Sunday, September 27, 2009

Gems from the Library of Congress -- accessible online!

The Library of Congress has made high res scans of some notable items in its collection available online!

From the Fritz Kreisler collection: manuscripts of Brahms' Violin Concerto and the Chausson Poeme

From the Copland collection: first rough sketches of Appalachian Spring & also a continuity draft; sketch/draft of the Clarinet Concerto

These holdings are bit scattered and don't always come up in the search engine as might be expected. I'll do some more digging when I have some free time.

Sadly, it doesn't look like they have the manuscript of Barber's Medea's Dance of Vengeance available online as of yet -- I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon studying it while researching my thesis awhile back; it's one of the more interesting final manuscripts/facsimiles I've seen given the amount of revisions/recompositions that can be observed based on Barber's erasures and cross-outs.

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