A Shakespeare Music Catalogue: 'What's in a Name?'
| Autor: | Bryan N. S. Gooch |
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| Rok vydání: | 1986 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Canadian University Music Review. :127 |
| ISSN: | 2291-2436 0710-0353 |
| DOI: | 10.7202/1014090ar |
| Popis: | Romeo and Juliet II, ii, 43. In my paper offered to a joint meeting of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries and the Canadian University Music Society on 31 May 1983,2 when the Learned Societies met at the University of British Columbia, I commented on the background to the Shakespeare Music project and explained something about the rather long route by which David Thatcher, my research colleague, and I came to the present task. I also outlined the parameters of the current project and reported briefly on our progress during our first eleven months of operation. It seems to me practical at this point to review certain details and then to move to a discussion of our methodology and results to date in order to outline for you what we have done and what we expect to achieve by our completion date in 1988; that process, at least, will explain to you "What's in [our] name". Let me begin by noting that my colleague and I came to work on the preparation of the Shakespeare Music Catalogue after a decade of experience in literary/musical bibliography. Beginning in 1972 with a study of music connected with the late Victorians and modern British writers, we moved to the early and mid-Victorians, and then to the British Romantics, taking into account the music produced from the authors' period to the present; catalogues of musical settings (and music influenced by the literature) in these three areas appeared sequentially, all of them published in New York and London by Garland Publishing Inc., in 1976, 1979, and 1982. All of the work was done not only because we were fascinated by the material but because we were entirely convinced that it needed to be done and that user-friendly reference works aiming at comprehensiveness in this field would be valuable to literary scholars, to musicologists, to producers of radio and television programmes, to performers, and, indeed, to anyone interested in the relationship of literature and music. Such works not only make easily available information about specific compositions, with all the appropriate manuscript and/or publication details and vocal and instrumental specifications, but facilitate, for instance, the tracing of composers' interest in a particular author, work, or set of lines and the further tracking of such interest according to, say, country and/or time period - such studies providing illumination with respect to the reception of styles and ideas. They also invite, for example, comparative literary/musical stylistic considerations, as well as examinations of two or more treatments of the same text. We have been committed, then, to the production of those bibliographic tools which would not only assist in solving the more immediate production-related problems but which would also make possible a good deal of rewarding critical work and which would serve, in their own way, as data bases for bibliographic researchers in the future. As I noted in other papers, we had no intention when we began our first joint book of doing a second or a third, but here we are, now working on a fourth project. Certainly, we might have continued our retrospective progress and looked at, say, music connected with Restoration and eighteenth century literature - and that is an area which must be covered at some time, as must the treatment and influence on music of Elizabethan, Jacobean, Caroline, and Commonwealth material. However, no other English writer has such international currency as Shakespeare, and we were satisfied not only that a full coverage of Shakespeare music was necessary and would be helpful to a wide range of users (in literature, music, and theatre) but that the kind of searching involved would solve a number of difficulties (e.g., with respect to the history of music publishing, material locations, and search patterns) which would inevitably arise in the course of any study of music connected with British literature written between, say, 1600 and the time of the earliest writers listed in our book on the Romantics. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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