The New York Library Performing Arts in America 1875 -1923
The website for Performing Arts in New York City’s Lincoln Center contains 16,000 items in its database. One segment of the site is the music archive. Material ranges from the Sophie Tucker and Benny Goodman Collections to the Bruno Walter and Rosa Ponsell Collections. A section on Piano Music contains images of popular sheet music and includes music by early twentieth century composers such as Irving Berlin, George M. Cohan, Eubie Blake, Rudolf Friml, George Gershwin, W. C. Handy, James P. Johnson, and Jerome Kern. An unqualified search on the piano music collection retrieves 671 items. Some music is from operettas and many songs were introduced by the Ziegfeld follies. The collection includes famous tunes such as Carry Me Back to Old Virginny (now politically incorrect), and Over There.
My project would be about popular music of the early twentieth century. If I must constrain my project to writing, I would use the piano sheet music of the collection at the New York Library as a starting point.
The vast majority of items are love songs, the eternal musical subject. I would choose to focus my project on popular music that does not deal with romance. These songs are more likely to represent the era and have historical interest. For example, there are a number of songs about the Titanic including The Titanic is Doomed and Sinking. The Hawaiian Annexation March celebrates the new acquisition. Race and ethnicity seem to be eternal American subjects. Eubie Blake, an African-American composer, wrote If You’ve Never Been Vamped by a Brown Skin and another African-American, Ernest Hogan, wrote All Coons Look Alike to Me. Eddie Cantor’s name was associated with Make It Snappy, My Yiddisha Mammy. There are songs featuring the Irish; Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly and the Chinese; Mamma's China Twins.
Transportation inspired composers; In An Air-Ship Built For Two, The Trolley Car Swing, The Subway Glide and He'd Have To Get Under - Get Out and Get Under: To Fix Up His Automobile. Politics was the subject of songs; Mack and Teddy, about McKinley and Roosevelt, and Would You Rather be a Tammany Tiger than a Teddy Bear? World War I inspired many songs: Sister Susie's Sewing Shirts For Soldiers, I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier and Those Draftin' Blues There are songs about firemen The Man Who Fights The Fire and baseball, Make a Noise Like a Fan, but nothing about policemen or basketball.
The library presents an image of each page of the sheet music. For Irving Berlin’s Dream On, Little Soldier Boy, there are 6 images; 1 for the front and back cover and one for 4 pages. Each image is presented as a thumbnail and can be enlarged. The catalog entry can be displayed and includes a description, title, publisher, year published, first line of the verse and first line of the refrain. A subject category may include the author, and whether the song is from a musical review or show. There is a link to related information in the sheet music collection.
The basic collection is by no means comprehensive and could not be the only source for a print project on American popular music. There is no overview or background information about the music, the composer or the historical setting. The entire collection can be listed but the user must scan through it page by page to get to the end of the list. There is a search capability. Unfortunately, there are no downloadable files.
Of course, the best things in life are not free. A print, TIFF, or JPEG file of an image costs $30.00. The New York Library charges a ‘license fee’ although it is a little difficult to be sure exactly how the fee works. It appears an educational institution would pay $100 annually to place one of the Library images on a web site.
The site has useful links to other music sites including a number of sites from which music can be downloaded. On a personal note, my mother sang many of these songs to me and I thought I would never hear about them again.
In thinking about how research and writing will be different in the digital era and this collection, it is obvious to me that this project should be a web site or a documentary rather than a ‘historical research and writing project’ so that original and contemporary (if there is no original) performances could be included.
There are a number of relevant urls.
http://www.nypl.org/digital/performingarts.htm New York Public Library Performing Arts Site
http://digital.nypl.org/lpa/nypl/lpa_home4.html Treasures of the Performing Arts Digital Library Collection
The screen for browsing the Collection by category: http://digital.nypl.org/lpa/lpa_browse.cfm