The series Collectionner la musique is founded on the idea that a collection is more than the sum of its parts, and that the act of collecting gives additional social and intellectual meaning to the components. The first book in the series addressed the history of collecting music, while the second dealt with collecting as part of musical interpretation and performance. The third and current volume, based on papers from the 2013 conference at Royaumont, concerns itself with the collections of scholars. Catherine Massip's Introduction defines a collection as something ‘formed through thoughtful choices and made up of rare materials not intended for immediate practical use’ (‘un choix rationnel de matériaux rares non destinés à un usage pratique immédiat’, 10). This definition obviously leaves room for negotiation: what is a ‘thoughtful’ choice, what counts as ‘rare’, and what are ‘practical’ uses? These questions are not addressed directly; rather, the variety of collections examined in the volume exemplifies the definition's flexibility.
While the book contains material spanning the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries, I will focus on eighteenth-century subjects, including the twenty-first-century collector Patrick Florentin, who specializes in materials relating to Rameau. Chapters of special interest for the scholar of the eighteenth century deal with Charles Burney, Sébastien de Brossard and Gaspare Selvaggi. This brief list of names gives a sense of the international scope of the volume; though Frenchmen make up the majority of the personages, Italian, English and even Japanese men also appear. (Women are incidental, at best, to the narratives of these erudite men, as are most non-Western musics.)
Like a collection, this group of essays is best when considered as a whole. Most chapters take a granular perspective, offering a biographical sketch of a collector, exploring his social and scholarly context, and then establishing what we can know about the contents of his library. Yet the chapters’ proximity to each other encourages reflection on broader questions: what does knowing the contents of a library tell us about the owner? How does the ownership of material objects relate to the lived experience of a scholar, performer or audience member? Rarely do the individual chapters seek to address these or related questions.
This is partly due to the type of materials available. Administrative records such as catalogues of sale and receipts for books reveal the contents of the library, but, unless pressed, do little more. In the case of Charles Burney (1726–1814), Graham Sadler combines three posthumous catalogues with Burney's travel diaries and correspondence to determine what Burney owned and how he acquired the materials. Burney's library during his lifetime can only be described as chaotic; he bought more books than he could easily transport or store, he loaned books and lost them, stored them in multiple buildings, and only maintained a semblance of order with the help of one of his daughters. The posthumous catalogues sort the library into different kinds of volumes: miscellaneous (non-musical, quite varied), music (print or manuscript), and books and treatises on music. While the first two categories were auctioned off in lots, Burney asked that the books and treatises on music be disposed of as an ensemble ‘to some collector or public library’ to benefit his two eldest daughters (112). The catalogues track the materials’ movements, but offer little insight into how Burney organized or thought about the contents of his library during his life: did he value the coherence of treatises and music theory more than he did that of scores and the miscellaneous volumes? Was this portion of the library more valuable? Less likely to sell well at auction? Whatever the reason for singling out music theory for special treatment, the British Museum (which bought the collection) did not continue with this practice, and Burney's theory collection is now dispersed throughout the British Library.
Annotations and personal documentation can help scholars connect the life and objects of their subjects in ways that auction catalogues cannot. In the case of Sébastien de Brossard (1655–1730), the catalogues that he personally prepared when presenting a gift of his library to the Bibliothèque royale and his preparatory notes for two of his dictionaries document the contents of his own library and the libraries that he consulted while writing the dictionaries. Focusing primarily on Brossard's own collection, Jean Duron connects the materials to Brossard's career as a maître de chapelle in Strasbourg and in Meaux, where he purchased music in order to teach, direct a children's choir and perform musical services. These acquisitions – both purchased and borrowed – increased as he wrote his dictionaries. Duron asserts that, as with Burney's chaotic library, Brossard collected books to further his own employment – a conclusion that should come as no surprise, as it has remained a common practice for modern scholars as well. Brossard's preparatory notes for his dictionaries, however, offer exciting material that in future could be explored in greater depth. These detailed records of provenance show which public, private and church-held libraries Brossard consulted, what these collections held and who he was able to borrow books from. They could be used productively in a study of the diffusion and circulation of specific texts and ideas in early eighteenth-century France or in an examination of the role that social networks played in access to musical materials.
In the right hands, administrative records can speak volumes. Thierry Favier examines the role of music in the Republic of Letters through the correspondence of Jean Bouhier (1673–1746). He argues that though Bouhier was certainly a scholar in some areas, in the realm of music he preferred to remain an amateur: his letters to close friends share gossip and witty descriptions of performances. Favier maintains that Bouhier, while enjoying contemporary opera and having more modern tastes, essentially subscribed to an older model of listening, where musical activity took place in intimate social contexts and was left untheorized. Bouhier emerges here as more of a collector of correspondents and musical experiences than of musical knowledge. Like the other scholars in this volume, Favier analyses his material by cataloguing it; however, instead of quantifying distributions across different musical genres or determining the rarity of pieces, Favier describes and quantifies a typology of musical discourses and examines the intersecting hierarchies of social status and scholarly reputation among correspondents. Favier concludes by showing parallels between the listening practice and musical discussion among amateurs in the Republic of Letters and the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns.
While most chapters focus on the act of bringing items into a collection, and rely on sale records mainly to verify what was in the subject's library, Dinko Fabris looks at the disbursement of the collection of a Neapolitan (and occasionally itinerant) music teacher, Gaspare Selvaggi (1763–1856). Fabris speculates that Selvaggi was involved with Neapolitan revolutionaries and had a plan ‘to sell over a long period (1797–1811) the complete musical archives of one of the oldest Neapolitan conservatories (probably Loreto)’ (370). However, Fabris presents little convincing evidence for the existence of this plan: though titillating, the argument should serve as a caution against reading too much into administrative records.
Evidence about a collector's social activities can also shed light on the nature of his collections, as Laurence Decobert demonstrates in a study of Jean-Baptiste-Simon Boyer de la Boissière (c1690–1763), a native of Nantes and eventually a receveur général des finances du roi who maintained residences both there and in Paris. The impressive variety of music found in his collection reflects his attendance at the Académie royale, court divertissements, and the Concert spirituel and Concert italien. Posthumous transfer records show that he owned many manuscripts of rare and unpublished documents, some of which are now the only exemplars of these works in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. However, despite the exciting collection, Boyer de la Boissière was neither a musician himself nor a musical scholar; instead, Decobert speculates that he collected music for others to perform in the musical societies that he belonged to (and which in turn formed his taste and influenced his collection).
Valérie de Wispelaere and Thomas Vernet argue that the same holds true for the marquis de Paulmy (1722–1787). His collection was impressive, but the authors conclude that though he was a knowledgeable connoisseur (‘connaisseur averti’) who became an expert through his collecting activities and who helped other scholars by opening his library to them, he cannot be considered a true scholar in the sense that he did not contribute new knowledge through his works (353). In many ways, this is a similar story to that of Patrick Florentin, a lawyer whose collection of works by and on Rameau is unrivalled, but who lacks formal training as a musicologist. Scholars and experts consult Florentin and his collection (now donated to Royaumont), but Florentin considers himself to be an amateur connoisseur.
How much specialized knowledge must one have in order to count as an érudit collectionneur? In her Introduction, Massip recognizes that the definition of ‘erudition’ must be specified for each era, as different forms of knowledge emerge and are valued. Subjects for the book were chosen for ‘having written on music and contributed even modestly to this domain, whether or not they relied on libraries and collections of music’ (‘ayant écrit sur la musique et fait progresser ce domaine même dans une mesure modeste, en s'appuyant ou non sur les bibliothèques et collections musicales’, 11). The volume therefore includes chapters on non-scholars and musical amateurs, whose contributions to musical knowledge transpired primarily through their social and intellectual networks. This gesture towards a broader understanding of who might be involved in producing knowledge is welcome and necessary. Yet the volume gives little sense of the ways in which the acts of organization and categorization – in short, collecting – changed in response to shifting definitions of ‘erudition’.
Collections are fascinating for the questions they raise about individual choices and values. The best chapters in this book look beyond the collector, connecting the practice of collecting to historically situated knowledge production. Others analyse a library's contents, but do not consider the collection's social and intellectual context. As it stands, the volume is a valuable and positivistic starting-point for research – but the study of collecting has much more to offer.
