Tag Archives: music

Alan Tyson, ‘the Sherlock Holmes of the music world’

Born in Glasgow and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford and the University College Hospital Medical School, London, Alan Tyson (1926-2000) held Research and Senior Research Fellowships at All Souls College, Oxford from 1952 to his retirement in 1994. He was a distinguished musicologist and a world authority on music manuscripts of the Viennese Classical composers, especially Mozart and Beethoven. His other musicological interests included authenticity, music printing, and music publishing. Initially, however, his career evolved around medicine and psychoanalysis.


1. Alan Tyson collecting his Honorary Degree from the University of St Andrews, Scotland.


2. Alan Tyson in a more relaxed context.

It is not certain what prompted him to devote the rest of his life to musicology, especially as he did not undergo a formal music education. Some suggest it was his passion for collecting, especially music, that made him change his mind.  Maybe he was curious how (well) the early and subsequent editions reflected the intentions of the composers? As he was not able to speak to Mozart or Beethoven as he would to his patients, he once explained, he turned to the composers’ autographs as his primary sources of information. While his earlier career helped him to determine the composers’ creative processes to some extent, it was his own meticulous methods when working with music manuscripts that brought the desired results. His pioneering work on watermarks, for example, enabled him to date (or re-date) many compositions. Tyson even invented his own term for the classification of watermarks resembling crescent moons, selenometry, a term which he advised should not be taken ‘wholly seriously’ (please see images 3 and 4).  He considered watermarks (together with the types of paper that contained them) so significant that he spent over 15 years working on an inventory of all watermarks in Mozart autographs. The watermarks catalogue was published in 1992 as part of the much-respected Neue Mozart-Ausgabe collected edition.


3. Explanation of the term selenometry in A. Tyson’s ‘Mozart: studies of the autograph scores’ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).


4. Tracing of watermarks in a Mozart autograph with noted selenometry.


5. Watermark from Beethoven’s autograph clearly visible thanks to beta-radiography, an imaging technique innovative at the time of Tyson’s research.

Tyson was also fascinated by composers’ sketches. As early as 1964 he gave two BBC interviews (one radio and one television) on the sketchbooks used by Beethoven throughout his life. There are 11 archival boxes of notes spanning some 20 years on the subject and twice as much correspondence discussing the topic. The work and discussions culminated in 1985 with a publication (co-written with Douglas Johnson and Robert Winter) of The Beethoven sketchbooks: history, reconstruction, inventory.  This is just one of many significant publications with Tyson as author, co-author, or editor.

It was important to Tyson to examine as many original sources as possible, not only because he was a thorough researcher (earning him the designation ‘Sherlock Holmes of the music world’), but also because he wanted his work to be as comprehensive as possible. He got to know which institutions and which private collections held the autographs, and visited them one by one. He also had a good rapport with auction houses, who were happy to pass on his requests for viewing or information about (sometimes anonymous!) purchases just made. Additionally, Tyson was in demand when it came to authenticating ‘recently discovered’ manuscripts, which likewise expanded his ‘portfolio’. In one of his letters he expressed his amazement and delight that his research into Viennese composers would take him as far as New Zealand and Japan, where he would find further autographs. I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Tyson personally when he visited the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków, Poland. Anecdotally, he declined an offer of lunch and suggested a dinner after the Library closed as, he said, ‘when you are holding a Mozart manuscript, you do not feel like doing anything else but study it!’

Tyson continued to collect throughout his life eventually amassing an important collection of some 70 manuscripts and 2,200 early (sometime extremely rare) editions of music. In addition, his personal library comprised some 350 books representing both, source and up-to-date research material. Tyson used the items from his private collection to compare with those in libraries and elsewhere, which led him to a deep (and often authoritative) understanding of the history of the musical texts.

Tyson very generously bequeathed his archive to the British and Bodleian Libraries. In 2002 over 1000 items of printed music in the Bodleian’s portion of his collection were catalogued by one Margaret Czepiel. It was therefore thrilling for me to deal with the collection of Tyson’s working papers years later. Here, just as he had observed the creative processes of the composers he studied, I was able to see Tyson’s own working methods. An example can be seen in the images (6 and 7) where he annotated his earlier notes with additional, dated comments, no doubt following subsequent visits to the respective repositories and discussions with fellow researchers. In fact, the sheer volume of correspondence (26 boxes of just mail, with further exchanges among the 43 boxes of notes) is telling; he valued the views of his colleagues highly. It is clear that he thrived on these intellectually stimulating epistolary (and over-the-phone) debates.


6. Notes on music manuscripts at the Morgan Library, New York, 1978-1981.


7. Notes on music manuscripts at the Moran Library, New York, 1983-1988.

The Tyson archive, now catalogued online, also contains a great number of reproductions of music manuscripts, both autographs and copies.  Many of them, however, offer no clues as to the identity of the works or indeed the composers. Unfortunately, the scope of this music-cataloguing project did not allow for identifying the vast quantities of photocopies, photographs, and microfilms of the various manuscripts. It would take a significant amount of detective work to identify and match the reproductions with their originals. We would welcome any offers of help in this respect if anyone would be up for the challenge!

Margaret Czepiel

Archivist

Desmond Carrington’s All Time Greats

“Evening all, from home in Perthshire”

Desmond Carrington (23 May 1926 – 1 February 2017) was perhaps best known for his successful BBC 2 radio shows: All Time Greats and The Music Goes ‘Round. When he retired in October 2016 The Music Goes ‘Round was still attracting more than 800,000 listeners’ according to The Guardian’s obituary. 

(Above: MS. 18901/10)

To some, though, Carrington was better known as the first heart-throb doctor of one of Britain’s first ever soap operas: Emergency Ward 10, a TV medical drama which ran on ITV from 1957-1967. Shows like Casualty and ER would follow suit.

In 2019, Carrington’s partner and producer, David Aylott, donated all of Carrington’s old scripts, programmes, publicity material, and a vast amount of photographs to the Bodleian Libraries. This collection spans his entire life from childhood, including his time as a soldier during the Second World War, a busy acting career, and finally his move behind the microphone hosting his own radio show. The catalogue for the archive received to-date has now been made available in Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts. In the future the actual recordings will also be added to the collection.

Most of Desmond Carrington’s career was dedicated to his popular radio shows All Time Greats and The Music Goes ‘Round, so it is no surprise that a vast quantity of the collection consists of years upon years upon years of radio scripts, production details, and publicity.
The scripts reveal Carrington’s eclectic, and sometimes eccentric, taste in music, from Bucks Fizz, Elvis Presley, Judy Garland to… Star Trek! An array of genres and artists which must have inspired and broadened listeners’ musical tastes and knowledge (MS. 18901/48).


Occasionally, Carrington would have themed shows. For the 50th anniversary of the Allies’ victory in the Second World War, something quite personal to the former WW2 officer, he played a range of war-themed songs (see MS. 18901/40 above). These included Vera Lynn’s ‘I’m sending my blessings’ and Segue’s ‘I’ll never smile again’, with the Welsh Guards playing out the episode with an instrumental British medley.

After three decades of entertaining on the radio airways, Carrington retired and hung up his headphones for the last time on the 28th of October 2016. Truly the end of an era.
He marked his final show of The Music Goes ‘Round (MS. 18901/104), which ran from 2004-2016, with the same song that he opened it with all those years ago in 1981 on All Time Greats: ‘Up, Up, Up and Away’ by the Johnny Mann Signers. Mel Torme’s ‘That’s All’ was his final swan song.

There is something quite moving about a man in his shed, with his cat (Sam), just playing his favourite songs for his dedicated listeners every week.

And always with a fond goodbye from him and ‘Golden Paws’ Sam:
‘Bye just now!’ and ‘…of course, thank you for having us at your place’.

 

By Archives Assistant Jen Patterson

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.

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 Composer who Defied the BBC

Robert Simpson. ©Robert Simpson Society

Robert Simpson (1921-1997), was an English composer and writer on music and, from 1951 until 1980, a well-respected BBC producer and broadcaster. His pioneering and popular radio programme ‘The Innocent Ear’ ran for many years introducing the British public to music of lesser-known composers. As well as his work for the BBC, he published a distinguished body of music, including 11 symphonies, 15 string quartets and other chamber music. He was a highly regarded composer and was even afforded the unusual honour of having a society founded in his name during his lifetime (https://robertsimpson.org.uk/). As a particular expert on Beethoven, Bruckner and Carl Nielsen, he wrote extensively and illuminatingly on these and other composers.

Robert Simpson’s contract with the BBC, dated 1953 (MS. Simpson 21).

Housed in the Bodleian’s Weston Library in Oxford, the Simpson collection brings together the archive of the Robert Simpson Society and additional material gifted by the late Angela Simpson, the composer’s widow, and others.

A small section of the Robert Simpson archive

Simpson’s original music manuscripts are in the British Library but the Archive in the Bodleian includes photocopies of many of the music manuscripts, often further annotated by the composer himself. The Bodleian archive also contains original correspondence and writings, broadcasting scripts, concert programmes, recordings and more. It has recently been catalogued for Archives Bodleian (https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repositories/2/resources/3681#) as part of the ongoing Music Manuscript cataloguing project. All the archival material quoted in this post can be found in a box bearing the shelfmark MS. Simpson 21.

It reveals that the 1980s were a trying time for Simpson. His disagreements with the BBC, particularly over the Proms, eventually resulted in his resignation, and his passionate hatred for the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher led him to move to the Republic of Ireland in 1986.

In 1980, tensions between various musicians, music producers and the BBC came to a head due to severe cuts in funding, which threatened the loss of a third of the BBC’s musicians and the scrapping of five of its orchestras. In fact, a strike by the orchestras caused the cancellation of 20 Proms concerts that year. Despite this, the BBC were not planning to showcase less music but to increase its output of records and foreign tapes. The Musicians’ Union stated that ‘over 60% of B.B.C. radio output consists of music but less than 5% of radio expenditure is on staff orchestras’ (such leaflets can be seen below), claiming that the BBC had therefore broken its agreement with the Union.

Material documenting the musicians’ dispute with the BBC (MS. Simpson 21)

Robert Simpson disapproved greatly of the BBC’s decision on this issue, believing Britain’s cultural integrity to be at risk. It also becomes clear from the papers in MS. Simpson 21 that the composer, always forthright in his views, was rather irritated by the BBC and those who defended it.

In a letter to Robert Ponsonby, Director of the Proms from 1974 to 1986 and Controller of Radio 3 (who died last year at the age of 92), Simpson scathingly wrote, ‘Your public support of them wins no respect…’. Regarding other people in the music profession who had written to the press in defence of a dwindling cultural life, Simpson declared, ‘I wish I could follow their example, and it is contractual duress not false loyalty that prevents me from doing so’ (12 March 1980). However, just four months later Simpson would rebel against this ‘contractual duress’.

After The Times had jumped the gun and falsely reported Simpson’s resignation on 11 July, Simpson retaliated with a response that the BBC had persuaded him to delay his resignation due to the fragile negotiations with the Musicians’ Union and their wish to avoid negative publicity. However, after the hearsay over Simpson’s relationship with the BBC he brought his resignation forward, just months away from retirement, which would have enabled him to claim a full pension.

In his letter to the editor published in The Times on 18 July 1980 he states ‘I have resigned from the BBC, for reasons wider and deeper than the current argument over the orchestras, which is only the symptom of a larger problem.’ Simpson argues that, ‘When I first joined the Corporation nearly 30 years ago it was a wonderful and promising place to be at, with the Third Programme at the height of its achievement… Since the BBC’s capitulation to the urge to compete on the lowest level with commercial broadcasting values have degenerated.’

Simpson ends this letter with a harsh testimonial: ‘I can no longer work for the BBC without a profound sense of betrayal of most of the values I and many others believe in… It is now necessary for me to be able to say what I wish to whom I wish when I wish, without the shackles imposed by that all too sinister phrase “corporate loyalty”. This is why I have resigned’.

Simpson immediately began to receive overwhelmingly supportive responses from fellow composers, musicians and admirers. Many key phrases such as, ‘courage’, ‘marvellous letter’, ‘what you said certainly needed saying’, and ‘thank you’ jump out from this correspondence, showing how much opposition there was to the BBC’s attitude and its decisions at the time.

A small selection of the responses, all dated 19-20 July 1980
One such letter, dated 19 July 1980, begins with ‘I read your letter… with some sadness as I have obtained great pleasure for many projects with which you have been associated as producer, but also with a feeling of reassurance that there are still people who are prepared to act according to their professed principles… am grateful for your example.’
After his resignation Simpson remained a vocal critic of the BBC and campaigned for music funding. He also continued his career as a composer, completing several further works. With time tensions with the BBC subsided slightly, and his compositions were once again played on BBC stations, although perhaps not as often as they deserve.

Robert Simpson suffered a debilitating stroke in 1991 which all but ended his composing career. He died in 1997, aged 76. The Robert Simpson Society continues today. 2021 marks the centenary of Simpson’s birth so do look out for performances of his music next year. It’s well worth getting to know!

Jen Patterson, Archives & Modern Manuscripts
Martin Holmes, Alfred Brendel Curator of Music, Bodleian Libraries,
and Robert Simpson Society Archivist

Have I Got A Hymn For You

‘A Hympne of Thanksgiving, composed by John Roe’ (MS. Eng. c. 7963, fol. 71) has recently been catalogued as part of the current project to incorporate the Bodleian’s music-related manuscripts into the online catalogue. The item contains the text of a previously unknown seventeenth-century hymn. It is in the hand of the herald and antiquary, Sir William Dugdale (1608-1686), many of whose other papers are held by the Library. Dugdale held the title of Chester Herald of Arms in Ordinary from 1644 to 1660. As part of the role, heralds would travel across England to deliver messages on behalf of the monarchy.

An early form of social media!

The hymn celebrates the Battle of Preston (1648), which ended with a victory of the Parliamentarians under the command of Oliver Cromwell over the Royalists and Scots led by the Duke of Hamilton during the English Civil War. John Roe is credited by Dugdale as the ‘composer’; however, his identity cannot be confirmed.

As an Assistant Archivist, I had the opportunity to take part in a Digital Editions Course at the Taylor Institutions Library. This course entailed for the digitisation of a chosen text, and creation of an XML file consisting of a transcription.

In order digitise the text, I had taken the photos using a digital camera and employed the software programme GIMP to ensure high-resolution and quality images. I then used Oxygen Editor to write the XML coding. The image and XML files were uploaded onto ORA data for future use and to provide access for researchers and students without the need to have the physical copy, which after about four hundred years is, unsurprisingly, showing some wear and tear. You can find these at the ORA deposit site here.

Following the convention of diplomatic transcription, I kept the spellings the same as they appear in the text; some of the writing though is illegible. For example, in stanza 6 (shown in the image above) I was unable to transcribe the last word in line 2: ‘‘Ye kings give ease, ye people […] / I even I will sing / And sweetly raise my voice in praise / To England’s God and king.’

Can you read the missing word? Heaze, wave, haze, or something else?

This catalogue is now online.

The Natasha Spender archive is now available

Programme for a piano recital by Natasha Litvin (later Spender) in 1944, from MS. 6647/54The archive of Natasha Spender, concert pianist, academic, and wife of the poet Stephen Spender, is now available.

Natasha Spender, Lady Spender, née Litvin (or Evans), was born on 18 April 1919, the illegitimate daughter of Ray Litvin and Edwin Evans, who was a well-respected (but married) Times music critic.

Ray Litvin (d. 1977) was from a family of Lithuanian Jewish refugees and grew up in Glasgow. She became an actress and was by 1915 a regular with Lilian Baylis’s Old Vic theatre company but in 1926 her career was crushed when she caught typhoid fever and became profoundly deaf.

Young Natasha, who had been fostered out during her early years, went on to spend her holidays with the wealthy and very musical family of George Booth (son of the social reformer Charles Booth) and his wife Margaret at their home Funtington House in West Sussex. A gifted pianist, Natasha trained at the Royal College of Music and following graduation, studied with the musician and composer Clifford Curzon and the pianist Franz Osborn before starting her professional career. During the war, she gave concerts for ENSA and in 1943 she, along with the actress Dame Peggy Ashcroft and the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, founded the Apollo Society which presented poetry with a musical accompaniment. She appeared often on television and radio including as the soloist in the very first concert televised by the BBC. She also gave recitals in the UK and abroad, including a concert for former prisoners in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In the 1960s Natasha made a move into academia after earning a degree in psychology and from 1970 to 1984 she taught music psychology and visual perception at the Royal College of Art. She later contributed to the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Natasha met the poet Stephen Spender in 1940 at a lunch party hosted by Horizon, a literary journal that Stephen was co-editing at the time. They married in 1941. For decades, the Spenders were central figures in the London (and international) literary scene, with Stephen Spender’s career as a writer, professor, lecturer, editor and delegate taking them all over the world, with long periods in America.

In the 1950s, Natasha became friends with the terminally alcoholic, noir author Raymond Chandler, who fell in love with her. The exact nature of their relationship became an ongoing source of speculation among his biographers. This, along with controversies over unauthorized biographies and interpretations of Stephen Spender’s life led to Natasha fighting hard for the rights of biographical subjects and particularly for her husband’s reputation. Following Stephen Spender’s death in 1995, Natasha founded the Stephen Spender Memorial Trust, which continues to promote poetry in translation, and she collaborated first with John Sutherland on an official biography of her husband (published in 2004) and then with Lara Feigel on an updated edition of Spender’s journals (published in 2012). Natasha also published articles about friends and associates, including Dame Edith Sitwell and Raymond Chandler, and her archive includes an unfinished memoir covering the early years of her life and marriage. She died on 21 October 2010 at the age of 91.

The papers will be of interest to readers researching the history of early twentieth century theatre and performance, the academic field of visual perception, and the literary circle of Stephen Spender.

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

The Braun Family Archive: Second edition catalogue now available

The second edition of the catalogue of the Braun Family Archive is now available here.

More than 50 boxes – MSS. Braun 168-221 – have been added since the first catalogue was published in February 2015. In addition to the papers of, and collected by, Thomas Braun and his parents Konrad and Hildburg Braun, the archive now includes a collection of family verse and writings, as well as correspondence, personal documents, writings, memorabilia and photographs of Gerhard Braun, his wife Anneliese and daughter Ruth.

Gerhard Braun (1893-1946) was Konrad Braun’s elder brother. By profession he was an obstetrician and gynaecologist. As a young man he served as a medical officer in the First World War and then as an American POW. In 1927 he married Anneliese Finster (1901-1996), and adopted her daughter Ruth (‘Rüthli’, 1926-1999).

Braun family photo, c. 1931

The Friedmann-Brauns, c. 1931: Gertrud and Felix Friedmann-Braun with Ruth, at the back Konrad, Hildegard, Johannes, Anneliese and Gerhard Braun. – Photo: Braun Family Archive

Due to the Friedmann-Brauns’ Jewish ancestry, the family faced discrimination and persecution under the Nazi regime. After losing his posts in the public health system and seeing his previously successful practice limited to private patients and the to Jews only, Gerhard Braun was arrested in the course of the November pogrom in 1938 and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was detained for five and a half weeks. He was released in December 1938, on condition that his family paid a large sum in tax and that he emigrated.

12-year-old Ruth was sent ahead to safety in England in late 1938, staying with family friends – Curt and Hilde Sluzewski who had had already emigrated from Germany – in London. Gerhard and Anneliese followed in early 1939. Since they had been forced to leave behind most of their possessions, and Gerhard Braun was forbidden to work, the family, for more than three years, was reliant on the generous support of Marcel Wolfers, a merchant in the China trade.

Gerhard Braun was detained as an ‘enemy alien’ at the Huyton internment camp near Liverpool for several months in 1940. Only from 1942 was he able to practice medicine in England, as a junior hospital doctor in Birmingham. However, his health had been seriously impaired by his mistreatment at the hands of the Nazis and he died in 1946, at just 52 years of age.

Gerhard Braun at the piano

Gerhard Braun at the piano. – Photograph by permission of Christopher Braun

Anneliese and Ruth Braun eventually moved from Birmingham to London, where they shared a house in Golders Green until Anneliese Braun’s death in 1996. Mother and daughter were extremely close, and together they were known as ‘the Pummels’ to family and friends.

Anneliese Braun was an amateur writer since her youth, and some of her poems and short stories had been published in German newspapers before 1933. Even before coming to England in 1939, she had begun to write in English as well, and later she also translated works by other writers, including Monika Mann, Ruth Tenney (Marcel Wolfer’s wife) and Veronica Erdmann-Czapski, with whom she was friends.

Ruth Braun, having attended Birmingham Theatre School as a young woman, also had a lifelong interest in drama and music – in many ways, following the family tradition. Her ‘adopted grandfather’, Felix Friedmann-Braun (1861-1934), had been a brilliant amateur pianist in Berlin, and his four children grew up in a prosperous, cultured family with many links to leading literary, musical and artistic figures in Germany.

Poster for a recital by Hildegard Braun in Berlin, 1918. The Bechstein-Saal, a chamber music hall with more than 500 seats, had been opened 1892 with a series of concerts by Johannes Brahms, Anton Rubinstein and the like. Hildegard Braun certainly was in good company! – Photo: Braun Family Archive

Daughter Hildegard was a successful professional singer, the youngest son, Johannes, an actor. Konrad Braun was a keen amateur violinist and played in a string quartet with friends (Curt ‘Slu’ Sluzewski, amongst others), while Gerhard had inherited his father’s talent as a pianist. Gerhard also composed short pieces of music, such as birthday serenades for Ruth, and set to music verses by his wife Anneliese and poems by Ruth Tenney. Some of his compositions survive in the archive (MS. Braun 221), and together with a collection of family verse compiled by Thomas and Christopher Braun (MSS. Braun 168-169), these give a wonderful glimpse of the important role that music, literature and writing played in the Braun family’s life – as a profession, as a pastime and for pleasure, and not least, as a source of a sense of identity, dignity and hope in times of hardship.

A song written down for Konrad Braun “von seinem Papa” – by his father, Felix Friedmann-Braun, 1911. – Photo: Braun Family Archive

Poem written by Konrad Braun for his wife Hildburg’s 30th birthday on 14 May 1940. Just a year earlier, they had emigrated from Germany to England to escape persecution by the Nazis. The poem was published 63 years later, transcribed and translated by their son Thomas Braun, in The Oxford Magazine, No. 216, 2003. – Photo: Braun Family Archive

Find out more about the Braun family story, and about the archive, here.

The Braun Family Archive was donated to the Bodleian Library by Christopher Braun, London, in several tranches between July 2010 and May 2017, together with a grant towards the cost of preparing the catalogue.

music, planets and secret messages

My head is all a-buzz this morning with thoughts and ideas. There are a several reasons for this, the first being the news that “Google has deleted at least six popular music blogs“. I don’t want to argue the rights or wrongs of illegal file sharing, that is not why my head is buzzing. Rather, it is that the struggle between of the music industry and the pirates, all riding the waves of the Web, seems to me a struggle that will be of great importance to future scholars trying to work out what happened in the 21st Century to produce the business models of the 25th. Google’s actions here could amount to someone burning Amatino Manucci’s Summa de Arithmetica.

The second reason is we’re just back from “Digital Preservation – The Planets Way“, a three day workshop in London put together by the lovely and talented people on the Planets Project. Just looking at the programme you’ll see what a treat it was and there are some great things that have come out of the project – including the Plato preservation planning tool, which provides a guided (albeit manual) workflow to build preservation plans for digital objects; and the Testbed, which is a Web-based “Lab” in which you can test preservation actions and record and evaluate the results prior to running those actions locally. Both provide a useful audit trail and hopefully protect a beleaguered digital preservationist from trouble should they find they’ve been using the equivalent of acid-paper some time in the future – because they can show the actions they took were the best available to them at the time.

Most interesting for me (as a developer) was the Interoperability Framework, which seems to promise simple integrated access to preservation tools and so my head is buzzing with the thoughts of how we might use it. Mind you, I’ve not delved deeper yet, but I’ll let you know what we find out!

Finally, on the train home, I bought a copy of Linux Magazine mostly because the cover announced an article on steganography. Earlier that day we’d been trying out image migrations in the Planets TestBed and I didn’t recall seeing any of the characterization tools pointing out (or having a space for) detection of secret messages, although such tools exist (the article suggested they might not work or lead to false positives however). Wikipedia lists some futher paths to follow and this morning I found a report from a conference in 2004 that mentions steganalysis and archives. I guess our forensics machine might have tools to find this sort of thing too.

All of which left the final buzz in my head – I didn’t know what migration might do to such messages – say embedding a poem inside a BMP file and then migrating that BMP to TIFF (and then back to a BMP) and seeing if the message is still there. If ever there was a time to try out the Testbed, this would be it! So I’m off to see if the group logins still work! 🙂

Addendum:

The login still worked, so I conducted four experiments.

Firstly, I converted this BMP (blogspot has migrated it to a JPG on upload, though it still has its original filename!) to a TIFF and noted that none of the “compare” tools noticed anything odd about the BMP, in spite of the secret poem contained therein and steghide would no longer work as it doesn’t support TIFFs.

Secondly, I converted the TIFF back to a BMP (using the same migration tool – GIMP in this instance). Perhaps if you know more about the innards of image formats it will come as no surprise, but I was surprised to discover that migrating back to BMP restored the original hidden message. (Interestingly, doing the same thing on the command line with ImageMagick – BMP->JPG JPG->BMP returned a BMP of identical size to the source, but the hidden message was lost).

Finally I converted the BMP to a JPG (twice – the first migration had some dubious default settings for quality of the resulting JPG) and tried steghide on the results. Unsurprisingly the message was again lost. This is nothing new – you have to decide which characteristics of an object you want to keep and which are OK to lose on migration and a stenographic message is probably just one of those characteristics – albeit a rare one!

This was just a brief moment spent with the Testbed and I rushed through the tests really, but it was pretty interesting. True, I could’ve probably conducted these experiments faster on the command line using any number of image manipulation tools, but then I would not have a record of my work. Using the Testbed forced me to document the experiment rather than just bash out a few commands and leap to a conclusion and any results I have, should, in theory make their way to the “community”.

Finally, if you want to know what the poem is, the passphrase is “boat” and the original image is available here. (You might want steghide too).

-Peter Cliff