All posts by hannahjordan

The M. Deneke-Mendelssohn Collection

by Martin Holmes
Alfred Brendel Curator of Music, Bodleian Libraries

Fig. 1: Oil sketch by Carl Begas (1794-1854) of Mendelssohn aged 12, shortly before his flowing locks were cut off (MS. M. Deneke Mendelssohn e. 5). The full portrait for which this study was made is sadly lost.

A major milestone in the ongoing music manuscript and archives cataloguing project has been reached with the conversion of the first two volumes of the printed catalogue of the Bodleian’s Mendelssohn collection (https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repositories/2/resources/7530). (The third volume is devoted to printed music so lies outside the scope of this project, but its contents are already included in the SOLO catalogue.)[1]

Given the importance of England to Mendelssohn’s career and his perhaps disproportionate prominence in and influence on the musical life of this country, it is not inappropriate that there should be a Mendelssohn archive here, in his almost-adopted homeland. However, the collection contains far more material than that relating specifically to his activities on this side of the English Channel.

The Library owes the existence of its Mendelssohn collection not to any direct relationship of the composer to the City of Oxford but to the fact that one of the composer’s grandsons, Paul Victor Mendelssohn Benecke (1868-1944) settled in Oxford in the 1890s, first as a student and later as a Fellow of Magdalen College. Paul took a great interest in the family treasures he had inherited from his mother and set about adding to his collection by persuading his cousins to part with other items, including the series of 27 volumes (known as the ‘Green Books’) containing practically all the correspondence received by the composer from the age of 12. (The extremely fragile ‘Green Books’ are currently undergoing a programme of disbinding and conservation which it is hoped will help facilitate a future digitization project.)

Fig. 2: A letter from Goethe to the 16-year-old Mendelssohn. The composer had first visited Goethe when he was only 12 and he made a deep impression on the elderly poet. (MS. M. Deneke Mendelssohn b. 4 (13).

In Oxford, Paul Benecke renewed an acquaintance with Margaret (‘Marga’) Deneke (no relation despite the similarity of name), whose family had been neighbours of the Beneckes in Camberwell. From 1916, Marga Deneke lived with her sister at ‘Gunfield’, a large house in Norham Gardens where they held frequent concerts and musical soirées which were well-known on the Oxford music scene, attracting occasional visits from the likes of Albert Schweitzer, Paul Wittgenstein and Albert Einstein, as well as more local musicians.

Eventually, following Marga’s own purchase of a Mendelssohn manuscript, Paul decided to pass on his entire collection to her and it was moved to her North Oxford home. After Paul’s death in 1944, Marga set about accumulating whatever other Mendelssohniana she could find, encouraging other descendants of the composer to sell or give items to her growing collection. Additions at this time included the remarkable series of sketchbooks, acquired from the Swiss branch of the family, which demonstrate the composer’s prodigious artistic talent and provide a record of his frequent travels. Much of the collection was deposited in the Bodleian in the 1950s and 60s for safe keeping and, following Marga’s death in 1969 and that of her sister in 1973, the collection passed formally into the ownership of the Library which has since tried to augment it further as opportunity and funds allow.

Fig. 3: The Pass of Killicrankie as sketched by Mendelssohn on his famous Scottish tour of 1829 (MS. M. Deneke Mendelssohn d. 2, fol. 19). You can follow Mendelssohn’s travels virtually at https://www.mendelssohninscotland.com/ where many of the Scottish sketches are reproduced.

Most of Mendelssohn’s completed music manuscripts were given to the Royal Library in Berlin in 1878 (now the Staatsbibliothek (SBPK)). Major music manuscripts are therefore generally lacking from the Oxford collection. Instead, it is particularly rich in biographical material: in addition to the correspondence and the sketchbooks, the other papers in the collection reflect every aspect of the composer’s life, from his childhood to his death, and include documents such as his elementary school reports, early harmony exercises, diaries, account books, albums and a large portion of Mendelssohn’s personal library – even a couple of his conducting batons, his death mask and a lock of his hair. There certainly are music manuscripts in the collection, including both his first and last compositions, but most are sketches or early drafts which, to some, are arguably more interesting than the finished fair copies. Other members of the family are also represented in the collection, notably Felix’s talented sister Fanny Hensel and his wife Cécile.

Fig. 4: The opening bars of the Hebrides Overture, probably Mendelssohn’s most famous work, inspired by his Scottish tour of 1829. Final autograph draft score, purchased in 2002 with funds provided by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Friends of the Bodleian and individual donors. (MS. M. Deneke Mendelssohn d. 71, fol. 1)

As one of the Library’s most important music collections, the Deneke-Mendelssohn archive is in high demand, not only from music scholars but also from historians researching the many people who corresponded with Mendelssohn and those interested in the Romantic movement more broadly. As Mendelssohn’s talent as an artist becomes better known, the sketchbooks and watercolours are generating considerable interest and, with the recent publication of the first real attempt at a comprehensive list of Mendelssohn’s drawings and paintings{2}, that interest is likely to grow further. In addition to the artwork, other highlights of the collection include the autograph vocal score of Elijah, the Mendelssohns’ Honeymoon Diary, performing materials from the composer’s revival of Bach’s St Matthew Passion and the final autograph score of the Hebrides Overture (a more recent acquisition).

The catalogue now published online in Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts is based on the text of Margaret Crum’s printed catalogue of 1980 and 1983 but incorporates the large number of corrections and amendments made to the reading room copy over many years, principally by the former Music Librarian, Peter Ward Jones (himself a leading authority on Mendelssohn). Other updates have been made (as time has allowed), including descriptions of items acquired since the printed catalogues were published and references to more recent scholarship. It is hoped that the launch of the online catalogue will further raise awareness of the collection and make it easier for scholars and other musicians to discover and access the wealth of fascinating material it contains.

References:

[1] Catalogue of the Mendelssohn papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, vols. 1-2, compiled by Margaret Crum (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1980-1983); volume 3, compiled by Peter Ward Jones, was published in 1989.

[2] Ralf Wehner, ‘»Mit Deinen Rebusen machst Du uns doch alle zu Eseln«.Zu einigen Bilderrätseln von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’, Mendelssohn-Studien, Bd. 20 (2017), pp. 111-126.

Fig. 5: Sketch of Pozzuoli, Naples (20 May 1831), showing Mendelssohn’s particular skill and love for drawing buildings and boats. He was less good at drawing people! (MS. M. Deneke Mendelssohn d. 3, fol. 3)

Fig. 6: The Château de Chillon (23 Dec 1843). This tiny watercolour by Mendelssohn measures only a few centimetres across (MS. M. Deneke Mendelssohn c. 49, fol. 97). Done from a pencil sketch at MS. M. Deneke Mendelssohn e. 1, fol. 4, made the previous year.

Fig. 7: A particularly fine example of Mendelssohn’s signature, appended to a presentation copy of his Schilflied, dated 24 March 1845 (MS. M. Deneke Menedelssohn c. 101)

Fig. 8: Mendelssohn’s final composition, the Altdeutsches Frühlingslied (‘Old German Spring Song’), written on 7 October 1847. The text alludes to the death of his beloved sister Fanny earlier in the year. Combined with overwork, the shock of her sudden death had sapped him of his strength and he succumbed to his final illness just a few weeks later.

#WeMissiPRES: Preserving social media and boiling 1.04 x 10^16 kettles

This year the annual iPRES digital preservation conference was understandably postponed and in its place the community hosted a 3-day Zoom conference called #WeMissiPRES. As two of the Bodleian Libraries’ Graduate Trainee Digital Archivists, Simon and I were in attendance and blogged about our experiences. This post contains some of my highlights.

The conference kicked off with a keynote by Geert Lovink. Geert is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures and the author of several books on critical Internet studies. His talk was wide-ranging and covered topics from the rise of so-called ‘Zoom fatigue’ (I guarantee you know this feeling by now) to how social media platforms affect all aspects of contemporary life, often in negative ways. Geert highlighted the importance of preserving social media in order to allow future generations to be able to understand the present historical moment. However, this is a complicated area of digital preservation because archiving social media presents a host of ethical and technical challenges. For instance, how do we accurately capture the experience of using social media when the content displayed to you is largely dictated by an algorithm that is not made public for us to replicate?

After the keynote I attended a series of talks about the ARCHIVER project. João Fernandes from CERN explained that the goal of this project is to improve archiving and digital preservation services for scientific and research data. Preservation solutions for this type of data need to be cost-effective, scalable, and capable of ingesting amounts of data within the petabyte range. There were several further talks from companies who are submitting to the design phase of this project, including Matthew Addis from Arkivum. Matthew’s talk focused on the ways that digital preservation can be conducted on the industrial scale required to meet the brief and explained that Arkivum is collaborating with Google to achieve this, because Google’s cloud infrastructure can be leveraged for petabyte-scale storage. He also noted that while the marriage of preserved content with robust metadata is important in any digital preservation context, it is essential for repositories dealing with very complex scientific data.

In the afternoon I attended a range of talks that addressed new standards and technologies in digital preservation. Linas Cepinskas (Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS)) spoke about a self-assessment tool for the FAIR principles, which is designed to assess whether data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Later, Barbara Sierman (DigitalPreservation.nl) and Ingrid Dillo (DANS) spoke about TRUST, a new set of guiding principles that are designed to map well with FAIR and assess the reliability of data repositories. Antonio Guillermo Martinez (LIBNOVA) gave a talk about his research into Artificial Intelligence and machine learning applied to digital preservation. Through case studies, he identified that AI is especially good at tasks such as anomaly detection and automatic metadata generation. However, he found that regardless of how well the AI performs, it needs to generate better explanations for its decisions, because it’s hard for human beings to build trust in automated decisions that we find opaque.

Paul Stokes from Jisc3C gave a talk on calculating the carbon costs of digital curation and unfortunately concluded that not much research has been done in this area. The need to improve the environmental sustainability of all human activity could not be more pressing and digital preservation is no exception, as approximately 3% of the world’s electricity is used by data centres. Paul also offered the statistic that enough power is consumed by data centres worldwide to boil 10,400,000,000,000,000 kettles – which is the most important digital preservation metric I can think of.

This conference was challenging and eye-opening because it gave me an insight into (complicated!) areas of digital preservation that I was not familiar with, particularly surrounding the challenges of preserving large quantities of scientific and research data. I’m very grateful to the speakers for sharing their research and to the organisers, who did a fantastic job of bringing the community together to bridge the gap between 2019 and 2021!

The Library of St Michael’s College, Tenbury

Sir Frederick Ouseley

Sir Frederick Ouseley

One of the latest collections to be added to Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts as part of the ongoing Music retroconversion project is the Tenbury Collection. Built up during the course of the 19th century by the English organist, composer and clergyman Sir Frederick Ouseley (1825-1889), it became one of the most important music collections in private hands.

Sir Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley was born into an upper-class family, the son of the diplomat and orientalist Sir Gore Ouseley (1770-1844), and numbered among his godparents the Dukes of Wellington and York. He was a notable musical child prodigy, reputedly playing duets with Mendelssohn at the age of six and composing an opera aged only eight. (His later compositions (mostly anthems and service settings) are worthy and well-crafted, but generally considered to be uninspired.)

Frederick inherited his father’s baronetcy in 1844, while he was still a student at Oxford, and he graduated from Christ Church in 1846. He was ordained in 1850 and served for a while as a curate in the Anglo-Catholic parish of St Barnabas, Pimlico in London. He later became Precentor of Hereford Cathedral, a post he held concurrently with that of Heather Professor of Music at Oxford, during which time he did much to reform the Music examinations.

As a musician as well as a cleric, Ouseley was greatly concerned by the low standards to which church music (particularly music in cathedrals) had sunk by the mid-19th century. He used his considerable private means to set about building the parish church of St Michael and All Angels on the outskirts of the small market town of Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire, close to the borders with Shropshire and Herefordshire. This mini cathedral was to function as the chapel for St Michael’s College which Ouseley founded as a choir school for boys next door. Here, for well over a century, daily, fully choral services were sung as ‘a model for the choral service of the church in these realms’, right up to the closure of the College in 1985. John Stainer (1840-1901) was appointed by Ouseley as the College’s first organist at the age of only 16 and generations of church musicians subsequently received their training at Tenbury, including George Robertson Sinclair, Christopher Robinson and the composer Jonathan Harvey.

Click here to hear Sir John Betjeman’s 1967 radio programme about St Michael’s College in the series ‘Choirs & Places Where they Sing’.

Ouseley was also a collector, pursuing interests in early music theory as well as music for the church. He started collecting seriously around 1850 and is known to have purchased antiquarian books and scores on an extended visit to the Continent in 1851. He bought from dealers and was also given many items by friends and fellow musicians, as well as inheriting some music from his father. The resulting collection is much wider in scope than one might expect, given his principal sphere of activity.

Ouseley’s collection became the college library at Tenbury and, after his death, it was looked after by eminent librarians, notably E.H. Fellowes (many of the sources for his numerous editions of Elizabethan music came from the Tenbury library) and Harold Watkins Shaw, famous for his ubiquitous edition of Handel’s Messiah, based on one of the highlights of Ouseley’s collection—Handel’s own conducting score of his most famous work, used at the work’s première in Dublin in 1742 and all subsequent performances during his lifetime.

A page from Handel's conducting score of 'Messiah', in the composer’s hand.

A page from Handel’s conducting score of ‘Messiah’, in the composer’s hand. MS. Tenbury 346, fol. 66.

As one would expect, the collection is rich in sacred music, both English and continental, and includes many important manuscript part-books dating from Tudor times. Among these are several sets which formerly belonged to the Norfolk Catholic gentleman and amateur musician, Edward Paston (1550-1630). A number of the Tenbury manuscripts were recently digitized for DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Manuscripts) as part of the AHRC-funded Tudor Part Books Project.

The Cantus part of William Byrd's motet 'Memento Domine'

The Cantus part of William Byrd’s motet ‘Memento Domine’. MS. Tenbury 341, fol. 5r.

Another important source for Tudor and Restoration church music is the so-called ‘Batten Organ Book’ which has enabled several pieces, which otherwise exist only in incomplete sources, to be reconstructed.

A page from the 'Batten Organ Book', featuring the anthem 'This is a joyful day' by John Ward.

A page from the ‘Batten Organ Book’, featuring the anthem ‘This is a joyful day’ by John Ward. MS. Tenbury 791, fol. 257r.

The Tenbury collection also contains unique sources for some of the church music by Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706), known to most people only from his all-pervasive Canon but clearly a composer of some extremely attractive vocal music, demonstrated in a recent recording by the Oxford-based group Charivari Agréable with the King’s Singers. Thought at one time to be the composer’s autographs, it is now considered more likely that most of the pieces are in the hand of his son, Karl Theodor, who emigrated to America in the early 1730s, one of the first European musicians to take up residence in the colonies.

The collection also contains the most important manuscript source for Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and autograph manuscripts by J.C. Bach, Blow, Boyce, Cimarosa, Galuppi and others. Autograph manuscripts of Ouseley’s own music, as well as his juvenile attempts at composition, can also be found in the collection.

Detail of 'Dido's lament', from Purcell's 'Dido and Aeneas'.

Detail of ‘Dido’s lament’, from Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’. MS. Tenbury 1266.

Ouseley’s well-known anthem From the rising of the sun can be heard in a 1965 recording from St Michael’s (at around 24’ 25”).

More surprising, perhaps, is the presence of numerous volumes of 18th– and 19th-century Italian opera and a variety of instrumental music, including a manuscript of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, corrected in the margins by the composer himself.

In addition to approximately 1,500 volumes of manuscripts, the Tenbury library also included many thousands of printed books and music scores, ranging from incunables to octavo editions of Victorian anthems, the latter often inscribed to Ouseley by their composers. Of particular note are a number of rare musical treatises, including two 15th-century books by the theorist Gaffurius (1451-1522)—his Theoricum opus musice discipline (Naples, 1480) and Practica musice (Milan, 1496)—and Praetorius’ famous Syntagma musicum (Wittenberg & Wolfenbüttel, 1614-1620), one volume of which belonged to Johann Ernst Bach and another to Telemann. A project to catalogue the printed collection took place in 1990s and this can be searched in the Bodleian’s main online catalogue SOLO.

The College kept going for nearly 130 years but, in 1985, it finally succumbed to the demographic pressures which made a tiny, specialist school in the middle of nowhere unsustainable in the modern world. For a recording of the final Choral Evensong from St Michael’s (13 July 1985), click here.

Owing to an accidental conflict between Ouseley’s will and the terms of the Trust deed made when he endowed the College, the subsequent fate of the Library was something of a compromise. Most of the manuscripts, which had been deposited in Oxford for safe-keeping since the 1970s, passed directly into the Bodleian’s ownership and the Library was then permitted to buy, at a valuation, items selected from the printed collections. A fundraising campaign followed which happily allowed the Bodleian to acquire all the printed books and music scores of which it did not already have a copy.

A catalogue of the Tenbury manuscripts, made by E.H. Fellowes, was published in Paris in 1935, with later supplements by Watkins Shaw. These form the basis of the online catalogue in Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts. Music scholarship has, of course, moved on a good deal in the last 85 years so, within the constraints of Project resources, every effort has been made to incorporate as many updates as possible to the information in the old catalogues; further amendments can be made as time goes by.

The addition of the Tenbury collection the online catalogue is a major milestone in the project to make the music manuscript catalogues accessible online. As Music Curator, I am most grateful to our funders and the Project team for making this possible. The Tenbury catalogue can be accessed at https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repositories/2/resources/4976.

Martin Holmes, Alfred Brendel Curator of Music, Bodleian Libraries

Illustration of a duck or goose from 'The Braikenridge Manuscript'.

One of the many illustrations in ‘The Braikenridge Manuscript’. MS. Tenbury 1486, fol. 3v.

The Archives and Records of Humanitarian Organisations

On 20th November the Bodleian Libraries hosted a workshop on ‘The Archives and Records of Humanitarian Organisations: Challenges and Opportunities’. The event was attended by archivists, curators and academics working within the field of humanitarian archives and I was pleased to be invited along to learn more about their work and write a blogpost about some of my observations.

The first talk was given by Chrissie Webb, Project Archivist at the Bodleian Libraries, who discussed her work on the archive of the international charity, Oxfam. The archive was donated to the Bodleian in 2012 and constitutes an enormous collection of over 10,000 boxes of material. Chrissie explained that the archive mostly consists of written documents, but also contains objects and ephemera, audio recordings and digital materials. Cataloguing the archive took several years and was funded by a grant from the Wellcome Trust, as the materials are of great interest to those studying the history of health and public policy, humanitarianism and the voluntary sector. Chrissie touched on a number of issues in her talk, particularly highlighting the challenges of appraising and arranging a collection of such size in sufficient detail. As a trainee the principles of arrangement are still quite new to me, so the idea of working on a collection so big is extremely daunting! The work required robust workflows and proved useful as a case study for development of the Bodleian Libraries appraisal guidelines for future collections. Chrissie also highlighted that the Oxfam catalogue was published on a rolling basis to allow the Libraries to promote the collection and prevent an end-of-project information dump of epic proportions. If you’re curious to learn more, the Oxfam archive can be explored via Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts: https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

The second talk was about the Save the Children Fund archive and was given by Matthew Goodwin, Project Archivist at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham. The Save the Children Fund archive shares some immediate similarities with the Oxfam archive: it was acquired by the University of Birmingham at around the same time (2011) and is being catalogued thanks to a grant from the Wellcome Trust. The archive covers the activities of the charity in the 20th and early 21st Century and while it is smaller than the Oxfam archive, it still spans over 2000 boxes of material. Matthew noted some interesting trends that he came across in the archive, such as the charity’s move away from campaign material that included intense images of child poverty and towards more positive images that highlighted the charity’s life-saving work. This is a trend that is noticeable across the sector, as many humanitarian organisations have chosen to pivot their publicity materials in this way in recent years.

A particularly interesting discussion evolved around the challenges presented by archives that contain graphic or distressing material and how this effects the archivists cataloguing the collections and the readers who access them. Several attendees noted that their work with collections from humanitarian and aid organisations had presented this issue. Possible solutions discussed included inserting warning notices inside boxes containing especially graphic material to warn users in advance of their contents and seating those using these materials in separate parts of the reading room to prevent other readers from accidentally viewing them. The archival community has shown an increased awareness of these challenges in recent years and in 2017 the Archives and Records Association (ARA) released guidance for professionals working with potentially disturbing materials. Their documents explore the current research around ‘vicarious’ or secondary trauma and compassion fatigue, as well as offering practical techniques for staff and detailing how to access support. Their guidance can be found here: https://www.archives.org.uk/what-we-do/emotional-support-guides.html

Regrettably I wasn’t able to attend the afternoon workshop sessions which discussed the Red Cross Archive and Museum and how the collections of humanitarian organisations factor into the work of NGOs. Hopefully as my traineeship develops I will get a chance to revisit these collections and learn more!

Music Archive and Manuscript Catalogues Go Online

The Bodleian Libraries house rich collections of music manuscripts dating from medieval times to the present and include such highlights as Handel’s conducting score of Messiah, Holst’s suite The Planets and Mendelssohn’s Hebrides overture. Anyone who has used the Bodleian’s music manuscript or archival collections over the years will be used to grappling with a confusing array of different findings aids. Apart from a few old collection-level entries in the Online Catalogue for Archives and Manuscripts, we have had to rely on various paper catalogues and handlists, published and unpublished, which readers can rarely navigate successfully without help from Music section staff. These include: the published Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts (for manuscripts acquired up to 1915), supplemented by large numbers of typescript revisions to the Summary Catalogue descriptions; typescript descriptions of post-1915 acquisitions, the more recent of which also exist as MS Word files; published catalogues for the Deneke-Mendelssohn and Tenbury collections, both of which have accumulated long lists of corrections and amendments over time; boxlists for various uncatalogued collections, such as Ella and Sterndale Bennett. Such finding aids were only partially indexed so locating material has always been dependent to a large extent on the knowledge and experience of staff.

Original conducting score of Handel’s Messiah (MS. Tenbury 346, fol. 66r)

Thanks to a very generous donation, we are now well into a three-year project which aims to incorporate the content of these various finding aids into the online catalogue as well as tackle a range of music manuscripts and archives which have hitherto had no catalogue description. So far, a number of uncatalogued manuscripts and collections have been catalogued while the existing finding aids were sent off to have their contents keyed into machine-readable form for the online catalogue. The two strands of converting the existing finding aids and new cataloguing will continue side-by-side for the remainder of the project which is due to finish in the summer of 2021. By this time, if all goes to plan, all of the Bodleian Libraries’ music manuscripts and music-related archives will have entries in the Online Catalogue for Archives and Manuscripts, which is itself undergoing a system upgrade and facelift. The first collections should start to appear online in the Autumn of 2019 and will be added to gradually as catalogues are completed.

Catalogues of the Bodleian’s Music holdings

To have online access to any of this information is a major step forward for users of our collections and the beauty of an electronic catalogue is that it can be added to and improved over time.

Martin Holmes, Alfred Brendel Curator of Music