Notes for NOTES

The Pierpont Morgan Library (J. Rigbie Turner, Mary Flagler Cary Curator of Music Manuscripts and Books) recently acquired two printed scores of music by Johann Sebastian Bach. While there can be no argument about the excellence of the music they hold, what the later score bears striking witness to is debated to this day.

In 1731, Bach published the Six Partitas for Harpsichord, BWV 825- 830. They were published by Bach himself and bear the proud designation "Opus 1." (They were not, however, his first published work.) The copy of this 1731 edition acquired by the Morgan Library is sadly incomplete, containing all or parts of seventeen movements from five partitas (there is no music from Partita no. 1, BWV 825). Curiously, pages that are not part of complete movements have been carefully crossed out in black ink, but several pages containing complete movements have also been crossed out. The complete movements are: Partita no. 2, BWV 826, Allemande; Partita no. 3, BWV 827, Scherzo and Gigue; Partita no. 4, BWV 828, Menuet and Gigue; and Partita no. 6, BWV 830, Toccata, Allemanda, and Air. There is a good deal of extremely faint writing on the title page that can only partially be read, even under ultraviolet light; efforts continue to decipher this text, which may shed light on the provenance of the score and help explain its disfigured state. It was once in the celebrated collection of Werner Wolffheim that was auctioned in Berlin in 1928 and 1929.

It is well known that Glenn Gould left the concert stage in 1964 and spent much of the remainder of his short life in radio, television, and recording studios. He recorded Bach's Goldberg Variations twice, in 1955 and 1981. For the latter session (held in the same studio where Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue in 1959), he recorded the complete work three or four times, and then recorded takes and retakes of individual passages. He returned to Canada and, in a copy of the C. F. Peters edition of the variations, indicated which takes or parts of takes were to make up the final recording. These instructions were then sent to Columbia in New York, where the recording was assembled from hundreds of snippets of tape. The Morgan Library has acquired Gould's copy of this score, which shows graphically what many have long alleged, namely that his recordings were a product as much of the editing room as the recording studio. Nearly every page is marked up, and some-- notably in the sublime Variation 25--are now almost illegible owing to the thick overlay of Gould's black felt-tip instructions. Moreover, Gould's notes refer only to such editing: there is not one indication of, for example, tempo, phrasing, or dynamics, all of which were largely fixed in his head and fingers.

The chance to acquire both music by Bach published during his lifetime and a score annotated by one of his most renowned interpreters--documents separated by two and one-half centuries--may come along but once in a curator's lifetime; that these scores arrived at the Morgan Library within the space of a fortnight is remarkable indeed.

Near the end of June 2001, the Brandeis University Libraries (Darwin Scott, Creative Arts Librarian) acquired a copy of a rare theoretical work by the composer, organist, and monk Adriano Banchieri (1568-1634) for the Walter F. and Alice Gorham Collection of Early Music Imprints, 1501-1650, housed in the library's Department of Special Collections. Full descriptions of the holdings are at www.library.brandeis.edu/ SpecialCollections/Collections/gorham.html (accessed 8 September 2001):

Adriano Banchieri. L'organo suonarino . . . entro il quale si pratica quanto occorrer suole à gli suonatori d'organo, per alternar corista à gli canti fermi in tutte le feste, & solennità dell'anno. . . . Opera terza decima. In Venetia: appresso Ricciardo Amadino, 1605. RISM B/VI, p. 117.

Copies of the first edition of Banchieri's landmark treatise on playing from a figured bass and accompanying liturgical chant are extremely rare (subsequent editions were...