Category: IGRA

International Guitar Research Archives Makes 1000s of Scores Available for Download

3/19/2016

During the past two years, the International Guitar Research Archive (IGRA) at Cal State Northridge (CSUN) has been increasing activity, acquisitions, and usability for scholars. The largest current project - the digitization of all public domain scores in the Vahdah-Olcott Bickford Collection - is almost complete. IGRA has decided to make public the first group of 1145 high quality photographs of scores in PDF format. As opposed to other repositories of PDFs for guitar music, the IGRA Scores collection contains only full colour scans and is fully searchable. In the coming months, the entire collection that falls in the public domain will be made available to the public. In addition to a large number of scores from the 19th and early 20th century in Europe, this collection also highlights the history of classical guitar in North America with rare scores published throughout the 1800s in the United States

You can browse the collection here. Please bookmark it for further reference.

Score published in 1895, San Francisco. Arranged by G.C Santisteban

Robert Brightmore's 1980 LP featuring premier recordings of Brouwer and Hunt's The Barber of Bagdhad

This addition to the Archives' online functionality compliments our digital collection of the Vahdah-Olcott Bickford Correspondence. The collection of over 500 letters provides fascinating insight into the history of the classical guitar in the early part of the 20th century. We have now added full text searchability to all correspondence, in addition to high quality color scans of the letters.

Additionally, researchers and guitar enthusiasts will be excited to browse the IGRA Discography. The discography features thousands of guitar LPs, most of which have downloadable full color scans of the front cover and back/cover liner notes. We are in the process of making all the liner notes completely text searchable, which will also facilitate research into the instrument's history. Researchers interested in listening to recordings should contact IGRA directly

The archive has been acquiring exciting new collections over the past two years. The most noteworthy is the Reginald Smith-Brindle Collection. After working with the Smith-Brindle family during a research project, I became familiar with the vast wealth of material amongst his personal papers. Working with the family, all documents have been moved to Los Angeles for preservation and they currently are being processed. The collection features manuscripts for virtually all of his works catalog, unpublished works, and some works presumed lost. His unfinished autobiography is amongst the documents, as well as his correspondence with major figures, including John Williams, Julian Bream, Andres Segovia, Luciano Berio and Luigi Dallapiccola.

Scholars who wish to view the materials should contact the Head of Special Collections for information on processing time and availability. If you have any specific questions about the contents of the collection, I have several pages of notes and can let you know if something you are looking for is there. Please contact me using the contact form.

Letter to Reginald Smith Brindle from Julian Bream, dated 1970

Additionally through our partnership with the Guitar Foundation of America, we now house the John Duarte Collection, containing his papers, music, documents and LP collection, as well as the GFA archives.

I am very excited by the developments in the archive, and the development of our partnership with the International Guitar Research Centre at the University of Surrey. We welcome all guitarists and scholars to participate in the history of our instrument.

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Concert Programs Tell a Story

11/9/2014

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Vahdah Olcott-Bickford

This was originally posted for the Oviatt Library's Peek in the Stacks on October 31, 2014
The original post can be found here.

The Vahdah Olcott-Bickford Collection contains many gifts of information about classical music, the guitar, and the city of Los Angeles, including several hundred concert programs from across the world that Olcott-Bickford (1885-1980) collected over her long career. Having assisted Philip J. Bone in assembling one of the seminal books on guitarists, The Guitar and The Mandolin, she knew that preserving her current experiences with the guitar would enrich the knowledge of those who followed her. And we are grateful for the images and records of concerts by early legends of the instrument, such as the Carnegie Hall concert by Tarrega’s student Pascual Roch in 1918.

One thing that becomes apparent is that concerts tended to have more than two parts to them, as is the current custom. Many of the concert programs, especially from the early part of the 20th century, were divided into 3 and sometimes 4 parts. Also, it was normal to only play one or two movements from a larger multi-movement work, in contrast to the current fashion of the complete presentation of sonatas and suites. Note the program at Wigmore Hall by Julian Bream from 1952, (famous amongst guitarists for the introduction of his lute-skills to his concerts) which is divided into 3 distinct sections, and single movements from larger works by Torroba, Weiss and Bach are performed.

Ida Presti

Through these programs, we are also taken through a history of classical concerts in Los Angeles. The concert program of Olcott-Bickford performing with Soprano Cecilia Dvorak is notable for the American premiere of something that was rare in the classical world at that time, a piece for guitar by a major composer, in this case, a song by Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius. It also displays the history of concert-going in Los Angeles, as the concert was presented at Pepperdine College, in their first location in South Central Los Angeles, before the move to their current Malibu home. Another example is the program for guitarist Rey de la Torre in 1955, presented by Monday Evening Concerts. The series, at that time 16 years old, continues to this day as a pillar of adventurous classical music programming for Los Angeles.

One other interesting aspect of this collection is the prominence of female classical guitarists represented. In a largely male-dominated classical music scene, Ms. Olcott-Bickford, understandably, paid a good deal of attention to the women who were talented, outspoken, and brave enough to pursue a career in music, much like herself. From lesser known players like the American Marguerite Lichti and Argentinian Maria Angelica Funes, to the very prominent and esteemed Luise Walker, Maria Luisa Anido, and Ida Presti, we are left with the impression that a female presence in the classical guitar scene was a strong one, and that their influence on the developing instrument was felt broadly.

Maria Luisa Anido is listed as performing her Wigmore concert partially on Francisco Tarrega’s Torres guitar, perhaps one of the most famous guitars in music history. This isn’t to say that the classical guitar world was without its gender biases. In a 1952 letter to Ms. Olcott-Bickford from Boris Perrott (one of Julian Bream’s early teachers), he states that “Anido specialized on solo-left-hand-playing: her tone is extremely powerful, man-like,…”. It would seem that although there were biases that these pioneers of the instrument needed to overcome, they did so through their superior artistry and captivating concerts.