Introduction to the 2016 Exhibition
The Spalding Reading Room, adjacent to the Loeb Music Library's exhibition space.
Treasures of the Last Ten Years: A 60th Anniversary Celebration
The dedication of the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library on December 8, 1956 was marked by three days of concerts and exhibits of “musical rariora and memorabilia at Harvard.” In the spirit of that first celebration, we are commemorating our 60th birthday by sharing some of the library's notable acquisitions from the last decade. These scores, books, recordings, and ephemera, drawn from the special collections of the Loeb Music Library and the Archive of World Music, reflect our commitment to the wide-ranging academic and musical interests of the library’s users.
Within these five cases, you will find items dating from the 18th century to the 21st, used by performers, theoreticians, scholars, and audiences: composer and copyists’ manuscripts, scores annotated by their performers and conductors, concert programs and ephemera, theoretical texts, and commercial and field recordings. Several have Harvard connections: a commission by the Harvard Jazz Bands; items from the archives of Harvard alumni Fred Ho and Ruben Bladés. Field recordings from the Archive of World Music, made in Yakutia and Iran, are precious physical objects, but have also been digitized and shared with listeners around the world. Film scripts, hiphop albums, and a set of underground recordings from Boston's early 80s punk scene remind us of the continual expansion of Harvard's musical curriculum and our own collections.
Given a collection as rich in musical sources as this one, the greatest challenge in curating this exhibit was deciding what not to include: I could have assembled another dozen exhibits from the library’s recent acquisitions, each as varied and full of spectacular and curious rarities as this one. I have resisted my initial urge to arrange the cases chronologically or thematically; instead, I invite you to find points of intersection, and to use our last ten years to help us create the narrative of the next.
Kerry Carwile Masteller, curator