New Acquisitions at the Newberry

Here is a selection of the recent acquisitions in music made possible by The Newberry’s Howard Mayer Brown / Roger Weiss Rare Book Fund. This fund was established as part of the bequest of Howard Mayer Brown (1930–93) to the Newberry. Members of the American Musicological Society have also contributed to the fund over the years.

Howard Mayer Brown Jacqueline Morreau / Newberry Library

The Brown/Weiss fund, together with the Newberry’s Society of Collectors fund, supported the acquisition of two sets of sixteenth-century partbooks printed in Venice by Antonio Gardano: three out of five voices for a collection of twenty-seven motets by the Franco-Flemish composer Dominique Phinot, and two out of four voices for a collection of songs by the Flemish composer MatthiasWerrecore. Neither composer was yet represented in the Newberry collection in an edition issued during his lifetime.

• Two opera scores from the seventeenth century: the first edition of Il Nino, performed in Bologna in 1673; and the first edition of the score for Zéphire et Flore, performed at the Palais-Royal in Paris on March 22, 1688, on the first anniversary of the death of Jean-Baptiste Lully. The opera was largely written by the music master Pierre Vignon, although two of Lully’s sons shared the profits.
• A volume of Bousset’s Airs serieux et a boire from 1702.
• A copy of the C. Ballard score (1706) for Cassandre: tragedie [mise] en musique, François Bouvard and Bertin de La Doué.
• Mattaeus Schenckenberg, German manuscript partbooks from 1599. Some of the music included is known, some unknown: