Music Speaking Volumes: Houghton Library’s Bound Sheet Music Collection
Some of the best evidence available on amateur music-making in the nineteenth-century United States exists in collections of bound sheet music now held by institutions and private collectors across the country. Scholars have recently begun to examine these volumes at length, notably through studies of single volumes (Slobin et al. 2011) and in broader explorations of volumes as reflecting cultural norms, particularly for women (Bailey 2016). My project adds to this growing field by exploring the yet-unstudied collection of over three hundred bound volumes in the process of being cataloged at Houghton Library (Harvard University). Expounding on Kathryn Lowerre’s initial catalog (2006), I provide an overview of trends emerging in both the repertoire and provenance of volumes in the collection. Furthermore, I contend that attention to the volumes’ afterlives – the decades since they left their compilers’ parlors – serves as an equally valuable approach to studying the volumes in their original contexts. Examining the volumes’ second home in a collection of other volumes allows us to consider relationships between donors and patrons, libraries and practice rooms, musicians and scholars.
In addition to a great deal of “standard” sheet music including dance music and minstrel tunes, the collection features many unique examples, such as music printed in Mobile during the Civil War. Unsurprisingly, many of these volumes were formerly owned by wealthy New Englanders with ties to Harvard. Careful attention to silences in terms of race and class are therefore essential. Beyond highlights of the collection, I look to the volumes’ position in a liminal space between circulating library books and personal, archival treasures. How should the changing role of these volumes inform our understandings of them? While considering what these volumes meant, and to whom, after their donation, I aim to draw scholars’ attention to this wealth of nineteenth-century musical materials.
Some of the best evidence available on amateur music-making in the nineteenth-century United States exists in collections of bound sheet music now held by institutions and private collectors across the country. Scholars have recently begun to examine these volumes at length, notably through studies of single volumes (Slobin et al. 2011) and in broader explorations of volumes as reflecting cultural norms, particularly for women (Bailey 2016). My project adds to this growing field by exploring the yet-unstudied collection of over three hundred bound volumes in the process of being cataloged at Houghton Library (Harvard University). Expounding on Kathryn Lowerre’s initial catalog (2006), I provide an overview of trends emerging in both the repertoire and provenance of volumes in the collection. Furthermore, I contend that attention to the volumes’ afterlives – the decades since they left their compilers’ parlors – serves as an equally valuable approach to studying the volumes in their original contexts. Examining the volumes’ second home in a collection of other volumes allows us to consider relationships between donors and patrons, libraries and practice rooms, musicians and scholars.
In addition to a great deal of “standard” sheet music including dance music and minstrel tunes, the collection features many unique examples, such as music printed in Mobile during the Civil War. Unsurprisingly, many of these volumes were formerly owned by wealthy New Englanders with ties to Harvard. Careful attention to silences in terms of race and class are therefore essential. Beyond highlights of the collection, I look to the volumes’ position in a liminal space between circulating library books and personal, archival treasures. How should the changing role of these volumes inform our understandings of them? While considering what these volumes meant, and to whom, after their donation, I aim to draw scholars’ attention to this wealth of nineteenth-century musical materials.