Today on the IAML (UK & Irl) blog: Gail Tasker, Content Developer and Music Cataloguer at the British Library, writes about a forthcoming resource which aims to bring library materials to life for a brand new audience. Gail writes:
Engaging with collection items is one of the greatest privileges of working in a library. Handling an old manuscript or beautifully embossed printed score can make something historic suddenly feel more relatable and tangible, an experience which is difficult to convey in writing. Yet this happens to be one of the aims of the British Library’s Discovering Music: Classical and Romantic (1750–1914), an online resource primarily aimed at A-Level students, as well as performers, lifelong learners and music lovers.
The project brings a new dimension to classical music through a series of commissioned articles by leading academics, digitised collection items, and texts exploring key works and composers. While the majority of items are taken from the printed music and music manuscript collections, the resource will also feature items from across the Library’s various curatorial areas, including sound, maps, and newspapers. Following two years of preparation, a beta version of the resource will be launched in early December this year. As the rebuilding from the 2023 cyber attack on the British Library continues, the full resource will hopefully be made available in 2027.
In my research for the project, I have leafed through the pages of a Samuel Coleridge-Taylor autograph score, listened to Adelina de Lara’s anecdotes on Brahms from a 50-year-old radio broadcast, and attempted to decipher the scribbles of a Chopin sketch down to the bar line. While most students first encounter classical music as a well-rehearsed, finished product, the collection featured in Discovering Music takes us behind the scenes, as it were, revealing the drafts, throwaway sketches, publishers’ rejection letters, and plain mistakes. These venerated composers were human too, something that I had difficulty grasping as a previous A-Level student myself.
The research has been a process of joining the dots across a 150-year stretch of great cultural, technological, and ideological transformation in Europe. This period encompassed wars and revolutions, the weakening of court patronage and the rise of the middle classes, and the invention of sound recording, photography, and the automobile. One thing that Discovering Music shows us is the enduring desire to make art throughout these rapidly changing times.
To list a few examples, the resource covers how a severely ill Chopin gave his last tour of England in 1848, having left Paris due to the instability of the French Revolution, before returning just in time to die of tuberculosis. Robert Schumann wrote his last work, Ghost Variations (1854) for piano, while suffering from delusions, shortly before his self-internment in an asylum. From these persistent innovators came such marvels as the symphony, the string quartet, the nocturne, and other innovations which form the bedrock of concert repertoire today. Perhaps also, the construction of the problematic Romantic trope of the composer as a troubled, genius artist.
But it’s almost too easy to say that we are compelled to make music in the face of adversity. The Library’s vast printed music collections tell us another story: that some of us are driven to have our art recognised, circulated and, in a word, published. Such was the case for Fanny Hensel, the older sister of the much more established composer Felix Mendelssohn, who spent decades writing music for her private circle of family and friends, occasionally giving semi-public concerts at a series of soirées. In 1846, at the age of 40, she confessed in a letter to Felix that she had decided to publish her first collection of songs, her Sechs Lieder, op. 1. Her words are particularly poignant: ‘I hope I won’t disgrace all of you through my publishing’ (trans. Marcia J. Citron). Excitingly, Discovering Music will feature a digitised first edition of Hensel’s inaugural publication as well as an article by Hensel scholar Tim Parker-Langston.
Hensel’s agonising self-censure prior to 1846 is of course linked to another unfortunately omnipresent theme within classical music: the often problematic process of canonisation of composers and their works, and tied to that, the under-representation of women and composers of colour. It is somewhat galling that our collections may on the one hand possess the diaries, shopping lists, and in some cases, carefully preserved human hair of a particular renowned white male composer, while the basic biographical facts of certain others are less evident.
In parallel with movements within musicology and the wider libraries sector, Discovering Music aims to counteract this unbalanced narrative. Alongside content on Mozart and Haydn, we will also be giving equal attention to historically marginalised composers such as Pauline Viardot, Amy Beach, and Chevalier de Saint Georges through commissioned articles and dedicated pages on their works. In the case of Viardot for example, the resource will include her arrangements of Chopin’s mazurkas, published as Six Mazourkes (ca. 1866), a vocal cadenza dating from 1849 inscribed in an autograph book belonging to Ignaz Moscheles, and an autograph score for her song ‘Lamento’ (1886), with the latter manuscript being made available digitally for the first time.
Of course, there are cases when composers are widely celebrated in their own time, and their legacy secured forever after. But for many composers and musicians, their due recognition only came after decades of neglect, followed by 20th century scholarship and reappraisal – evidence if any more was needed of the continuing importance of libraries and archives, and resources like Discovering Music which help to preserve, reassess and share music with new audiences.
I have almost come to view composers’ legacies like stocks in a very unpredictable market, inextricably tied to public opinion. It is a fact worth remembering for any contemporary musician, songwriter, or composer, that the value of your work changes over time and is shaped by various shifting social, historical and political factors. As Mahler once opined, ‘Meine zeit wird noch kommen’, meaning ‘My time will come’.
The author wishes to thank Irene Diamantouli and Frankie Perry for reviewing this blog post.