Blog topic: Music

It was my distinct pleasure to offer a window into Stanford Libraries’ rare music collections to students in the “Why Music Matters” course from the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Summer Institute, and performers in the St. Lawrence String Quartet’s Chamber Music Course.  We gathered in Special Collections for an up-close examination of manuscripts and early print materials, dating from 1942 (Irving Berlin’s White Christmas) all the way back to the 12^th century (a sacred chant fragment).

The maverick composer Henry Cowell wrote the solo piano work, The Harp of Life, in Menlo Park in 1925; it was later incorporated into the suite, Four Irish Tales, for piano and orchestra (1940). The original holograph score is held in the Memorial Library of Music in Stanford’s Department of Special Collections (MLM 232C). Accompanying correspondence from Cowell’s widow, Sydney, notes that only a few of Cowell’s 25 or so manuscripts employing tone clusters have survived, this being one. The Harp of Life refers to a great cosmic harp, upon which a plucked string announces the birth of a new being. Cowell’s tone clusters create an aural celestial environment within which the harp is played.

It has been some time since there has been a report on the Player Piano Project, but there has been a great deal of activity toward the design and construction of a piano roll scanner. We are working with Anthony Robinson in England who is a player piano enthusiast and the designer of a roll scanner which we believe is one of the best scanners in operation to date. Anthony graciously and generously agreed to work with us to create a scanner that would handle scanning large numbers of rolls easily and efficiently.