Notes for Notes

The Music Division and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has acquired the George Avakian / Anahid Ajemian Archive. Avakian was a record producer most notably for Columbia Records. Avakian’s wife Anahid Ajemian, a violinist, was the foremost interpreter of American modern classical music of her time. The Avakian portion of the archive contains correspondence and business papers documenting George Avakian’s day-to-day work of signing and producing top recording artists such as Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong, Bill Haley, and others. The archive includes memos, contracts, recording session logs, and in some cases, the original handwritten music played by the musicians in the recording studio. Also included in the archive are lectures, notes, published and unpublished articles, oral histories, essays and interviews, all documenting Avakian’s personal recollections and professional activities. By far the rarest portion of the Avakian Archive is the unreleased recordings: hundreds of never-before-heard broadcasts, live venue recordings, studio takes, and complete recording sessions of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Sonny Rollins, Bing Crosby, Johnny Mathis, Peggy Lee, Keith Jarrett, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, and Ravi Shankar. The Ajemian portion of the collection is equally rich in correspondence and performance materials, contracts and notes, as well as unreleased recordings of major twentieth-century composers and performers. John Cage, Henry Cowell, Alan Hovhaness, Aram Khacha -turian, and Lou Harrison are all represented here.

The papers of American composer David Amram have also been acquired by the Music Division. Amram’s association with any and all musical movers and shakers, from creators of world music to the “beat generation,” is documented in this important archive of correspondence, original music manuscripts, and noncommercial recordings.

The American Composers Orchestra has donated its collection of original scores, and recordings from performances, dating from the orchestra’s founding in 1977.

George Boziwick
New York Public Library

The University of North Texas Music Library has received as a bequest from the late Joe M. Morris of Dallas a large collection of historic sound recordings in various formats and equipment, consisting of 5,500 piano rolls (including such well-known composers as George Gershwin, Fats Waller, Sergey Rachmaninoff, Camille Saint-Saëns, Pietro Mascagni, and Leopold Godowsky, among many others, playing their own works), a large number of wax cylinders, Edison discs, and 78-rpm recordings, in addition to more recent formats. Also included in the gift are a Victor Orthophonic Credenza, Edison Diamond Disc Phonograph, Edison Amberola Cylinder Phonograph, and a Victor Type 6 phonograph with horn, as well as a Knabe Model B grand piano with Ampico B reproducer, and a Steinway Model A grand piano. This bequest greatly enhances and complements the library’s existing holdings of historical sound recordings in the Ozier Sound Archive, and will contribute educationally to UNT’s College of Music in the areas of American musical and cultural history, the history of sound recordings, piano technology, jazz, popular music, and performance practice. An inventory and finding aid for the piano rolls is currently being prepared and will be available from the UNT Music Library’s Web site.

Mark McKnight
University of North Texas Music Library

The Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library of the University of California at Berkeley has acquired an important manuscript source for chorale settings by Johann Sebastian Bach. The manuscript collection of 126 four-part chorales in the hand of Bach’s last pupil, Christian Friedrich Penzel (1737–1801), is dated 26 November 1780, and may have been copied from earlier sources, now lost. As there are no surviving autographs of J. S. Bach’s chorale harmonizations, scribal copies assume the status of primary sources. Three of these—identified as Z1, Z6, and Z7 in volume four of the Bach Compendium—are the main sources for the chorales. Z1 and Z6 are in libraries in Leipzig and Berlin, respectively, and Z7, formerly in private hands, is the Penzel manuscript now at Berkeley. Of the 126 four-part chorales in the Penzel manuscript, thirty are not found in the other two main sources, and were published for the...