I originally wrote in 1997 about the guitars purchased in 1926 by Japanese collectors from Philip Bone, but never shared a copy of the original letter received from Bone listed details on the guitars. I stumbled across my correspondence with Nakano recently and realized he had sent me a copy of the letter. Here it is! (more…)
On November 6th, 1856, less than a month after the death of J. K. Mertz on October 14th, his manuscripts and instruments were put up for sale. (more…)
I’ve been gathering locations for all issues of S.S. Stewart’s Journal for many years and am now at a point where I’ve exhausted all major sources. I am still looking for missing issues and any suggestions would be most welcome.
(more…)Julie Fondard, possibly 1819-1864, was a student of Sor in Paris perhaps earlier than 1830. Sor dedicated his opus 62 to her in 1838. She published in Cheltenham, England from around 1834 through 1836 where she first announced herself as a pupil of Sor. By the end of 1836 she was back in Paris.
A Theodore Fondard appeared in Paris newspapers in 1826-27 as a professor of guitar, but the relationship with Julie is unknown.
(more…)Below is a list of all of Alexander Weinmann’s “Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alt-Weiner Musikverlages” series for easy reference. His books document the output by date and plate number of many important Viennese publishers. His papers are housed in the David M. Rubinstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. Many well-known (and unknown) guitarists’ publications can be researched in this series.
There is a nice video of Nicoletta Confalone’s presentation on Emilia Giuliani at the “Musica con la chitarra, oggi” in Bologna, February 2014. There is also a great overview of her work on Emilia on the same site.
The Emilia Giuliani book is finally done! She was the daughter of Mauro Giuliani. Very little information about her has been available and only a few of her compositions have had much attention since their original publication in the 1830-40’s. In the 200th anniversary year of her birth I’m proud to release this book with tremendous work and support from Nicoletta Confalone and Thomas Heck.
The following list is the current state of my research into the works of Luigi Sagrini (1809-1874). (Correct birth date discovered by Bernard Lewis.)
The works list below represents my latest work on the works of Felix Horetzky (Feliks Horecki) (1796-1870). Please see my other article on Horetzky which has more biographical information on him. Horetzky republished the same composition with multiple publishers often tracing his movements from Vienna to Paris and then on to London. I have denoted these publications with letters after the opus numbers.
(more…)This is an incomplete list of compositions in the Morishige Takei collection at the Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo, Japan. It was compiled by Jiro Nakano. The Takei collection is not publicly accessibly to my knowledge, nor has it been fully catalogued. After Takei’s death it was in the custody of at least one other person during which time portions may have been mixed with other collections. Takei also had a large amount of mandolin music in his possession. I doubt that this list represents the total of his guitar collection. One thing to remember though is that Takei lost nearly all of his collection due to fires caused by the great Kanto earthquake in 1923, though his rebuilt collection mostly survived other fires caused by air raids on Tokyo during World War II.
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