Schiedmayer fortepiano damage report

I just discovered the Waller Manuscripts Collection at the University of Uppsala Library. What a knockout! It is a beautifully catalogued digital archive of manuscripts from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, mainly related to the sciences, all donated to the Uppsala Library in 1955 by the famous collector Erik Waller.

You can view high-resolution scans of the manuscripts, and the search capabilities are excellent. The catalogers have identified people, places, objects, etc. associated with each manuscript, and you can search for these either in specific search fields or in a freetext search that searches the whole text of the catalogue. According to the website, there may be as many as 40,000 documents in the collection, and the project to catalogue and digitalize them is ongoing.

In a search for “pianoforte,” I came up with a letter of May 4, 1827, from a Professor Eschenmayer in Tübingen to the piano builder Johann Lorenz Schiedmayer in Stuttgart.

Book of illustrious mechanics

Browsing Google Book Search the other day, I came across The Book of Illustrious Mechanics by Edoard Foucaud, translated from the French by John Frost (1847). It’s available in full view and to be downloaded as a PDF.

Unfortunately, the PDF file is missing a number of pages at the beginning, including the latter part of the table of contents and the beginning pages of the introduction. This is a problem I’ve experienced more than once with Google Books. I guess that they are scanning and uploading such a large number of books that they inevitably have problems getting everything right–or maybe there are pages missing in the originals? In either case, it’s very frustrating.

Still, even an abridged version of Foucaud/Frost makes a great read.

Early keyboard symposium in Edinburgh

Luckily there is still (plenty of) time to submit a proposal for a paper or presentation to the symposium on early stringed keyboard instruments that will be held by the Edinburgh University Collection of Historical Musical Instruments at St. Cecilia’s Hall in Edinburgh on October 24-26. From the website:

Papers should be based on original research and discoveries, and may be on any topic relevant to the clavichord, harpsichord family or early piano.

The deadline for submissions is May 15.

Finding used books

Operating on the principle that the more you give, the more you get in return, I’m going to divulge my secret research weapon a great tip:

AddALL Book Search and Price Comparison

The AddALL site aggregates listings from amazon, abebooks, choosebooks, and many other sellers. You can search for new or used books, and easily compare various sellers’ prices–they’re all listed on a single page. Just a few features that make it great:

• The results page shows what country each vendor is in
• You can choose what currency the price is displayed in
• You can sort the results page by price, ascending or descending
• For used books, the results page shows detailed information about the condition of the book (to the extent the seller provides this info)
• If your search yields too many results, you can quickly weed out what you don’t want by choosing terms to exclude, or, if you see the title you want, clicking “match this title” to immediately exclude everything else

From AddALL, you click on the title of the book you’re interested in to purchase it directly from the seller’s site.

I use this site almost every day to check prices on books, usually pretty obscure ones, and I’ve rarely come up empty-handed.

About this blog

My plan is to use this blog for two things:

• to write about my research on music history and the history of technology during the Early Modern period,
• and to present digital resources for historians of these topics and this period.

My research focuses in particular on keyboard instrument building during the latter half of the 18th century, especially in Germany. I try to understand developments in instrument design during this period by asking questions not about the instruments, but about their makers: what do we know about 18th-century builders, how they lived and worked? Were they artisans, artists, musicians, celebrities? Who were their friends and acquaintances; who influenced them? Why did they build as they did?

I have found that research on the history of technology, and most especially traditional craft practice, faces a fundamental challenge: relatively little has ever been written about these topics, either by craftspeople or by scholars. I hope that this blog can become a collection of resources and writing that will help to address that lack.