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enChanting Musical Artifacts in Unlikely Places: Rare Resources in MIT’s Lewis Music Library

Michael Scott Cuthbert Nancy Carlson Schrock: March 3, 2009; Running Time: 0:53:15

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

There are times when it’s necessary to judge a book by its cover, or a single page, because that’s all that remains. Michael Scott Cuthbert and Nancy Schrock reveal some treasures from MIT’s early music collection which, while often incomplete or damaged, sing volumes about their origins and use.

Cuthbert demonstrates that when it comes to medieval and renaissance music manuscripts, there’s really no substitute for the real thing. His discussion concerns several recent additions to MIT’s Lewis Music Library. Online perusal alone cannot reveal which of his manuscripts was designed to be read by a large group of singers in a cathedral, and which served as a valued part of a priest’s collection for personal study. Holding the two artifacts up, Cuthbert makes it clear: He first displays a giant, two-sided leaf, and then an aged volume containing the much smaller page.

To examine these specimens, says Shrock, she must use special tools of the trade: a fiber optic light sheet for studying paper; microscopes, digital cameras. In examining and preserving music manuscripts and other rare MIT books, Schrock needs to know the process by which the object came into being. She shows the large leaf from the choir book: it’s parchment, made from the lined skins of young animals, with the hair scraped off, shaved and rubbed with pumice to achieve a smooth surface perfect for text and binding. Schrock shows a 15th century book of hours, an illuminated manuscript that was rebound by a collector in the 18th century. While she admires the redo (red morocco tooled in gold), the object “no longer reflects the way this manuscript was originally made, and we’ve lost knowledge about it.” Flaws are more informative than beauty.

Says Cuthbert, “For many of us, modern musicology is less about spending time in dusty archives and more about recreating what we see in CSI.” New technology may hold the key to answering longstanding mysteries, such as the abrupt abandonment or evolution of certain kinds of religious music. Some manuscripts may hide their beginnings, or travel widely: “Maybe the choir book left the cathedral in a sack in the middle of the night,” he says. With computer software, researchers can now compare music manuscripts that originated in widely separated regions of the world. New machines can peer into manuscripts where the music has been scraped off to make room for other information (such as land ownership records, or an illustrated bestiary), to see what originally existed; and advances in digital imaging can discern the flow of notes on a page where they had once been obliterated or obscured. DNA tracing, he hopes, will ultimately permit musicologists to determine the provenance of animals used in parchment down to the cathedral green where they grazed.

Lecture Details

Location: Lewis Music Library

“For many of us, modern musicology is less about spending time in dusty archives, and more about recreating what we see in CSI.”

Michael Scott Cuthbert

About the Speakers

Michael Scott Cuthbert

Assistant Professor of Music, MIT

Michael Scott Cuthbert received his A.B. summa cum laude, A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. A Rome Prize winner in Medieval Studies, Cuthbert spent 2004-05 at the American Academy in Rome. He recent served for two years as Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT.

Prior to MIT, Cuthbert was Visiting Assistant Professor on the faculties of Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges. Cuthbert is a musicologist specializing in fourteenth-century music and music of the past 40 years, particularly minimalism. He has published on fragments and palimpsests of the late Middle Ages, set analysis of Sub-Saharan African Rhythm, and the music of John Zorn. Cuthbert's current project is a book on sacred and secular music in the Italian Trecento. He has also founded a software lab creating new tools for computer-aided music analysis and generative music composition.

Nancy Carlson Schrock

Thomas F. Peterson, Jr. Conservator for Special Collections MIT Libraries

Nancy Schrock manages the conservation program for rare books, archives, and manuscripts in the MIT Libraries. She treats book and paper-based materials in its E. Martin Ethel Wunsch Conservation Laboratory and currently heads the Libraries’ exhibit committee for the new Maihaugen Gallery.

From 1997-2006, Schrock served as Chief Collections Conservator in Widener Library, where she planned a comprehensive conservation laboratory and developed an expanded program for research collections in Harvard College Library.

Schrock received her A.B. in art from Brown University, M.A. in art history from the University of Delaware, and M.L.S. from Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. She apprenticed with a book restorer and continued her bookbinding studies through internships.

Today Schrock enjoys being back in the lab where she can continue to learn about the structure and history of books and paper while treating MIT’s most valuable books and manuscripts in consultation with its librarians, archivists, and scholars.

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