The archive and the web

Over the past thirty years, more musical sketches have been (re)discovered, gathered together in archives and libraries, studied, and published in transcription and facsimile than ever before. They are even turning up in mainstream music history textbooks. The casual observer can be left with the impression of vast quantities of easily available manuscript material coherently organised and safely stored under lock and key. Projects to digitalise autograph collections and make them available online have become so numerous that they are hardly considered newsworthy: see for example the recently completed project undertaken by the Bibliothèque nationale de France to place its collection of Beethoven autographs online. Though not overly large, this collection is significant because, out of approximately 120 autographs, 84 are identified as sketches.

What kind of information can we obtain from these newly available sources? In early 2013, twenty-one pages of Franz Waxman’s sketches and drafts in pencil for the short score of the Rebecca Suite, an adaption for the radio of music written for the film Rebecca, were posted online. As a result, the material was cited and two pages of sketches were reproduced in an undergraduate term paper on the composer. Clearly the twenty-one pages do tell something about Waxman’s working methods, but the information they are able to deliver is severely circumscribed if the data is limited to what we can see on these pages. An exhaustive reading of the information contained in them requires that they be contextualised with other sources. Waxman’s autographs are preserved in the Franz Waxman Papers held by Syracuse University Libraries. His scores for motion pictures, as well as for radio and television productions, constitute the bulk of this collection and include a substantial number of autographs and manuscripts pertaining to the music written for Rebecca. Set within this context, the twenty-one pages would have a lot to tell.