Cataloguing 17th- and 18th-century Manuscripts of French Music in the Ward Collection (US-CAward)

Natasha Roule

Monday, August 3, 2015

Natasha Roule, a candidate for the PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University, has spent the summer as a Pforzheimer Fellow at Houghton Library, Harvard’s principal repository for rare books and manuscripts, including rich holdings in print and manuscript music. Here is her account of her project, which saw the creation of many new records for the RISM A/II database.

The John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection at Houghton Library, Harvard University, contains extensive holdings of 17th- and 18th-century manuscript volumes of French music. Many manuscripts represent full or short scores of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s tragédies en musique, while others are musical miscellanies that gather popular pieces from operas and other sources into single volumes. As a Pforzheimer Fellow at Houghton Library, I have spent this summer cataloguing eleven volumes from the Ward Collection into RISM (900020000, 900020274, 900020408, 900020710, 900020370, 900020523, 900020371, and 900020409 are in the online catalog so far).

The miscellanies reveal rich sites of information about 17th- and 18th-century French musical culture, and are therefore especially deserving of comprehensive records on RISM. The miscellanies with which I have worked represent a musical book culture in which operatic pieces mixed with chansons à boire and other genres. Several miscellanies were each contributed to by multiple copyists over periods that spanned up to eight decades. Not all copyists recorded the title and other identifying information with the pieces they inscribed. To identify the anonymity of these works, I entered their incipits into RISM using Plaine & Easie Code. Using this method, I have identified nearly 50 anonymous works from several miscellanies in the Ward Collection. The detailed records of these volumes should prove useful to scholars interested in documenting the role of manuscript miscellanies in Baroque musical culture.

Illustration caption: Miscellany of French arias and songs. 2010TW-24, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Page 71. (RISM ID 900020371)

Category: Library collections