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.

Gmail, why must you taunt me?

... by putting this link at the top of my mailbox periodically when opening emails that touch upon music...

Mozart Opera Manuscripts - mozart.packhum.org - Full-size,
Color Facsimiles of Mozart's Autograph Manuscripts

At $175 per set on the linked site (the price on Barenreiter.com is 248 Euro), the offer brings on the "I have to buy it, it's on sale" mentality that one can be infected by at the Barney's Warehouse sale when coming upon a $400 t-shirt that's been marked down to $250...