Endowments; Folk music--Research; Musicologists; United States; Sharp, Cecil J. (Cecil James), 1859-1924; Aldrich, Richard, 1863-1937; Karpeles, Maud, 1885-1976
Format
correspondence
Genre
Business correspondence
Date
[between 1901 and 1919?]
Physical Description
microfilm, 16 mm, b&w
Note (Reel no.)
Reel 81
Note
PDF may contain multiple grant documents.
Richard Aldrich; to collect English folk songs and ballads amongst the people of North Carolina and Tennessee
Cecil James Sharp (22 November 1859 – 23 June 1924) was the founding father of the folk-song revival in England in the early 20th century. His work covered several areas. He did scholarly field work on folk song, gathering thousands of tunes both from rural England and the Southern Appalachians region of the United States, and wrote an influential volume, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, about his findings. He revived the extinct tradition of English country dance, based on his study of surviving rural folk dances as well as written sources; this form of dance as Sharp revived it has by now been actively maintained by enthusiast participants for over a century. Sharp also promoted Morris dancing, and in 1911 founded the English Folk Dance Society... During the years of the First World War, Sharp found it difficult to support himself through his customary efforts at lecturing and writing, and decided to make an extended visit to the United States. The visit, made with his collaborator Maud Karpeles during the years 1916–1918, was a great success. Large audiences came to hear Sharp lecture about folk music, and Sharp also took the opportunity to do field work on English folk songs that had survived in the more remote regions of southern Appalachia, pursuing a line of research pioneered by Olive Dame Campbell. Travelling through the mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, Sharp and Karpeles recorded a treasure trove of folk songs, many using the pentatonic scale and many in versions quite different from those Sharp had collected in rural England. Generally, Sharp recorded the tunes, while Karpeles was responsible for the words. Sharp was greatly struck by the dignity, courtesy, and natural grace of the people who welcomed him and Karpeles in the Appalachians, and he defended their values and their way of life in print" [SOURCE: "Cecil Sharp." Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Sharp. Accessed 12 Oct. 2018.] "Among the collections of the Isham Memorial Library, a special library adjunct to the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, may be found Ms. Coll. 131, a huge file of lively correspondence between Richard Aldrich, chief music critic of the New York Times from 1902 to 1923, and his friends, editors and fellow critics. Aldrich graduated from Harvard University and his personal library, donated posthumously by his son in 1955, was an important early gift to the Loeb Music Library. One particularly thick folder is that of letters to Aldrich from the folk music collector and editor Cecil Sharp. The correspondence chiefly concerned Sharp’s desire to investigate traditional English music as it was performed in the United States and Canada. Sharp’s research would result in the two-volume work English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1932). Grove music online credits Sharp with giving 'impetus to American efforts, subsequently taken up by American universities, to collect and publish their traditional ballads and songs, both English and indigenous, and to conserve their other traditional arts' (but see also The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology, and the English Folk Revival, by Georgina Boyes, for a more nuanced interpretation). In these letters we see Sharp tentatively exploring his relationship to the United States and its traditional music." [SOURCE: Linklater, Christina. "Cecil Sharp in America." Loeb Music Library Blog. Harvard University, Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, 20 Jul. 2015, https://blogs.harvard.edu/loebmusic/2015/07/20/cecil-sharp-in-america. Accessed 12 Oct. 2018.]