| Researching 18th Century Music
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A note from Susan.... At the recent Fort Frederick Market Fair (April 24-28, 2003), Dave and I presented a brief seminar that was supposed to be about researching 18th century music. However, since we didn't know the subject of the seminar until we got there, we were wholly unprepared to give any intelligent information about doing research, and instead spent an hour discussing other very important topics such as building Appalachian dulcimers and re-padding 200 year old flutes. In an effort to make it up to the surprisingly well-informed audience that attended, I have compiled a list of sources that I use when researching the tunes and songs that the Itinerant Band performs and records. A couple caveats... 1) My research is done primarily to verify the date of the music, and to look for interesting information to include in liner notes and talk about during the "informances" that the band presents at historic sites. This list of sources reflects that goal, though I'm including a few more scholarly sources at the end of this list for anyone who wants to do more in-depth research. 2) If you were to do an Internet search on "18th century music" you would find thousands of web sites, many with very interesting though not necessarily accurate information. In this list I have only included sources that are a) relatively reliable, and b) relatively stable (meaning that they're not likely to disappear all of a sudden because some starving musician forgot to pay the ISP bill.) 3) If you're looking for specific information about some tune or song that the Itinerant Band performs, please see the bibliographies attached to our CDs' liner notes: Jefferson and Liberty, The Road Out of Town and Apples in Winter. ONLINE RESOURCES (in no particular order) (1) Fiddler's Companion. Vers 2.0. Compiled and edited by Andrew Kuntz. Nov. 2003. This site is now being hosted by ibiblio's library & digital archive. The compiler, Andrew Kuntz has done a superb job of collecting just about every scrap of information in print about thousands of tunes, including discographies, bibliographies and ABC files. www.ibiblio.org/fiddlers/index.html There is an older version still hosted by the Ceolas Celtic Music archives which has a keyword searching capability (which is not yet completely functional on the new site). http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc/. For footnoting purposes, be sure to check the bibliography and look for a copy of the primary source if you can. (2) TuneIndex. July 1996. Compiled by James Stewart. Also hosted by Ceolas. This is a searchable index of tune titles, based on a bibliography of at least 600 printed sources. This can give you a lead as to where to find a printed version of a tune, and also a hint as to the first time it appeared in print. http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/TuneIndex/ (3) The Kitchen Musician. Features gif and midi files of several tunes, and extensive histories on a select few of them. Also includes copies of the "In Tune with the Times" articles from "Smoke and Fire News." http://www.kitchenmusician.net/ (4) The Contemplator's Folk Music web site. Folk and Traditional Music and Popular Songs, with Lyrics, Midi, Tune Information and History behind the folksongs and ballads. Irish, British and American Folk Music including Francis J. Child Ballads and Sea Shanties. Each tune in this archive has complete lyrics, a midi file and thorough history. Site includes links to other research sources. http://www.contemplator.com/folk.html (5) The Traditional Ballad Index. An ongoing project of the Folklore Department at California State University in Frenso. Their goal is to create a searchable online index of all written sources of English language ballads. In practice the index is encompassing far more than the traditional ballad sources and includes work-songs, sea shanties, and non-English songs. http://www.csufresno.edu/folklore/BalladIndexTOC.html (6) The Digital Tradition folk song database. Lyrics to over 8000 songs. The discussion groups are also a good place to glean tidbits of historical and bibliographical information. http://www.mudcat.org/threadscfm (7) The Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads collection. Digitized copies of over 30,000 broadsides and songs from the 16th through the 20th century. Searchable by title, keyword, publisher, subject, etc... http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/ballads.htm (8) Glasgow Broadside Ballads. Similar to the Bodleian (though much smaller), a collection of digitized broadsides from the Murray collection at Glasgow University. http://wwww.cc.gla.ac.uk/courses/scottish/ballads/index.htm (9) The Lester S. Levy Sheet Music collection at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University. Digitized copies of over 29,000 pieces of American sheet music published from 1780 through 1960. Searchable by title, date, composer, subject, publisher, etc... The library will provide good photocopies of anything within public domain for a very nominal fee. http://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/ (10) Keffer Collection of Sheet Music, part of Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania. Collection of over 2,500 pieces, mostly U.S. imprints, ranging in date from 1790 to 1895. The collection can be searched through the library's online catalog. http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/keffer// (11) American Memory collections at the Library of Congress. Click on "Performing Arts, Music" for several sheet music collections. Of particular note are the African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920; American Sheet Music, 1820-1860 & 1870-1885; Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920; and the Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets collections. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/finder.html (12) Historic American Sheet Music collection at Duke University, digitized collection of 3042 pieces of American sheet music from 1850 to 1920. http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/sheetmusic (13) Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources, 1589-1839. This is a collection of indexes of primary sources of music from the mid-16th through the 19th centuries. This includes many sources found nowhere else, but it will take a bit of study to use the indexes. Read the help screens. http://www.colonialdancing.org/Easmes/Index.htm (14) The Village Music Project: A study of English Social Musicians from the 17th century onwards from their manuscripts. An ongoing project of the University of Salford (UK). Their goal is to locate manuscripts of traditional social dance music of England, and to index and transcribe the tunes. Approximately 100 manuscripts have been located thus far and several have indexes and ABC files available. http://www.village-music-project.org.uk/index.htm. Alternate site for manuscript index only: http://www.smmp.salford.ac.uk/research/music/vmp/vmp/index.htm (15) Bruce Olson's Website. Indexes of 16th through 18th century broadsides and ballads, and links to several other song and tune sources. Note: William Bruce Olson, retired physical chemist and longtime song and ballad scholar, died on October 31, 2003. His family retained work and his website is now being hosted by Folklore Department at California State University in Frenso. http://www.csufresno.edu/folklore/Olson/ (16) The National Library of Australia has an ongoing digitization project for its 19th and early 20th century music collections. Click here www.nla.gov.au/digital/program_digitised.html#mus for an overview of the collections. The collections may be searched through the library's main catalogue, http://catalogue.nla.gov.au. (17) Major new addition to the National Library of Scotland (May 2004), 'The Word on the Street' brings nearly 1,800 broadsides, both ballads and news-sheets from 17th & 18th century Scotland. Each broadside comes with a detailed commentary and most also have a full transcription of the text, plus a downloadable PDF facsimile. BIBLIOGRAPHIES and OTHER SOURCES David and Ginger Hildebrand's Colonial Music Institute site has several good bibliographies, interesting essays, and other sources specifically on 18th century music. http://www.colonialmusic.org/Resource/Resources.htm For simple, though unsorted, lists of printed tune sources, look at the bibliographies for the Fiddler's Companion and James Stewart's TuneIndex. Research Centers for American Music (http://www.american-music.org/resources/ResearchCenters.htm) - This list is maintained by The Society for American Music, a non-profit organization whose mission is "to stimulate the appreciation, performance, creation and study of American music in all its diversity, and the full range of activities and institutions associated with that music. "America" is understood to embrace North America, including Central America and the Caribbean, and aspects of its cultures everywhere in the world." They also publish a quarterly journal, American Music, which features well-researched, scholarly articles on American music from the 17th through 20th centuries. Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale a.k.a. RILM Abstracts of Music Literature. An ongoing database of musicological bibliography and scholarly writings on music and related disciplines. It indexes writings on historical musicology, ethnomusicology, instruments and voice, librarianship, performance practice and notation, theory and analysis, pedagogy, liturgy, dance, criticism, music therapy, and interdisciplinary studies on music and various other fields. This is a proprietary resource and you must either subscribe to it or find a library that has a subscription (most any college or university with a music program will have a subscription). The Country Dance and Song Society, http://www.cdss.org, has a mail order catalog of hundred of otherwise unavailable books and recordings of English and American dance tunes, folksongs and ballad collections. Much of our repertoire comes from sources acquired from CDSS. Notes updated & Links checked: 14 June 2006 - Susan Lawlor |