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Sheet Music Round-up

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2019

Andrea Cawelti
Andrea Cawelti*
Affiliation:
Houghton Library, Harvard Universitycawelti@fas.harvard.edu
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Extract

We are living in a great age for sheet music research. After a long period of scholarly apathy, in the last few decades the world has awoken at last to the great historical value that sheet music holds, from its topical texts, to its extraordinary illustrations. Researchers today can discover online sheet music-based exhibits on a huge variety of subjects, from the blockbuster Music for the Nation exhibits and digital collections on the Library of Congress website, which embed detailed articles and essays into curated collections of sheet music resources, to exhibits created by specialized institutions like the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, which brings together songs from the North and South concerning enslaved persons, pacifists and carpetbaggers, complete with historical context and analysis. Many blogs tie sheet music illustrations in with current events: McGill's Marvin Duchow Music Library current exhibit, for instance, Women, Work, and Song, in Nineteenth-Century France (Fig. 1), provides impressive historical context and brief essays in both English and French. Accessed entirely through the lens of sheet music, the McGill exhibit neatly demonstrates the power of the Wayback Machine that sheet music can provide us. All things ‘culture’ can be explored: the economy, religion, gender, LGBTQ issues, consumerism, elements of popular culture such as the figure of the diva, sociological topics, and so on. Sheet music is invaluable for research of all kinds, as it documents trends as they happen in a specific time and place. McGill's music library curators have harnessed just this type of documentary evidence to build an excellent exhibit. But how do researchers find the music for this kind of detailed analysis? This round-up will explore the current landscape of historical sheet music, centred around how we access it online, news about the Sheet Music Consortium (where it has been, and where it is going) and, finally, a brief listing of digitized sheet music collections which are not included in the Consortium.

Type
Digital Resource Review
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 18 , Special Issue 1: The Digital Humanities and Nineteenth-Century Music , April 2021 , pp. 129 - 144
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

Some of this material was presented at the joint chapter meeting of the New England Music Library Association, the New York State-Ontario chapter of the Music Library Association and the Quebec chapter of Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres in Montreal, 8 November 2018. I am deeply indebted to Don Krummel for his guidance and generosity, particularly for the sharing of his sheet music bibliographical material from years of Rare Book School courses.

References

1 Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820–1860, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/collections/american-sheet-music-1820-to-1860/about-this-collection/ (accessed 12 July 2019); Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1870–1885, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/collections/american-sheet-music-1870-to-1885/about-this-collection/ (accessed 12 July 2019); Music in the Civil War, National Museum of Civil War Medicine, www.civilwarmed.org/explore/bibs/music/ (accessed 12 July 2019).

2 The ‘Wayback Machine’, or, WABAC Machine, was a fictional time machine used for a recurring segment of the animated American cartoon series, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. The name was co-opted in 2001 by the Internet Archive for their digital archive of the World Wide Web.

3 www.worldcat.org/ (accessed 12 July 2019); https://libraryhub.jisc.ac.uk/discover/ (accessed 12 July 2019). Library Hub Discover has replaced COPAC and SUNCAT, providing access to materials held in many UK national, academic and specialist libraries.

4 In the writer's experience, university students are particularly prone to give up once they hit a snag like this. Hearing about these problems after the fact and asking why help was not sought at the time often only generates more bafflement.

5 www.musiclibraryassoc.org/members/group_select.asp?type=12693 (accessed 12 July 2019); the writer is currently the coordinator.

6 http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic/ (accessed 12 July 2019).

7 Sheet Music Consortium, http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic/aboutProject.html (accessed 12 July 2019).

8 For more details about its earlier history and challenges see Sampsel's, Laurie J. excellent overview of the Consortium, ‘Book Review: Sheet Music Consortium’, Notes 63/3 (2007): 663–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 http://bit.ly/SMC_ST_name_index (accessed 19 September 2019).

10 Sheet Music Consortium, ‘Collections Harvested’, http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic/aboutProject.html#Collections_Harvested (accessed 12 July 2019).

11 Glenn Fleishman, ‘For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain’. Smithsonian Magazine, January 2019, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/first-time-20-years-copyrighted-works-enter-public-domain-180971016/ (accessed 12 July 2019).