Songbooks and compilations

The Booth Family Center Songbook and Music Pedagogy Collection contains items purchased from 2002 onwards by Special Collections staff using money from the Leon Robbin Library Endowment Fund. The collection is mostly comprised of manuscript song compilations created by non-professional musicians for private use in the home, by students or teachers for pedagogical purposes, or for liturgical use by church choirs or religious orders. Most of the songbooks are bound manuscripts, but a few appear to be portions of disbound songbooks, several are bound compilations of printed sheet music, and one is an early American imprint.


Highlights of the collection include: a songbook and a music theory textbook created by early 19th century American schoolgirls; a Spanish-language, vellum-bound music theory manuscript (circa 1750) with a hand-drawn and -colored "Guidonian hand" illustration; a bound compilation of Liszt sheet music for solo piano with a tipped-in autograph music manuscript by Liszt; two 17th century Italian manuscript four-voice antiphonaries; songbooks created by the 19th century writers L.E.L. (i. e., Letitia Elizabeth Landon), Caroline Lucy Scott, and Sarah Atkinson; three volumes of manuscript repertoire music of an early 19th century musician in Columbia, South Carolina; two matching volumes (though with different contents) of Civil War-era sheet music compiled by two Southern-sympathizing Maryland sisters, one volume of which includes a 1st edition of the Maryland state song; a manuscript volume of tunes and instruction for bagpipers compiled by William Cleland, likely the prominent mid-19th century New York City piper; the repertoire book of a mid-19th century small-town Pennsylvanian bandmember; two manuscript volumes of verse, songs, and dramas bound in stained vellum, created by a French nun for her niece shortly before the French Revolution; and additional manuscript music in German, Swedish, French, Spanish.