Writing (British) concert history: the blessing and curse of ephemera.

It has probably not escaped librarians' notice that since the mid-1990s there has been an upsurge in intellectual interest in the history of musical life in Britain from the eighteenth century onwards. This has produced a range of journal articles, books of essays, monographs, databases, and Web sites on this once highly marginalized topic. Ashgate Publishing has a series, Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by Bennett Zon; Boydell & Brewer has recently launched another, Music in Britain, 1600-1900, edited by Rachel Cowgill and Peter Holman; and the North American British Music Studies Association (NABMSA) (1) publishes a newsletter, hosts an electronic mailing list (for members only), and holds biennial conferences, and maintains an online bibliography of recent publications--to name only a few of the more visible examples. Within this broad area, concert history has become one of the more popular fields of investigation, offering opportunities to combine studies of the social, cultural, and economic structures of British musical life with the concerns of performance and reception history in their broadest senses. Among the several scholars who have contributed to this field are Jenny Burchell, Rachel Cowgill, Cyril Ehrlich, Christopher Fifield, Leanne Langley, Meredith McFarlane, Alyson McLamore, Simon McVeigh, Michael Musgrave, Roz Southey, and David Wright. (2) Collectively they have embraced many areas of inquiry, mostly concerned with art music and high culture, and ranging from the development of repertoire and patterns of taste to socioeconomic aspects of concert life, and from the functions and meanings that concerts had in people's lives to the development of ideologies about music and codes of behavior in the concert hall, some of which remain with us today.

Along with all this has come a solid demonstration of the crucial importance of ephemera--that is, the "detritus" left after the performance event--as source material for serious concert history. Its artifacts comprise not just concert programs, but handbills, posters, tickets, newspaper advertisements and reviews, administrative records, contracts with performers, and so on--any documentation, in fact, that was associated with the business of putting live music before audiences. And the resultant concert history has strikingly demonstrated the value of ephemera, as James B. Coover put it, to illuminate "those people, those events, those organizations," and to vivify the history of music. (3) Admittedly, once upon a time only a few librarians and archivists bothered preserving such materials; but disdain for ephemera has long been on the wane. By 1991, Coover reckoned that the adage "today's trash, tomorrow's treasure" was being taken on board by "most of us [American librarians]," (4) just as five years earlier he had called for definitions, taxonomies, a national survey of holdings, and systems for bibliographic control. (5) In all this he held the view that British librarians had been ahead of the game in the value they placed on ephemera collections and the groundwork they had laid in this field. (6) Certainly, in the early 1990s much concert ephemera was lying in wait for British musicologists, in such collections as the John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and--notably--the Portraits Collection (now the Centre for Performance History) at the Royal College of Music, London, and some of the first significant publications in the field were produced around this time. Since then, much more material has come to researchers' attention, as the value of concert ephemera to the scholarly community has continued to be demonstrated. Important archives (both public and private) have been purchased and opened up--witness the Royal Philharmonic Society's archive, bought for the nation by the British Library in 2002; or the papers of the musical artists' agency Ibbs and Tillett, now at the Royal College of Music's Centre for Performance History; and the archives of the Wigmore (formerly Bechstein) Hall, London, and the BBC Promenade Concerts, to which scholars have recently gained access. (7)

As someone who has spent many years researching concert history, I have a love-hate relationship with its ephemera. On the one hand it is a source of almost unimaginable richness, providing the sort of telling detail that draws one's interest and opens up avenues for exploration. Examples include gentlemen being advised to light their pipes to help them concentrate during concerts; protocols about applause and encores (for much of the nineteenth century, individual movements were applauded and even repeated before moving on to the next one); accounts of performance calamities (a string breaking during a quartet performance, and how the player compensated); and so on. This is in addition to the mass of musical, social, and economic data and statistics that can track continuities and discontinuities over time, and help us understand such trends as the growing relationship between the drawing power of an artist and box-office takings; the emergence and definition of masterworks of repertoire; and the arrival of new paradigms for listening and music appreciation. These are blessings indeed. Probably every concert historian has a quasi-addiction to the material--its smell, its look, its feel. On the other hand, concert ephemera presents the researcher with real--and interlinked--difficulties of research methodology and historical interpretation, which sometimes leave one wondering (cursing?) that one started on this field of study in the first place.

Having been closely acquainted with music librarians for some twenty years, I am aware of how much my research has benefited from seeing how librarians approach and organize their holdings. In return, I have often shared my perspective and needs as a library user and music historian with them, and have noted their interest in what I have had to say. In the current essay, I consider some of the challenges of using concert ephemera from the point of view of the library user and scholar, in the hope of opening up a productive dialogue between librarianship, bibliography, and musicology, thus enlarging a discussion begun by Stephen Lloyd in 2003. (8) While my focus is on sources for British concert history, most of which are located in the UK, I hope the findings and issues raised may also have relevance to an international audience. I shall deal in turn with the following: finding ephemera; managing ephemera; interpreting ephemera; and writing history using ephemera.

FINDING EPHEMERA

The first challenge to the concert historian is the fundamental, often intractable, business of identifying and locating sources. What material might help me with my topic, and where on earth will I find it? Where are the finding tools for concert ephemera? The scholar is bound to ask these questions early on in any research project, but the questions do not have easy answers since there are, as yet, no national union catalogs of holdings. Concert programs may, as Lloyd demonstrates, be spread over a range of repositories--not just libraries, but including collections belonging to concert halls, composers or performers, orchestras, concert societies, and so on. (9) Even when the repository is a library or archive, ephemera collections are often not inventoried in online catalogs or, where they are, they lack adequate description. Digitized collections are rare. Experience, persistence, and networking count for a lot, but students, amateur researchers, and scholars from abroad who are unfamiliar with UK libraries and archives may find this part of the research process at best perplexing, at worst defeating, particularly if investigation of library holdings in the locality of the concert activity yields nothing. (10) Happily, the power of the Internet, allied to collaborative endeavors, is at last coming to our aid, and some potentially powerful bibliographic projects are taking off. In the UK, the most important of these is the Concert Programmes Project, which aims to document a range of program collections in the UK and Ireland; directed by Rupert Ridgewell, it is based at the Centre for Performance History at the Royal College of Music. (11) Another indispensable source is the growing Access to Archives database (A2A), which currently catalogs more than nine million items (not all music-related) held in hundreds of repositories in England and Wales. (12) On the international stage, IAML has a Working Group on Access to Performance Ephemera, which has recently been seeking to establish guidelines and standards for describing materials. (13)

For concert historians, the completion of such projects cannot come quickly enough, though even when they are finished they will be limited in coverage and accessibility, since much of the indexing is being done at the collection level, not at the item level. The day when every item of concert ephemera in the UK is indexed in multiple ways, to be pulled up electronically from the scholar's desktop, is unlikely to come to pass in my working life. So, for now, one works out strategies depending on the topic. In the main, and allowing for the many ways in which libraries organize their ephemera, concert programs for the most significant venues, performers, and institutions (whether orchestras, concert clubs, or artists' agents) are not too hard to locate. (14) However, complete runs of concert programs even for prominent institutions are often elusive, (15) with those for "one-off" or less high-profile concerts--which are important for exploring the richness of everyday musical life in a particular center, or for contextualizing the main concert institutions in a particular period--being especially difficult to unearth. Serendipity and tip-offs from other scholars play a huge part in success here. But in the end there is still little substitute for sifting through the holdings of a regional public library or county record office, a task that for many music historians still constitutes the lifeblood of their craft.