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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
The library of University of Wales Lampeter, one of the oldest universities in Britain, collected many rare items, including music, during the first thirty years after its foundation in 1822. This music collection has never really been explored hitherto, and there are no printed references to it in the standard literature. The collection contains nearly 200 items, ranging from 1711 to the mid-nineteenth century but dating mainly from 1770–1820. Alongside the printed music are sixteen instrumental tutors and fifteen manuscripts. Judging by names written on some of the items, the collection was assembled piecemeal from various private collections. For nearly a third of the items, no exact match has yet been found elsewhere. These include previously unknown editions of music by Arne, Mozart and others; previously unknown works by composers such as William Burnett, Francis Linley and William Howgill; and even possibly unknown composers such as J. Gray and Henry Schroeder.
I wish to express my profound gratitude to the library staff, and in particular David Selwyn, Peter Hopkins, Caroline Pilcher, Liesa Martin and Carol Dery, for confirming to me the existence of this music collection, for providing me with every assistance in examining it, and for answering numerous questions about it and about individual items within it. I should also like to thank Peter Ward Jones for reading through a draft of this article and inventory and making many valuable suggestions. The present study concerns only the music items I was able to examine personally. It is possible that a few more were somehow overlooked. The library also has a good collection of printed libretti for musical works performed in London theatres during the same period. These have been catalogued previously by the staff of the library and can be traced through its online catalogue.
2 2 vols., ed. Edith Schnapper (London, 1957). BUC has more thorough coverage of music from just before 1801 than RISM and also includes anonymous items, though it is confined to libraries in the British Isles whereas RISM has world-wide coverage.Google Scholar
3 See Warburton, Ernest, The Collected Works of Johann Christian Bach 1735–1782, xlviii/2 (New York, 1999), 233–4.Google Scholar
4 Ibid.Google Scholar
5 Rita Benton, Ignace Pleyel: A Thematic Catalogue of his Compositions (New York, 1977).Google Scholar
6 See Donald M. McCorkle, ‘John Antes “American Dilettante”‘, Musical Quarterly, 42 (1956), 486–99, for a full account of the composer and this work.Google Scholar
7 See Girdham, Jane, ‘Lodoiska (i)‘, Grove Music Online, ed. Laura Macy (accessed 9 Dec. 2005), <http://www.grovemusic.com>. There is also a Lodoiska by Simon Mayr (1796)..+There+is+also+a+Lodoiska+by+Simon+Mayr+(1796).>Google Scholar
8 See Charles Humphries and William C. Smith, Music Publishing in the British Isles: From the Beginning until the Middle of the Nineteenth Century, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1970), 290 and 381.Google Scholar
9 A brief comment in The Musical Times, 73 (1932), 730, is probably the most recent reference to him in the periodical literature.Google Scholar
10 Information kindly supplied by Paul Banks, who with Jenny Nex and Lance Whitehead is compiling a database of London musicians, 1750–1800, from mainly non-musical sources.Google Scholar
11 'Information kindly supplied by Paul Banks from the London music database.Google Scholar
12 Music Publishing in the British Isles (see note 8). This lists almost all music publishers of the period, and so Waring's absence is significant. Waring is, however, included in John A. Parkinson, Victorian Music Publishers: An Annotated List (Watten MI, 1990), 280, which mentions only the Rossini overture amongst Waring's publications. The British Library dates this as c.1830, but Parkinson's date of c.1820 seems more probable, since it is much closer to the Henry Smith volume in Lampeter, which bears the watermark date 1819.Google Scholar
13 See Thomas E. Warner, An Annotated Bibliography of Woodwind Instruction Books, 1600–1830 (Detroit, 1967), no. 205.Google Scholar
14 George Smart senior died in 1818, not c.1805 as sometimes stated: see Maclean, Charles, ‘Sir George Smart, Musician-Diarist’, Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, x/2 (1909), 287–307.Google Scholar
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16 See Medforth, Martin, ‘The Valentines of Leicester: A Reappraisal of an Eighteenth-Century Musical Family’, The Musical Times, 122(1981), 812–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar