A Model View: Achievement, Recreation, and Adult Beginning Violin Instruction

It has probably not escaped librarians' notice that since the mid-1990s there has been an upsurge in intellectual interest in the history of musical life in Britain from the eighteenth century onwards. This has produced a range of journal articles, books of essays, monographs, databases, and Web sites on this once highly marginalized topic. Ashgate Publishing has a series, Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by Bennett Zon; Boydell & Brewer has recently launched another, Music in Britain, 1600-1900, edited by Rachel Cowgill and Peter Holman; and the North American British Music Studies Association (NABMSA) (1) publishes a newsletter, hosts an electronic mailing list (for members only), and holds biennial conferences, and maintains an online bibliography of recent publications--to name only a few of the more visible examples. Within this broad area, concert history has become one of the more popular fields of investigation, offering opportunities to combine studies of the social, cultural, and economic structures of British musical life with the concerns of performance and reception history in their broadest senses. Among the several scholars who have contributed to this field are Jenny Burchell, Rachel Cowgill, Cyril Ehrlich, Christopher Fifield, Leanne Langley, Meredith McFarlane, Alyson McLamore, Simon McVeigh, Michael Musgrave, Roz Southey, and David Wright. (2) Collectively they have embraced many areas of inquiry, mostly concerned with art music and high culture, and ranging from the development of repertoire and patterns of taste to socioeconomic aspects of concert life, and from the functions and meanings that concerts had in people's lives to the development of ideologies about music and codes of behavior in the concert hall, some of which remain with us today. Along with all this has come a solid demonstration of the crucial importance of ephemera--that is, the "detritus" left after the performance event--as source material for serious concert history. Its artifacts comprise not just concert programs, but handbills, posters, tickets, newspaper advertisements and reviews, administrative records, contracts with performers, and so on--any documentation, in fact, that was associated with the business of putting live music before audiences. And the resultant concert history has strikingly demonstrated the value of ephemera, as James B. Coover put it, to illuminate "those people, those events, those organizations," and to vivify the history of music. (3) Admittedly, once upon a time only a few librarians and archivists bothered preserving such materials; but disdain for ephemera has long been on the wane. By 1991, Coover reckoned that the adage "today's trash, tomorrow's treasure" was being taken on board by "most of us [American librarians]," (4) just as five years earlier he had called for definitions, taxonomies, a national survey of holdings, and systems for bibliographic control. (5) In all this he held the view that British librarians had been ahead of the game in the value they placed on ephemera collections and the groundwork they had laid in this field. (6) Certainly, in the early 1990s much concert ephemera was lying in wait for British musicologists, in such collections as the John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and--notably--the Portraits Collection (now the Centre for Performance History) at the Royal College of Music, London, and some of the first significant publications in the field were produced around this time. Since then, much more material has come to researchers' attention, as the value of concert ephemera to the scholarly community has continued to be demonstrated. Important archives (both public and private) have been purchased and opened up--witness the Royal Philharmonic Society's archive, bought for the nation by the British Library in 2002; or the papers of the musical artists' agency Ibbs and Tillett, now at the Royal College of Music's Centre for Performance History; and the archives of the Wigmore (formerly Bechstein) Hall, London, and the BBC Promenade Concerts, to which scholars have recently gained access. …

Writing (british) concert history: the blessing and curse of ephemera

RIPM on the Internet. RIPM: International Index to Nineteenth-Century Music Periodicals. First edition. Baltimore: National Information Services Corporation (NISC USA), 2000. http://www.nisc.com/RIPM/ ripm_electronic.htm (information); http://www.nisc.com/RIPM (access via NISC BiblioLine). [Data licensed from Repertoire international de la presse musicale; H. Robert Cohen, founder and general editor; Richard Kitson, assistant editor. Updated every six months. Annual subscription base price $1,195; for 2-5 users add 50%; 6-10 users add 125%; 11-15 users add 200%; prices for 16+ users available upon request.] Since the appearance of the first publications of the Repertoire international de la presse musicale (RIPM), this invaluable research tool has occupied an important place among the four "Rs" of international bibliographic documentation, particularly RILM (Repertoire international de litterature musicale) and RISM (Repertoire international des sources musicales). Prior reviews (such as M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, Journal of the American Musicological Society 43 [1990]:498-504, and Peter Ward Jones, Fontes Artis Musicae 36 [1989]:331-32) have praised RIPM for its indispensability to the research of music and culture between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries. As these reviews have noted, RIPM facilitates the study of under-explored areas of reception, performance, and cultural history through a projected indexing of sixty-five key music and theater periodicals published in the musical centers of Europe, Russia, and the United States. Focusing on the nineteenth century, the generally cleft organi zation of a large amount of detailed information on composers, performers, writers, theaters, ensembles, instruments, and other elements essential to historical study saves researchers countless labor-intensive hours by eliminating the need to comb through periodicals page by page. RIPM print publications--which include annotated calendars, keyword/author indexes, and introductory studies of the periodicals--have increased production over the past decade, raising the count to over 120 published volumes by the time of this review. Recent additions include indexes to the important French periodicals La gazette musicale de Paris (1834-35) and La revue et gazette musicale de Paris (1835-80); the Spanish journals La zarzuela-Madrid (1856-57) and La espana artislica-Madrid (1857-58); three Polish periodicals from various decades, including Tygodnik muzyczny (1820-21); and two Russian publications of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Muzikal'noye obozreniye: muzikal'naya gazeta (1885-88). Since January 2000, RIPM has increased its usefulness through the availability of both online and CD-ROM versions, as well as microforms containing the journals' full texts. RIPM on the Internet, the focus of this review, is overseen by general editor H. Robert Cohen and produced in collaboration with NISC (National Information Services Corporation). At present, it is a cumulative index of 380,000 annotated citations from all targeted periodicals, updated every six months. Most noteworthy among the advantages offered by the electronic format is the ease and speed of obtaining both a wide range of data and very specific information from all indexed periodicals at once, as well as the extraordinary flexibility and control possible in setting and refining search parameters. Researchers can easily expand their focus beyond individual periodicals, cities, countries, or narrowly circumscribed periods, but can also pinpoint information accurately. The RIPM online home page provides much background information: summaries of RIPM's scope and scholarly significance, a list of its editors, and updates on the status of its publications. Users' guides in thirteen different European languages are available online, or can be downloaded as Adobe Acrobat documents. Although these guides are for the print versions primarily, nonetheless they include important editorial information for the online user: title formats, spelling variants, punctuation and capitalization, explanatory citations, music examples, illustrations, and the denotation of reviews or advertising. …

Diana R. Hallman

Papers

RIPM on the Internet