MUSIC AND MUSICAL RESEARCH FROM

Peter H. Adams

 

An Annotated Index of Selected Articles from The Musical Courier 1880-1940

has been published by Scarecrow Press. This two volume reference book

will greatly reduce time locating articles. No other index exists for

The Musical Courier for the time covered in my index.

 

This massive cross-referenced index is the result of 20 years of research by me. The index is over 1600 pages of text. The purpose of this index is to assist researchers search through the wealth of articles that appeared within this weekly trade publication for the U.S. music industry. In its day, The Musical Courier was arguably the most significant music trade publication for both the musical instrument industry and the performing arts fields within the U.S. However, given that I was working on my own, I could not index every article. Therefore, I concentrated on what I knew best: the musical instrument industry. The U.S. keyboard industry is especially well represented in this index. Band and orchestral instruments are not as well represented in MC. I concluded my index in 1940 even though MC continued publication until around 1962. By 1940, few articles appeared in MC about the musical instrument industry.

Researchers looking for articles about performers will find this index of some use, especially  If the performer played an unusual instrument (such as a viola d'amore). If the performer was a vocalist, I did not actively index articles about him/her. I actively indexed articles about John Philip Sousa, obituaries about composers, women in the industry, African Americans, and articles discussing the worsening situation in Nazi Europe.

JUST COMPLETED!

I can now offer a complete scan of August Pollmann's Catalogue K. 1894-'95. NY, NY: August Pollmann; 1894, 368 p. More detailed information about this catalog can be found elsewhere on this website. The massive catalog covers almost all European musical instruments, except for piano and organs. It is a wholesale catalog of great importance. Most of the instruments were imported from unidentified European manufacturers. To order a copy, look for my email address under my resume. The price of the CD is $25. Send me an email and I will give you further information.  I have to do this to avoid receiving mountains of spam. I ship only to the U.S. and Canada.

 

I am now in the process of creating a new edition of the Braye Brown manuscript for solo lyra viol. This is the latest in my on-going effort to assemble an exhaustive, if not complete set of all works for solo lyra viol. Currently, I have completed the Playford editions, Marsh, Mansell, Boedlian F575, and the Leycester manuscript. My goal is to offer a CD of the music in PDF format of all solo lyra viol so that performers and researchers will have a single source for this rare material. By offering this music on CD, I can reduce costs and produce collections more quickly. If paper copies are desired, please look for the Boulder Early Music Shop's website. I have a number of works for sale through this shop.

The following list of trade catalogs is of importance to musical instrument researchers. This bibliography offers a very wide selection of reprints, many not available in museum or library collections. To reduce repetition, I have not included catalogs from Norberg in my list. Click on the following link to access his extensive collection of reprints.

FRANK NORBERG'S LIST OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENT TRADE CATALOGS AND RELATED MATERIAL

Robert Gellerman has compiled a list of trade catalogs for reed organs. Mr. Gellerman is one of the most respected authors of the U.S. reed organ industry. I have yet to correlate his list with mine. Yet, he clearly relied upon my list when compiling his list. So, expect some duplication. His list can be found at the internet address below. Cut and paste this address into your internet browser to get to the list.

http://81.59.183.155/Gellerman/ListAE.htm

 

Search for:

 

 

 
 

Welcome,

The purpose of this website is to make available excerpts of music that I publish and research material for persons interested in European and U.S. musical instrument history. Some of the music listed on this website, I've edited, while other works I've composed. Because of size restrictions, I cannot provide complete MIDI files for longer works, and I cannot presently provide MIDI files for all of the works listed on this website. Please go to the "My music" below. For viola da gamba music, please go to the "Viola da gamba music" link. Both links are toward the bottom of this page.

This website includes a bibliography of musical instrument trade catalogs printed around 1930 or earlier. This list is a work in progress and contributions are encouraged especially for non-U.S. companies. Citations are organized by company or, rarely, by author. The goal here is to assemble as complete a list as possible of antique musical instrument trade catalogs. For owners of trade catalog who wish to be cited on this website, my contact information is available on my resume, found on this website. I had to remove my email address to avoid spammers. Click here to order the entire list.

I invite viewers to check out Horn-u-copia.net to see my on-going efforts to document 19th and early 20th century musical instrument trade names. I also invite viewers to check out BEMS.com to order sheet music of my viola da gamba music. For sheet music of non-viola da gamba music, click on Buy music below.

Recently, I added reprints of selected articles from The Musical Courier under the heading Organological works.

FINDING COPIES OF TRADE CATALOGS

If you are trying to find antique musical instrument trade catalogs listed on this website, here are a few suggestions:

I have tried to list the owners of all trade catalogs. When I found this information, I appended it at the end of a citation. Any citation that ends with an OCLC number can be searched by bringing that number to a reference librarian who has access to the OCLC database. This database is not available to the general public. This bibliographic database indicates which library or museum owns the original catalog, and may well include catalogs not listed here.

Any catalog owned by the Library of Congress can be purchased as either a photocopy or microfilm by contacting the Photoduplication service of the Library of Congress (LOC.gov). You will need to dig around the website to find the link to the Photodup service. You might find it less expensive to contact the Music Division directly and ask for a list of independent researchers who can photocopy the catalog, assuming that the catalog is not too fragile.

All catalogs whose citation ends with “Citation generated from online description” are owned by someone unknown to me. I found these citations by searching eBay and other websites. I posted these citations partly in hopes that the owners or library patrons would contact me so that they could share catalog with others.

Any catalog whose citation includes the phrase "Author's collection" is in my library and photocopies of those few catalogs can be purchased by contacting me. My contact information is available on my resume.

Music composed and/or edited by Peter H. Adams and articles about music or musical instruments written by Peter H. Adams.

 
Resources on this website

 

 
Musical instrument trade catalogs. Company name beginning with:

A    B   C    D    E    F    G  

H    I     J    K    L    M   N

O   PQ   R S   T  UV  W  XYZ

 

 

 

Buy Trade catalog printout or add data to this list   Trade catalog introduction

Buy music

 

Solo for Lyra Viol, Number 94 by Peter H. Adams (3 pages)