Broderip. Tawa 69 includes songs sung at Vauxhall Gardens by composers including Tommaso Giordani, James Hook, William Jackson, and Thomas Linley. Lowerre 274, unfortunately somewhat dilapidated, contains several printed collections from the 1770s, of which the most valuable is a copy of Thomas Arne's The Syren: A New Collection of Favorite Songs Sung by Mrs. Farrell at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden and at Ranelagh ... the Whole Composed by Dr. Arne (London: Longman & Broderip, [1777]). Many other collections feature popular works by later generations of London theater composers, including Charles E. Horn, Henry Rowley Bishop, and William Glover.