We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
The archive and the web
Over the past thirty years, more musical sketches have been (re)discovered, gathered together in archives and libraries, studied, and published in transcription and facsimile than ever before. They are even turning up in mainstream music history textbooks. The casual observer can be left with the impression of vast quantities of easily available manuscript material coherently organised and safely stored under lock and key. Projects to digitalise autograph collections and make them available online have become so numerous that they are hardly considered newsworthy: see for example the recently completed project undertaken by the Bibliothèque nationale de France to place its collection of Beethoven autographs online. Though not overly large, this collection is significant because, out of approximately 120 autographs, 84 are identified as sketches.
What kind of information can we obtain from these newly available sources? In early 2013, twenty-one pages of Franz Waxman’s sketches and drafts in pencil for the short score of the Rebecca Suite, an adaption for the radio of music written for the film Rebecca, were posted online. As a result, the material was cited and two pages of sketches were reproduced in an undergraduate term paper on the composer. Clearly the twenty-one pages do tell something about Waxman’s working methods, but the information they are able to deliver is severely circumscribed if the data is limited to what we can see on these pages. An exhaustive reading of the information contained in them requires that they be contextualised with other sources. Waxman’s autographs are preserved in the Franz Waxman Papers held by Syracuse University Libraries. His scores for motion pictures, as well as for radio and television productions, constitute the bulk of this collection and include a substantial number of autographs and manuscripts pertaining to the music written for Rebecca. Set within this context, the twenty-one pages would have a lot to tell.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
