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 My music below.

Recently, I added reprints of selected articles from The Musical Courier under the heading Organological works. The Musical Courier published weekly editions between 1880 and 1962. In its time, it was arguably the premier newspaper/periodical for the U.S. music industry.

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 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.