Archive Item of the Month – Sept 2021

Carl Friedrich Abel (Cöthen, 22 December 1723 – London, 20 June 1787, Member EM001)

Christian Ferdinand Abel, father of Carl Friedrich, was a violinist and viol player at the court of Prince Leopold I of Anthalt-Cöthen (1694-1728) at the time that Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was appointed Kapellmeister in 1717.  Abel senior must have been good friends with J.S. Bach as the composer was godfather to Abel’s first child.  On his father’s death in 1737, it is likely that the earlier connections with the Bach family were used as Carl Friedrich went to Leipzig and studied with J.S. Bach.  Charles Burney (1726-1814, EM053), who knew Abel, wrote 

“Abel’s musical science in harmony, modulation, fugue, and canon, which he had acquired under his great master Sebastian Bach, and taste under Hasse … had made him so complete a musician, that he soon became the umpire in all musical controversy, and was consulted in difficult and knotty points as an infallible oracle” (Charles Burney, A General History of Music, from the earliest ages to the present period (London: printed for the Author, 1789), vol.4, p.679). 

Archive Item of the Month – August 2021

Henry Wood (1869-1944) and the Promenade Concerts. 

Programme for Saturday 5 October 1929, Queen’s Hall, London, thirty-fifth season of Promenade Concerts. Donated, with a letter from Wood of 5 October 1938, by Rowland Dyson (RSM Member 00760) in July 1989. 

The British musical summertime would not be complete without the excitement and scope of the BBC Proms. It draws together performers from across the world for programmes and performances of music. It is a festival experience with a wonderful sense of comradeship in the audience as well as with the performers.  

Archive Item of the Month – July 2021

A letter from Christian Kramer (d.1834) addressed to C. Hamilton, of 19 Wardour Street. 

This letter touches on several areas of musicological interest including provenance and the ownership of manuscripts, printing, publishing and editorial history, as well as the professional and personal connections between individuals. 

Kramer was a performer, composer and arranger who had studied with the composer Peter von Winter (1754-1825), of whom the RSM holds an autograph of a March. A concert in the Argyll Rooms for William Hawes (1785-1846, Member A222) on Friday 30 April 1824 reveals that the programme opened with the overture from Handel’s Occasional Oratorio with “additional accompaniments” by C. Kramer. At the time of this letter, Kramer was also Master of the King’s Musick (1829-1834), spanning the reigns of two monarchs, namely George IV for whom he also led the private band, and William IV. We could therefore assume some authority on the discussions relating to the manuscripts in the Royal Collection. 

Archive Item of the Month – March 2021

Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber (1786-1826)

Pencil drawing of Weber by an anonymous artist; [1826]. Presented to the RSM in 1908. 

Archive item of the month – September 2020

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (London 15 August 1875 – London 1 September 1912) 

Two early songs by the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a violin student at the Royal College of Music (RCM) from 1890, starting composition lessons with Charles Villiers Stanford in 1892 and receiving an open scholarship in the following year. His studies ended at the RCM in 1897 and his contemporaries had included other famous composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, John Ireland, Frank Bridge and William Hurlstone. 

Archive Item of the Month – January 2020

Beethoven 2020 : 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth

Head and shoulders painted plaster bust of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), clad al’antica, after a bust by Johann Nepomuk Schaller (1777-1842) of 1827. The sitter’s cloak is gathered at the right shoulder with a morse, the whole atop an integral socle. Rectangular name-plate below unlettered.