Announcing The Music Treasures Consortium

The Music Treasures Consortium proudly announces a new site designed to give access to selected music manuscripts and printed editions from six institutions in the United States and United Kingdom. The site is hosted by the Library of Congress on its Performing Arts Encyclopedia, and is available at:

http://loc.gov/musictreasures

(The scores pictured in this post represent a tiny fraction of the items available on the Music Treasures Consortium site; click any thumbnail to view the uncropped images.)

The Consortium’s goal is to further music scholarship and research by providing access in one place to digital images of primary sources for the performance and study of music. Two examples may help to demonstrate the connections researchers can make through the site:

• The 1741 autograph manuscript of Handel’s Messiah, from the British Library, can be easily compared with both the first published edition of the score, from the Loeb Music Library, and a copyist’s manuscript, ca. 1743-46, from The Morgan Library and Museum.
• Scores from the Loeb Music Library’s extensive collection of Schubert first editions can be studied in tandem with manuscripts from the Library of Congress, the Morgan, and the Lila Acheson Wallace Library at Juilliard (Schubert in the Music Treasures Consortium).

In this initial launch, online items range from the 13^th century – the British Library’s manuscript Harley 978, Musical, medical and literary miscellany, including ‘Sumer is icumen in'[…] – to the 20^th, by composers including Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, Georges Bizet, Arnold Schoenberg. The site will continue to grow as Consortium members add more items.

Read more about Harvard’s contributions to the Music Treasures Consortium in this Harvard College Library News article.

Members of the Consortium include:

• The British Library
• Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library at Harvard University
• Lila Acheson Wallace Library at the Juilliard School
• The Library of Congress
• The Morgan Library and Museum
• New York Public Library

Initial planning for the Consortium was funded by Bruce Kovner. The MTC Advisory Board includes Christoph Wolff, Jeffrey Kallberg, Philip Gossett, and Laurent Pugin.

-Kerry Masteller