Deirdre Loughridge's valuable article ‘Making, Collecting and Reading Music Facsimiles before Photography’ (JRMA, 141 (2016), 27–59) explores the early history in Germany, Austria and France of publishing facsimiles of composers’ autographs using transfer lithography. However, she seems unaware that these developments had been anticipated in England. In 1825 Thomas Busby published in his Concert Room and Orchestra Anecdotes samples of autographs of composers ranging from Henry Purcell and William Croft to Ignaz Pleyel and Joseph Haydn (see Clare Brown and Peter Holman, ‘Thomas Busby and his “Fac Similes of Celebrated Composers”’, Early Music Performer, 12 (August 2003), 3–12; <http://www.earlymusic.info/Performer/EMP12-1.pdf>). Most if not all the manuscripts Busby used were in the library of the composer William Shield, and Shield was clearly a pioneer in the collection and publication of facsimiles: he had published an extract from the lost autograph of Thomas Arne's opera Artaxerxes (with corrections and revisions throwing important light on the compositional process) in his Introduction to Harmony (London, 1800); and he included two more ‘fac-similes’ in his Rudiments of Thoroughbass (London, 1815) – a piece by William Croft and a page from a ‘lute’ (actually Baroque guitar) manuscript. These examples of ‘fac-simile’ were engraved, presumably using tracing to transfer the images onto the plate. The significance of Shield's role in collecting and publishing facsimiles needs further research, but Rebecca Herissone (‘Robert Pindar, Thomas Busby, and the Mysterious Scoring of Henry Purcell's “Come Ye Sons of Art”’, Music and Letters, 88 (2007), 1– 48) has already used one of Busby's extracts to throw important new light on one of Purcell's most popular odes.
Peter Holman
University of Leeds
I am grateful to Peter Holman for drawing my attention to two figures who had escaped my notice: Thomas Busby and William Shield. An interesting question raised by Holman's letter is in what senses the autograph collecting and publishing activities of these figures anticipate the various practices connected with music facsimiles discussed in my article. That is, do their facsimiles provide the earliest (known) examples of handwritten music reproduced for the purposes of physiognomic interest, visual decoration or morbid curiosity, and/or to demonstrate authorship or creative process; or were their pioneering music facsimiles stimulated by yet other conditions and interests that were superseded as cultures of facsimile collecting developed?
Busby's ‘Fac Similes of Celebrated Composers’ (1825) seems in keeping with F. J. Fétis's ‘Gallery of Celebrated Musicians’ (1827), the London-produced Apollo's Gift (1829) and many productions of the 1830s and 1840s: the facsimiles provide publication-enriching illustrations as well as a ready-made collection of musical hands, suitable for physiognomic decipherment. Shield, however, offers something different. The extract included in his Introduction to Harmony (1800) is a typeset diplomatic transcription; the two included in Rudiments of Thoroughbass (c.1815) do reproduce the handwritten appearance but were, Holman observes, made by engraving rather than transfer lithography. These works (along with books like John Thane's British Autography: A Collection of Fac-similes of the Handwriting of Royal and Illustrious Personages, with their Authentic Portraits, 1788) belong to Britain's era of pre-lithographic facsimile production, a topic also in need of further research, but which seems in the case of Shield to involve a convergence of antiquarian collecting with compositional, historical and music-pedagogical concerns. While facsimiles of any era may serve to illuminate text-critical questions, when using reproductions in the absence of originals it is important to be cognizant of the kinds of changes that may have been introduced as a result of the reproduction method as well as the interests of the reproducer; in the case of facsimiles made by transfer lithography, one should be particularly alert to the possibilities of reformatting and omission. By bringing knowledge of the cultures of facsimile production and consumption to bear, we stand better able to make sense of music facsimiles both new and old.
Deirdre Loughridge
Northeastern University
