Conference Agenda

In 1838, the Liceo Artístico y Literario de Madrid, a recently founded arts organization comprised of Madrid’s cultural elite, gifted its patroness and protectress, Regent Queen María Cristina de Borbón, a manuscript album containing original artwork, poetry, and music created by its members. The extant album contains nine complete works of art, eight poems, and four musical compositions. Some poems and images reflect broader Romantic styles and genres, while others depict unambiguously Spanish themes and ideas that speak to María Cristina’s role as the leader of the Spanish nation and mother of the future queen. In contrast, the four musical works are imported-style salon pieces: two waltzes and two Italian-texted romanzas.

In this short talk, I demonstrate that the album itself functions as a hybrid object whose form and contents simultaneously reflect Romantic album culture and honor the esteemed tradition of presentation manuscripts. I argue that this hybridity represents the aesthetic and philosophical values of the Liceo’s members who saw themselves and María Cristina as co-curators of the nation’s culture charged with navigating tensions between modernity and tradition. Using a waltz by Pedro Albéniz as a representative case study, I contend that the musical works in the album were selected to appeal to Regent Queen María Cristina as a royal female patron and performer and to represent the Liceo’s goal of cultivating music by Spanish composers that was recognized as both modern and equal to that of their European contemporaries.

Studies on binder’s volumes in Latin America have pointed out their value as sources that offer information about musical repertoires, composers in vogue, and the production and consumption of sheet music among certain social groups. However, the materiality and histories of these albums also reveal valuable information about the salon culture and the mobility of musical practices and repertoires. This lightning talk offers an example through the study of the Echeverría musical Album, a binder’s volume containing both sheet music and manuscript pages collected between 1860 and 1888 in Bogotá by Ana and Cristina Echeverría. Inscriptions such as annotations, footnotes, dedications, and stamps in this album offer an insight into the Echerverría family’s history and the complex networks that spread new musical repertoires and forms of socialization with cosmopolitanism aspirations based on the practices adapted from the European urban bourgeoisie in the Latin American private spaces.

While musicology has seen a surge of interest in private keepsake albums as windows into intimate moments of musical exchange, little attention has been paid to a more public practice: the “monument album” (Droese 2023) curated by fledgling music institutions, which legitimized themselves by inviting celebrities to contribute leaves, and in so doing, archived the present like a time capsule. This lightning talk offers the field’s first close look at a monument album as a music-historical document. In 1876, the fledgling International Mozart Society in Salzburg put out a call for poems, messages, manuscripts, and pocket-sized signed photographs (or cartes-de-visites) to display in a Mozart-Album at its upcoming music festival. Over time, the collection—laid out on a writing desk in the quirky composing-cottage that had been recently transplanted to Salzburg—swelled to over 300 leaves. In its time, the Mozart-Album enacted what critics called the Denkmalwut, the mania for preservation; today, the album offers a prism of microhistories that capture the nineteenth-century musical establishment with a fine grain. The collection serves not only as a trove of lost music manuscripts, letters, and mementos, but a record of the strategic self-promotion of celebrities as they wrote themselves into history in Mozart’s name. Contributors ranged from prominent names like Richard Wagner and Jules Massenet, to female composers like Josephine Weyß who have since fallen into obscurity, to opera divas, poets, and monarchs whose leaves signaled the transnational diplomacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The value of this album for music history is threefold, offering insights into music’s position in historic preservation, celebrity culture, and transnational politics. The album’s endeavor to act as an archive invited contributors to imagine their own celebrity afterlives. Its cozy display in the cottage made celebrity feel intimate and dissolved the boundary between public and private. By presenting this album as an international tourist attraction, the International Mozart Society positioned Salzburg as both a cosmopolitan crossroads and a sanctuary that sheltered art from the abuses of the modern city, blessed by the prestige of a network of Enlightened nobility.

I focus on five albums which were created in, and travelled between, India and Britain during the period 1890-1939. Created by two remarkable musicians, Maud MacCarthy and John Foulds, the albums are held privately by the creators’ granddaughters. MacCarthy – virtuoso violinist and pioneering Indian music expert - kept three keepsake albums which, from around the year 1935 onwards, possibly to mark her departure for a new life in India, she annotated extensively, creating what I read as musical memoirs, a feminist method of having agency over her own story. A fourth album, entirely handmade and handwritten, dating from 1909, contains Karnātic songs she learned in Chennai and later performed in lecture-recitals in London and with a cross-cultural musical ensemble. This album, read and heard alongside MacCarthy’s keepsake albums, is a landmark in the field of Indian music in the West.

From 1936 (after his arrival in India with MacCarthy), to his untimely death in Calcutta in 1939, composer-conductor John Foulds kept an album entitled "A Few Indian Records" based on his work as director of European music at All India Radio in Delhi which includes photographs of his Indo-European orchestra, press clippings, broadcast schedules, and radio features. Taken together, these albums traverse Chennai, London, and Delhi during the final decades of the Raj, illuminating an intimate historiography of gender, race, and empire through an eclectic range of materials – from music notation and personal reflections penned by hand, to photographs, press clippings, letters, concert programmes, and radio broadcasting schedules. The albums provide insights into colonial institutions and contact zones, marginalized musical milieux, the emotional investment underpinning both musicians’ anti-colonial activities, Indian-British musical exchange, attitudes to Indian musical performances in London, and music’s role in national broadcasting in India in the years before Independence. Ultimately, the albums enable a nuanced reading of how the lenses of race, empire, and gender play a vital role in the mutual reconstitution, and the inseparable act of rewriting British music history through South Asian music.

The British Legion formed in the early 1920s as an advocacy group for British veterans of the First World War. Many of the Legion’s campaigns, like the sale of poppies for Armistice Day, are now firmly fixed in the iconography of remembrance in Britain. The 1924 British Legion Album represented the peak of the Legion’s early efforts to support veterans’ causes. The album, deemed “the world’s most notable collection of autographs” for its entries from royalty, statesmen, military heroes, and artists, was offered for sale first as a facsimile copy and then as a prize in a national raffle.

The album contained inscriptions from twenty-six prominent musicians, many of whom left quotations of their own works. Contributions from Ralph Vaughan Williams, Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, and their contemporaries appeared alongside those of singers and conductors like Nellie Melba and Thomas Beecham. Some inscriptions were clearly patriotic, while others were meant to call attention to the signatory’s celebrity or reputation. These musical contributions appear to have held great significance to the Album’s value as a personal possession for the British public. The Album’s novelty and variety, coupled with the national significance of its cultural signatories, performed the same function for postwar reconstruction as the many memorials and commemorative events that dotted public life after the war.

I draw on unexplored archival materials to show how the Album’s musical inscriptions helped it to play an important role in national discourses of memory and mourning following the end of the war. The inclusion of notable musical figures alongside royalty, political icons, and military heroes suggests that the arts were important—perhaps even crucial—to the process of social reconstruction that eased Britain into the 1920s. I argue that this was possible because the Legion’s campaign brought together three British “cultures” affected by the First World War: musical philanthropy, “albuming” practices among the middle class, and the support of ex-servicemen. Tracing the integration of these cultures reveals that the Album reflected the intertwining of public and private needs, values, and practices that made many of the postwar memorials so meaningful.

Amidst the broader de-Stalinization of Latvian society around 1960, the Academy of Music dedicated a room in its Riga home to a memorial for the composer Jāzeps Vītols (1863-1948), who founded the institution at the dawn of Latvian independence in 1919, only to emigrate with the Soviet annexation of the republic in 1944. Already by the mid-1960s, the room had become a repository of cultural memory from the interwar independence period: furniture from Vītols's flat, the composer's library, and dedication albums gifted by students and colleagues, some of which deemed so sensitive by Soviet authorities as to require their consignment to highly restricted “special fonds.” Over the years, the room also became a repository for contemporary objects, notably the visitor's books maintained by the conservatory rectorate from the mid-1970s to the late 2000s. There, elaborate inscriptions document the life of the institution – and of the nation it represented to the wider world – against ever-shifting political horizons. This study opens windows onto this history as witnessed in these documents, tracing an arc from the cosmopolitan aspirations of the interwar republic to postwar Stalinization and Thaw, from a long period of geopolitical isolation to the restoration of Latvian independence in 1991. Following that latter moment, the Jāzeps Vītols memorial room, like the republic itself, was once again opened to the world. This presentation will focus on entries in the visitor's books from 1992 to 2006, which underscore the significance of visitors' and gatekeepers' awareness of the necessity of documentation in this transitional period, while also serving as evidence of the room's transformation into a gathering place for artists and others to remember the national past while imagining new futures.