Collector or Curator

[Erik]

(b Ilmajoki, Feb 2, 1911; d Tampere, Sept 2, 1996). Finnish musicologist and folklorist. He studied at Helsinki Conservatory (1929–36) and under A.O. Väisänen at Helsinki University (MA 1942), where he took the doctorate in 1956 with a dissertation on the polska in Finland. His extended fieldwork on folk music and instruments in Finland and Sweden resulted in a collection of over 10,000 melodies (now in Tampere University library). After teaching music at Helsinki Conservatory (1951–7) and lecturing at Helsinki University (1957–62) he held a research grant from the State Humanities Committee (1962–75). He was professor of folk research at Tampere University (1975–7) and director of the university folk research institute (1977–81). He was active in many folk music research organizations. A list of his writings is included in the Festschrift Kentältä kentälle: juhlakirja Erkki Ala-Könnin 70 - vuotispäiväksi 2.2.1981...

(b S Antônio de Jesus, Bahia, Dec 6, 1895; d Rio de Janeiro, Jan 25, 1981). Brazilian musicologist and folklorist. After graduating from law school in Rio de Janeiro, he set out to be an author, journalist and critic. His first writings dealt with criticism and philosophy, but he also wrote important works on music, including the well-known História da música brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1926). The second edition (1942) contains over 150 musical examples and gives a chronological treatment to the art-music tradition as well as a detailed account of Brazilian folk and popular music. This was the standard Brazilian reference book for many years.

From 1947 Almeida turned his attention to folk music and folklore studies. For many years he was a member of the executive board of the International Folk Music Council. He was a founder-member of the Brazilian Academy of Music and chief of the information service of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations. He was also the first chairman of the Comissão Nacional de Folclore, created in ...

(Paoliello de)

(b Varginha, Dec 6, 1911; d São Paolo, Feb 23, 1984). Brazilian folklorist and musicologist. At the São Paulo Conservatory of Drama and Music, Mário de Andrade directed her towards the study of Brazilian folk and popular musical traditions; she also studied ethnography and folklore with Dina Lévi-Strauss (1937). Her main areas of activity were sound archive organization, ethnomusicology and folklore: she organized and directed the Discoteca Pública Municipal de São Paulo from its foundation in 1935 until her retirement in 1968. The collection of historical recordings, the Discoteca Oneyda Alvarenga of the Centro Cultural São Paulo, was named after her to honour her contributions to the field. She was a founder-member of the Brazilian Academy of Music, a member of the Conselho Nacional de Folclore of the Ministry of Education and of the executive committee of the International Association of Music Libraries, a corresponding member of the International Folk Music Council, and a member of the Conselho de Música Popular Brasileira, do Museu da Imagem e do Som established at Rio de Janeiro. Her publications include editions of the volumes on music in the complete works of Mário de Andrade....

(b Kranz, Russia, July 7, 1896; d Trondheim, Norway, Nov 19, 1963). Norwegian collector of musical instruments and founder and director of the Ringve Museum in Trondheim. An amateur singer, she had no formal musical training, but three siblings became professional musicians. In 1920 Victoria (née Rostin) married Christian Anker Bachke (1873–1946), the last private owner of Ringve manor outside Trondheim. Together they made plans for two museums: one for the history of the manor and its inhabitants, another for musical instruments, which they had begun to collect. Upon Christian’s death, his will established a foundation encompassing the land and buildings, and Mrs Bachke began serious collecting to prepare the museum, which opened in 1952 in the manor’s main building, a well-kept example of historicist architecture and interior decoration from the second half of the 19th century. Her main gifts for this task were enthusiasm and useful contacts, notably in France and Italy. One of her advisors was the Danish musicologist and organologist Godtfred Skjerne. Before she died, Mrs Bachke had collected about 1000 instruments of European and non-Western classical and folk traditions. She desired that the instruments be playable. Today the Ringve Museum has a national responsibility for collections of musical instruments in Norway, with educational and scientific staff and a conservation workshop. It remains a foundation under the administration of Museene i Sør-Trøndelag AS....

(b Széplak, April 7, 1799; d Mainz, Oct 4, 1854). Hungarian composer, theatre director and collector of folksongs. He came from a Hungarian noble family and embarked on a career in the civil service; it was not until 1829 that he first appeared on the musical scene, when he and Lajos Menner founded and became directors of the first Pest singing school. Bartay was one of the first to publish Hungarian folksongs: in 1833–4 he published a two-volume collection Eredeti nép-dalok klavir-kísérettel (‘Original folksongs with piano accompaniment’), and in 1834 he brought out one of the earliest Hungarian books on music theory, Magyar Apollo.

In 1837 his comic opera Aurelia, oder Das Weib am Konradstein had its première at the Pest Town Theatre, and in 1839 his comic opera Csel (‘Ruse’) was first performed at the Pest Hungarian Theatre as Ferenc Erkel's benefit performance (Erkel later composed variations on themes from this opera). Bartay was director of the National Theatre in ...

(b Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey, UK, March 14, 1940). English dealer in musical instruments, rare music books, music iconography, and related ephemera. After leaving school at the age of 16, Bingham trained as a quantity surveyor and opened his own surveying business in 1961, about the same time he began dealing in general antiques. He had a partnership in a musical instrument business for one year until 1966, when he opened his first independent shop at 247 Kings Road, London. Through extensive travels Bingham obtains and sells both Western and non-Western instruments. He specializes in assembling collections of European woodwinds, illustrating their development also with patent documents, methods, and other materials. His shop at 11 Pond Street features collections of metronomes, oil paintings of musicians, trade cards, tuning forks, and trade catalogues in addition to instruments. Major museum clients include the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the National Music Museum (South Dakota), the Musée de la Musique (Paris), and the Musashino Academia Musicae (Tokyo), while private collectors have included Joe R. Utley, Nicholas Shackleton, and H. Iino. Bingham has also published several important works on musical instruments, such as William Waterhouse’s ...

(b Lugoj, 20 March/April 2, 1877; d Bucharest, Dec 19, 1968). Romanian composer, folklorist and administrator. He studied privately in Lugoj with Josif Czegka and Sofia Vlad-Rădulescu, in Blaj with Iacob Mureşianu, in Sibiu with Hermann Kirchner and in Braşov with Paul Richter. Extremely active in the musical life of Romania, he participated in the foundation of the Romanian Opera, the Romanian National Theatre (1919), the Dima Conservatory, Cluj (1920), the Society of Romanian Composers (1920) and the Astra Conservatory, Braşov (1928); during this period he directed the opera houses in Cluj and Bucharest. He collected more than 2000 folksongs, recorded on 214 cylinders, and made use of them in his ten books of Doine şi cântece poporale (‘Doinas and Other Folksongs’) and in eight books of instrumental pieces published as Jocuri populare româneşti (‘Romanian Folkdances’); he also published a scholarly collection, ...

(b nr Warsaw, Poland, Dec 25, 1899; d Atlantic City, NJ, Jan 27, 1977). American collector of and dealer in sheet music, born in Poland. He immigrated to the USA in 1906. For some 40 years until his retirement in 1965 he worked as a waiter in Philadelphia. While operating a small bookshop, from 1929 to 1931, he developed a passionate interest in early American popular sheet music; he eventually collected and distributed approximately 500,000 sheets of the late 18th to late 19th centuries. Much of the music was purchased by universities and municipal libraries, many of which relied on Dichter as altant—from 1942 to 1945 he served the Free Library of Philadelphia in this capacity. With Elliott Shapiro, a sheet-music publisher, he wrote Early American Sheet Music: its Lure and its Lore, 1768–1889 (1941, rev. 1977 as Handbook of Early American Sheet Music, 1768–1889), still regarded as the leading reference work of its kind. Under his own name or that of Musical Americana he issued several collections of sheet music and other important publications, including J.J. Fuld’s ...

(Pio Francesco Antonio Maria)

(b Genoa, April 27, 1717; d Padua, Oct 15, 1794). Italian diplomat, theatre director, librettist and art collector, and one of the principal catalysts of reform in 18th-century opera and ballet. The francophilia that coloured nearly all Durazzo's theatrical endeavours was largely the result of his birth into a noble Genoese family (of Albanian origin) with a long history of commercial and political dealings with France. The Durazzos (who produced several doges, including Giacomo's older brother Marcello) were active in Genoa's theatrical life, notably as proprietors of the Teatro del Falcone. Following his inscription into the nobility in 1744, Giacomo was entrusted with several commercial and diplomatic missions to France, during one of which, in 1748, he and his compatriot Agostino Lomellini conceived a plan to rework Quinault and Lully's Armide as an Italian opera on reformed principles. As versified by Migliavacca and set by Traetta, this project was realized in Vienna in ...

(Aloysius )

(b Takoma Park, MD, Feb 28, 1939; d Salem, OR, Feb 22, 2001). American guitarist, folklorist, and record producer. As a teenager, Fahey’s early interest in country music was expanded to include bluegrass and country-blues due to a friendship with richard Spottswood , later a noted folk and ethnic music scholar. With Spottswood and famed collector Joe Bussard, Fahey sought out pre-war 78 r.p.m. records. After taking up the guitar, Fahey’s made his first recordings for Bussard’s private Fonotone label on 78 r.p.m. shellac discs, some of which Fahey claimed to have slipped into boxes of more “authentic,” vintage records at flea markets. In 1959 Fahey founded Takoma Records to distribute his own recordings, beginning with the LP Blind Joe Death; his liner notes also frequently mock the language of then-contemporary blues scholars, the very people he had hoped to fool with the Fonotone 78s.

Despite his sense of humor Fahey was a serious student of American vernacular music. He travelled long distances to find Bukka White and Skip James in the Mississippi Delta in the early 1960s; he relates these events in the memoir, ...

(b Canton, CT, Nov 11, 1833; d Brooklyn, NY, May 17, 1896).

American instrument dealer and collector. He was trained as a clock maker in Bristol, CT, and later worked as a machinist in Hartford, CT, before moving to New York in January 1852. The following year he became a clerk at Rohé & Leavitt, a firm of dealers at 31 Maiden Lane; on the partners’ retirement in 1863, Foote bought the company and continued it under his own name. Except for a short-lived partnership with John F. Stratton in 1865, as Stratton & Foote, “importer and manufacturer” of brass band instruments, he was sole manager for the next 30 years, dealing in string, woodwind, and brass instruments and serving as the sole American agent for several French manufacturers, including the firm of Courtois. A Chicago “branch house” of his business, under the management of W.H. Foote, was still in operation at the time of his death. An obituary in the ...

[V]

(b New York, Jan 15, 1922; d Poughkeepsie, NY, Feb 16, 1983). American band enthusiast and philanthropist. After attending Pomona College, Claremont, California (BA 1943), he owned and managed an architectural woodworking firm in Poughkeepsie for over 20 years, and later a chain of bowling alleys. An amateur euphonium player, he amassed an encyclopedic collection of band scores, rivaling that of the US Marine band. In conjunction with Commander Donald Stauffer, director of the US Navy Band, he issued a series of 15 recordings made by the band entitled Heritage of the March. Each of these records presented unavailable marches by an American composer on one side, and a European composer on the other. Hoe then invited many American and European service, community, college, and high school bands to make recordings. He provided most of the music from his own collection, prepared liner notes and biographies, financed the recordings, and distributed them, free of charge, to schools, libraries, and radio stations. The initial ...

(bap. Aldersgate, London, Feb 26, 1724; d London, April 15, 1764). English amateur musician. ‘In his younger days he was a great beau’, said Hawkins, who is the chief source of information about Immyns. ‘He had been guilty of some indiscretions, which proved an effectual bar to success in his profession, and reduced him to the necessity of becoming a clerk to an attorney in the city’. He cultivated music assiduously, playing the flute, viola da gamba and harpsichord, and had a ‘cracked counter-tenor voice’. As a member of the Academy of Ancient Music, and as a student and copyist to Pepusch, he became familiar with much old music, which he preferred to that of his own day. In 1741 he founded the Madrigal Society, which began as a small group of mechanics and tradesmen experienced in psalmody, meeting at a tavern in Fleet Street. Immyns was ‘both their president and instructor’, and in preparation for the meetings he copied out some 200 madrigals and canons: his MS survives at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The music was confined to madrigals and other old music, by such composers as Ruffo, Lassus, Marenzio, Vecchi and Gesualdo; the English madrigalists were also explored. Immyns copied seven Palestrina motets for the society's use. From these modest beginnings sprang what is now the oldest musical association in existence....

(Viktorovich)

(b Moscow, 1944; d Moscow, 1996). Russian ethnomusicologist, collector, folklorist, ensemble director and actor. In the mid-1960s he studied the balalaika at the Gnesin Academy of Music. After undertaking fieldwork with his mother, who was an ethnographer, he became fascinated by folklore and founded an experimental ensemble which rehearsed for the first time on 16 September 1973 under his direction. The young participants did not learn the songs from memory but improvised them as though they had adopted them from traditional singers. Their songs were in the style of the drawn-out songs of the Don Cossacks, which have distinctive qualities of timbre, texture and structure. This was the beginning of a powerful revival of traditional songs in various regions of Russia. Pokrovsky's work encouraged others to establish ensembles for the purpose of performing regional traditional musics, and by the early 1980s thousands of such groups were playing traditional material based on his principles. Pokrovsky's ensemble and the revival movement won enormous popularity, which troubled the KGB. After ...

(b Passaic, NJ, July 20, 1934; d Washington, DC, July 2, 1994). American Musician, promoter, record producer, author, folklorist, and museum administrator. He grew up in Passaic, New Jersey, and it was at Swarthmore College that he was first exposed to folk music. He became one of the most important individuals behind the scenes during the folksong revival of the late 1950s. Rinzler performed on many instruments but was mainly associated with the mandolin. He was a onetime member of the urban bluegrass group the Greenbriar Boys.

Rinzler decided he would rather spend his time promoting the music of others than performing himself. He studied with Alan Lomax in England. Rinzler was appointed the chief talent scout for the Newport Folk Festival and was the person responsible for bringing traditional musicians such as Clarence Ashley, John Hurt, Maybelle Carter, and others to the festival. His fieldwork for the festival led to the rediscovery of Ashley and, in turn, the discovery of guitarist Doc Watson. He later managed Watson and Bill Monroe, organizing shows nationwide....

[Morris]

(b Scheinfeld, Bavaria, March 9, 1831; d New Haven, CT, Jan 21, 1912). American music dealer and collector of instruments. He moved to New Haven in 1854, and in 1856 to Savannah, Georgia. Shortly after the Civil War broke out he returned to New Haven, and his name appeared in the New Haven City Directory of 1862; by 1866 he was listed as a piano and music dealer. He formed the Mathushek Pianoforte Co. and later the M. Steinert & Sons Co., which sold pianos in Boston, Providence, New Haven and other cities. He was active in the musical life of New Haven where he was organist at St Thomas’s Church, taught music and formed a quartet in which he played cello. He later formed an orchestra which was to become the nucleus around which he founded the New Haven SO in 1894. This orchestra is the fourth oldest in the USA with a continuous existence. He became interested in antique musical instruments and the problems involved in playing them, and assembled a collection of considerable importance which was exhibited in Vienna in ...

(b Oxford, Feb 11, 1838; d Oxford, Jan 8, 1905). English music and instrument dealer and collector . He was the son of Charles Taphouse (c1816–1881), the founder of the firm of Charles Taphouse & Son Ltd, first established in 1857 at 10 Broad Street, Oxford, shortly after at 33 St Giles, and from 1859 at 3 Magdalen Street. Taphouse held various local appointments as organist, and made the music shop into a lively musical centre, having added a piano warehouse and several music rooms to the premises – one of which was for many years the home of the Oxford University Music Club. His collection of early music and instruments, which contained numerous rare and some unique printed and manuscript items (including the only contemporary source of the Violin Sonata by Henry Purcell), became one of the finest in the country. The library was sold by auction at Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge's in ...

(b Fontaneto d’Agogna, nr Novara, c1790; d Milan, Oct 1854). Italian violin dealer and collector . He was born of humble parents and is said to have trained as a carpenter, with violin playing as a hobby. He developed an interest in violins themselves, and with a natural talent both as a connoisseur and for business he began to acquire and resell some of the many fine instruments that were lying unused in the towns and villages of northern Italy. His first journey to Paris (in 1827) was evidently profitable for him and for the dealers there, who gave him every encouragement. In the same year he made his greatest coup, acquiring a number of violins from Count Cozio di Salabue, including a 1716 Stradivari in unused condition. This violin was Tarisio's treasure, and as he spoke of it on every visit to Paris but never actually brought it with him it came to be known as the ‘Messiah’....

[Tomás Parés, Juan]

(b Barcelona, April 6, 1896; d Barcelona, Nov 7, 1967). Catalan choral director, composer and folklorist. From the age of 11 he studied solfège with Lluís Millet, the piano with María R. Canals and Juan Battista Pellicer and composition with Antonio Nicolau and Enrique Morera at the Barcelona Municipal School of Music. In 1908 Millet gave him a place in the children’s section of Orfeó Català, and later he joined the main chorus, becoming one of its deputy directors in 1946. In the same year he joined the newly founded Instituto Español de Musicología under Anglès. As a prominent choral director he conducted such choirs as the Chor Infantil Mossèn Cinto, la Escuela Coral de Tarrasa, Parroquia de S Paciano and Orfeó Lluis Millet; he taught music and was organist at the Colegio de S Ignacio de los PP Jesuítas de Sarriá and for the student group Pere Vila. In the early 1950s he became director of the schola cantorum of the Barcelona Seminary. His main area of research was Spanish folk music; having participated in many field trips throughout Catalonia, Castile and León, he began to prepare a systematic study of regional Spanish cancioneros, which is fundamental to the study of Spanish traditional folk music. His compositions include several choral works, including ...

(b Potsdam, Germany, Nov 15, 1855; d Washington, DC, Nov 14, 1938). American collector of and dealer in keyboard instruments. His father, Christian, had a music business in Trenton, New Jersey, from c1858 to 1861, and in Washington from 1863 to 1868 and again in 1883; Worch and his brother Emil took this over in 1883, and after Emil’s death his widow and Hugo continued the business as Hugo Worch & Co. from 1884 until 1895. After 1895 the firm of Hugo Worch sold instruments (including pianos sold under the Worch name but manufactured elsewhere), sheet music, and, as tastes changed, phonographs, recordings, and radios. The firm went out of business in 1960 on the retirement of Hans Hugo Worch, who had bought it from his brother Carl and sister Paulina in 1954.

In the 1880s Worch began collecting keyboard instruments that showed the development of the American piano industry from the 1790s to ...