LOC Releases Irving Fine Collection

The LOC has announced the Irving Fine collection at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ifhtml/ . Irving Fine was a composer, conductor, writer, and academic who lived from 1914 to 1962.

The collection contains over 4300 items, including printed music, sketchbooks, writings, personal and business correspondence, scrapbooks, programs, clippings, and sound recordings. The first release of materials online includes 57 photographs, a manuscript score, a recorded performance, and a sketchbook.

The sketchbook is not what you might think -- they're not pictures. The "sketches for woodwind partita and string quartet, pencil" are actually short musical bits handwritten in a music book. These are images only -- there were no transcriptions. (Does that sound dumb? I couldn't read some of his notation.)

The sketchbook and the photographs are both browsable (the photograph collection is small enough that browsing is interesting rather than mind-numbing) and the whole collection is, as always, searchable by keyword.

Posted to Reference-Libraries-Collections