Digitizing the Musical Past

Vacant Chair

Among the music collections at the University of Virginia Library is a significant collection of nineteenth 19th century American imprint sheet music, currently housed in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library because of its fragile nature and format. This collection, currently estimated at more than 25,000 titles, contains a large and varied selection of popular and minstrel songs, along with a selection of rare American imprints of European classical music.

Sheet music and its accompanying illustrated cover art during the nineteenth century offer a rich source of social commentary, providing researchers with the societal norms and values of a particular time in history. Music sheets could be produced rapidly in response to an event or public interest and can— through their texts, music, images and advertisements, —be strong indicators of contemporary perspectives and public attitudes. The collection contains visual and textual depictions of African and Native Americans, and social commentary on such themes as politics, the Mexican war, tobacco and the railroad.

One of the most poignant images discovered so far in the collection is found on the cover of the song the Vacant Chair (see photograph), published by Davies and Sons in Richmond, Va. (1861).

Also of particular interest in the collection are some of the earliest examples of American popular music: parlor songs (by Stephen Foster and contemporaries) and minstrel songs. American minstrelsy, most prominent in the nineteenth century, was a theatrical presentation displaying elements of African American life in song, dance and speech. The genre was first performed by whites impersonating African Americans (blackface) but later was performed also by African Americans. Minstrel music greatly influenced many other genres including bluegrass, ragtime, blues and American popular music.

Thirty years ago, a portion of this collection was cataloged; the results appeared in the 1977 Computer Catalog of Nineteenth-Century American-Imprint Sheet Music, compiled by Lynn T. McRae. While the catalog was a remarkable accomplishment, it suffers from some severe limitations:  important information had to be truncated, names were not standardized, and images of the works could not be provided. Regardless, the value of this collection and its index was recognized by more than fifty North American libraries that purchased copies of the index on microfilm. Today’s technology allows for more complete descriptions of the music, illustrations, and texts, and allows for viewing and printing of the music itself.

With generous funding from the University of Virginia Arts Council, the Music Library has started digitizing, cataloging, and preserving a 5,000- title portion of this collection. By cataloging and making these images available online we will be allowing performers, musicologists, and other scholars from around the world to more easily perform and study this music. Initial cataloging work has begun to reveal the uniqueness of this collection:  approximately three- quarters of the titles cataloged so far are unique and were not previously accessible to scholars.  The first images from this collection will be available online in Summer 2008. The end product will be a searchable collection with color full screen images and printable PDFs to enable performance. The collection will be viewable from the Music Library homepage .