With nearly 40,000 scores of both published and unpublished works, the British Music Collection is a treasure trove of musical creativity and diversity in Britain in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

An excellent example of this diversity can be seen from this stunning experimental score for Matrix, composed by Alywnne Pritchard.

Matrix, composed in 2001 for violin, shows the freedom and creative nature inherent to much experimental music. The piece is made up of eight spokes and three islands of music which can be played in any direction by the performer (i.e. both towards and away from the centre), but that can also be linked as the performer is allowed to make excursions at their discretion into other spokes and islands at any of the paths that are highlighted on the piece’s accompanying map. Repetition of individual fragments is also allowed so long as all parts of the score are played during the piece. Consequently, by allowing the performer to choose their path through the score, this same piece can be played differently by each performer and in each performance!

What an interesting and inventive approach to composition and notation! And another great example of the innovation and variety of methods that have been captured by the British Music Collection throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries. So with another 39,000 additional scores to browse through, imagine all of the other exciting musical styles and approaches that are waiting to be discovered by our users!

The full score to Matrix by Alywnne Pritchard is available on the British Music Collection website here.

With work starting on the surveying and cataloguing of the British Music Collection, we would like to introduce you to one of the most exciting sections of the collection; the composers files of the British Music Information Centre (BMIC). As mentioned in our last blog post, BMIC worked to promote contemporary British classical/art music and provide a reference library for composers’ scores and recordings. However in addition to the scores and recordings, over the years the Centre also actively collected administrative and reference material relating to British composers and those living in the UK, and this has resulted in the volume of material you can see below!

Now the surveying of these files has only just begun, but our first impressions of this body of records are very giddy ones! Particularly as we start to consider all the different types of information and evidence that are waiting to be discovered, and the potential research paths that our users will take. So far we’ve come across correspondence, composers’ CVs, manuscript scores, subscription cards, biographies, newsletters, journals, newspaper cuttings, event publicity, programs and catalogues, to name but a few! And just as diverse as the types of records that we’ve found is the volume of material held within each file; a point which is nicely demonstrated by the two images below. On the left is the complete file for Richard Ascough, a member of The Scratch Orchestra from 1970, while on the right is one of a number of files relating to Benjamin Britten.

Finally, to give you an insight into the next steps and what we’ve been doing over the last few days, we’d like to point out that it’s no coincidence that the above examples are both from composers whose surnames sit early alphabetically. Unfortunately, that’s because most of the alphabetical order that the records were originally kept in has been lost over the years, and as a result we now have to fully reorder the entire collection to ensure that all the files have been accounted for and that they can be retrieved into the future! Well, that’s the As and Bs done, only another 24 to go!

Last Friday 12th October we enjoyed a launch event for the deposit of the Goldberg Ensemble archive.
Chris Robins, the Ensemble’s Project Manager, Professor Malcolm Layfield (Founder/Artistic Director of the Goldberg Ensemble, strings adviser to the University for approx. 30 years, and the Royal Northern College of Music’s Head of Strings) and Professor Michael Clarke (Composer and Music Lecturer at Huddersfield) joined former University Archivist Hilary Haigh, our music librarian Janet Waterhouse, Director of Computing & Library Services Sue White and myself to chat about the Ensemble’s tours, composition and performance, and “archiving” music.

The Goldberg Ensemble Collection includes scores and programmes from 8 annual ‘Celebration’ tours that the Ensemble presented between 2001 and 2008. The principal purpose of the tours were to contribute to the maintenance and development of the string ensemble tradition, by commissioning new works from British composers and by giving second and subsequent performances to existing British string works of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In total, 39 works were commissioned or written for the ‘Celebrations’, of which 19 were original scores.

The addition of this score collection to our other music collections (notably the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival Archive and the British Music Collection) sets us on the path to becoming ‘THE’ national resource for contemporary music research.

The Heritage@Huddersfield project aims to revolutionise access to these important collections. Ways in which we could do this include full cataloguing, digitisation (where possible), performance and workshops of individual pieces, composition workshops….and other things.  Add your ideas in the comments!