The legacy of Carleton Sprague Smith: Pan-American holdings in the Music Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Carleton Sprague Smith (1905-1994) was chief of the Music Division of the New York Public Library (NYPL) from 1931 to 1959. The first fifteen of those years are remembered as a period of economic turmoil and war, yet Smith--through his vision, broad education, and keen intellect--helped turn the challenges of his time into great opportunities for the New York Public Library and the communities which it served. While chief of the Music Division, he helped expand the repertoire of music available to the public, and through public programs and special projects he enlarged the audiences for a variety of repertoires, such as early music from England and America. He not only promoted awareness of the music of the United States, but as a diplomat he also facilitated cultural exchanges with Latin American countries, and enhanced the Music Division's holdings of music from those nations. In 1932, Smith conceived of a music museum in New York City; (1) through his dogged persistence, this idea was expanded and realized as the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts, which opened at Lincoln Center in 1965. (2) Smith was directly responsible for the creation of the Americana Section and Dance Collection within the Music Division. The Americana Section (now known as the American Music Collection) has steadily grown into an indispensable resource for American music history, with holdings that now include the twentieth-century score collection of the American Music Center--the official music information center of the United States--and archival collections devoted to jazz, popular music, and musical theater. Ultimately, the world-class Dance Collection--now the Jerome Robbins Dance Division--became independent of, and on an equal administrative footing with, the Music Division. A founding member of both the Music Library Association (MLA) and the American Musicological Society (AMS), Smith became president of each organization, from 1937 to 1939 and from 1939 to 1940, respectively. Smith was a consultant in the formation of the International Music Council of UNESCO, and in the planning for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, as well as serving on the boards of directors of several cultural institutions and performing organizations.

Carleton Sprague Smith's achievements in collection development--and, indeed, in library development--were made possible partly by his upbringing in homes (the family had residences in Manhattan and in Washington, Connecticut) where literature and the arts were cherished, and by his broad and deep education, which included music but ranged far beyond it. His father, Clarence Bishop Smith, was a New York admiralty lawyer, and his mother, Catharine Cook Smith, was an author of two books, (3) and a patron of the arts. (4) (The following short summary of Carleton Sprague Smith's education is drawn from a tribute by Israel J. Katz, who drew from an unpublished essay by Smith himself. (5)) At the age of twelve, Carleton Sprague Smith began studying flute at the Institute for Musical Art (later to become the Juilliard School) with a student of Georges Barrere. In 1922, after graduating from secondary school (the Hackley School for Boys in Tarrytown, New York), he continued flute studies with Louis Fleury in Paris while studying French at the Ecole Yersin. He entered Harvard University the following year and broadened his study of music history and literature, while studying flute with Georges Laurent, the principal flutist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He also continued his study of French language and literature, but his studies moved increasingly in a new direction--Spanish and Portuguese literature and history. He enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1928, and in 1930 completed his doctorate in history with a dissertation in German on the seventeenth-century Spanish Habsburgs. In January of 1931, after his return to New York, Dr. Smith accepted two concurrent appointments--as an instructor in the History Department of Columbia University, and as chief of the Music Division in the Reference Department of the New York Public Library. (6)

As chief of the Music Division, one of Dr. Smith's first initiatives became known as the Black Line Print project, under which copyists working with india ink on ozalid master sheets produced scores of compositions--such as eighteenth-century trio sonatas--which had previously only been printed as parts; in some cases, works which had been published as scores had parts produced to facilitate performance. Ozalid, or black-line, prints produced by a blueprint process from the master sheets were sold by the New York Public Library at a nominal price. "Under CSS's guidance, the copying was soon expanded to transcribing from tablature, transposing, reconstructing missing parts, realizing figured bass parts, and eventually editing scores and parts for concert use." (7) Dr. Hans T. David, an eminent displaced German scholar hired by Dr. Smith, and Sydney Beck, already on the staff of the Music Division, acted as editors and supervised twelve music copyists provided by the Federal Music Project of the Works Progress Administration. (8)

     The publications project  ultimately encompassed five general     categories under the series  titles of: 1) English Instrumental Music     of the 16th and 17th  Centuries from Manuscripts in the NYPL [Drexel     Collection]; 2)  Psalmody in 17th-Century America from the Psalters     used in Colonial  America with the original tunes in harmonizations     current at the  time: The Ainsworth Psalter, The Bay Psalm Book and     the Dathenius  Psalter (edited by Carleton Sprague Smith); 3) Music     of the  Moravians in America from the Archives of the Moravian Church     at  Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (edited by Hans T. David); 4) Early  Symphonies and concertos; and 5) Chamber Music and Choral Works. (9)  

Clearly, Smith's interest in early American psalmody (10) arose from his New England upbringing and broad interest in the history of the American colonies. A number of miscellaneous American scores were also copied during this project, such as Wind Song for solo flute by the nineteenth-century poet and essayist Sidney Lanier (see fig. 1), a composition which Dr. Smith performed on at least one public concert. (11) Some of the editions produced in the Black Line Print project were issued as publications by C. F. Peters in the 1950s. Garland Publishing later issued thirteen volumes of the editions--selected and introduced by Kenneth Cooper, with a foreword by Susan T. Sommer--under the title Three Centuries of Music in Score. (12)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The interest in earlier American music reflected in the Black Line Print project manifested itself more overtly when Smith established the Americana Section of the Music Division in 1936. Supported by money and staff from the Works Progress Administration, the Americana Section under its first head Joseph Muller (1877-1939) began its work to fulfill what Smith clearly regarded as a historical mission. In 1938, the Americana collections grew exponentially with the acquisition of the collection of the American composer and conductor Henry Hadley (1871-1937) from his widow Inez Barbour Hadley. This enormous collection consisted of orchestral, choral, operatic, and chamber music works by American composers--published and in manuscript--and proved to be the cornerstone on which a formal collection of American music could be built. Under Carleton Sprague Smith's leadership, the Music Division established the Henry Hadley Memorial Library as an entity that could continue to build on the foundation of Hadley's personal collection.

Smith had been discussing his dream for a collection devoted to the music of the United States with other colleagues and their respective institutions. One such institution was the American Music Center, which came into existence after a meeting on 11 November 1939. In the minutes of that meeting, Quincy Porter recorded the following statement:

   It was decided that the place might  be called American Music Center,   to be for the distribution of  published music and records, of a   serious nature.   On the question of  the new music room at the public library in New   York, which is to  contain the Hadley Collection as well as other   American works, it is  suggested that Carleton Smith be asked to call   it something other than  Center, so as to avoid confusion. We hope to   have his cooperation in  sending people who inquire for American Music   to us if they wish to  buy some. (13) 

It is a mark of Carleton Sprague Smith's involvement in the musical life of his time that he would be consulted about the naming of the first national music information center. (In July 2001, events came to a nearly full circle when the American Music Center donated its library of approximately 50,000 twentieth-century scores to the American Music Collection of the Music Division of The New York ...