Private Music Collections: Catalogs and Cognate Literature (review)

Private Music Collections: Catalogs and Cognate Literature. By James B. Coover. (Detroit Studies in Music Bibliography, 8.) Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 2001.[xxxviii, 718 p. ISBN 0-89990-099-2. $75.] Index.

Music historians have long had an interest in the study of the provenance of unique or rare materials. This curiosity has been coupled in more recent times with an interest in how music has been disseminated and how individual collectors and libraries have assembled materials into collections.

For Jim Coover this investigation has been a labor of love. He has gathered the data for this book over a period of forty years, harvesting his information in many byways; he has been a keen student of the history of music in auctions, particularly English; and he has studied and drawn from the work of his predecessors in this corner of the discipline. He has also struggled with the difficulties of defining a "collection"; should it be merely an amassing of material or must it have rare materials or a strong focus?

Auction sale catalogs can be very treacherous when used as sources revealing the content and extent of a collection. All too often they do not cite all the materials from the library of the named consignor. In addition, they often have contents added to them whose consignors are not revealed in the catalog. In some instances it has been possible to learn where this additional material has come from, as some auctioneers have kept records which are now available to scholars. In this regard, I think especially of the "Index to the Series of Puttick & Simpson Catalogues" which the firm supplied to the British Museum in 1871 when the British Museum (now British Library) acquired the run of Puttick and Simpson sale catalogs from the firm and "The Messrs. Hodgson & Co. List of Sales by Auction from 9 Sept. 1807 to 12 December 1901," now at the British Library (pressmark: S.C. Hodgson [a]). The catalogs in the muniments room of Christie's can also reveal additional consignors. Even such documents do not show which items belonged to whom and they may not name all of the consignors in any given sale. The practice of salting, i.e., adding additional materials from unknown sources to a sale, has been recently described in "English Book Sale Catalogues as Bibliographical Evidence: Methodological Considerations Illustrated by a Case Study in the Provenance and Distribution of Dudsley's Collection of Poems, 1750-1795" by Michael Suarez in The Library (6th ser., vol. 21, no. 4 [December 1999], 321-60). Music scholars need to do some similar sleuthing in music auction sales.

Given the luxurious size of Coover's book, one might expect it to be the latest word on this topic. Coover set his cutoff date at 1995, which precedes the appearance of the new editions of both Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart with its lengthy list of "Privat Musiksammlungen" appended to the end of Gertraut Haberkamp's article, "Musikbibliotheken und Archive" (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1994-, Sachteil 6: 1095-1156; hereafter MGG2) and the unsigned revision of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians article "Collections (Private)" (New York: Grove, 2001, 28: 5-39; hereafter NGD2). This latter is based on that originally constructed by one of the great pioneers in this pursuit, Otto Albrecht. Even with the 1995 cutoff date, it is puzzling that so many collections described by Albrecht are not included in Coover's list.

Each of these lists has a different feel to it. In general, the MGG2 list (the hardest to use of all of these) has the least amount of information about each collection, but it does include collections that are in neither Coover nor NGD2. In fact, those in search of information about such collections will need to bear in mind that all of these sources should be consulted, as any might yield information about a collection they seek. For, unfortunately, each has made different decisions about...