Theodore M. Finney:

An Inventory of Music Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center

Biographical Sketch

Theodore Mitchell Finney, American musicologist and educator, was born in Fayette, Iowa, on March 14, 1902. He studied at the University of Minnesota (B.A. 1924), the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, the Stern Conservatory in Berlin, and the University of Pittsburgh, earning his Master of Letters degree there in 1938. He taught at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, from 1925 to 1932 and was supervisor of music for the public schools in Council Bluffs, Iowa, from 1933 to 1936; during that time he was also a lecturer at the Smith College Summer School. From 1936 to 1968 he was professor and head of the music department at the University of Pittsburgh.

Finney retired in 1968 and became curator of the Warrington Collection of Hymnology at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. His career encompassed a wide range of musical interests including performance, research, music education, and librarianship. He played violin in the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra from 1923 to 1925, and was also active as a choral conductor, founding the Heinz Chapel Choir at the University of Pittsburgh in 1939. He died in Pittsburgh on May 19, 1978. He was the brother of composer Ross Lee Finney.

Finney's publications include A History of Music (New York, 1935, 1947), Hearing Music (New York, 1941), We Have Made Music (Pittsburgh, 1955), and A Union Catalogue of Music and Books on Music Printed Before 1801 in Pittsburgh Libraries (Pittsburgh, 1959, 1963). He also served as editor for J. Warrington's Short Titles of Books Relating to or Illustrating the History and Practice of Psalmody in the United States, 1620-1820 (Pittsburgh, 1970).

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Scope and Contents

The collection consists of 53 bound volumes and 3 document cases of music manuscripts, primarily English, Italian, French, and German, dating from around 1700 to the middle of the 19th century. In addition, there is a manuscript catalog of an unidentified private music library, dated 1816 (Finney 26). Collected and bound by various former owners, the music manuscripts include anthems, glees, sacred and secular songs, masses, opera arias, chamber music, didactic works, and music for keyboard, harp, guitar, and mandolin. The materials were purchased from Finney himself, and his handwritten notes on various items are in the collection files. The order and numbering of the volumes are Finney's.

Among the major composers represented are Tallis, Purcell, Corelli, Handel, J. C. Bach, and Haydn. (There is an index of composers, authors, copyists, and former owners at the end of the finding aid.) For the most part the manuscripts are the work of copyists, but holographs include William Boyce's arrangement in full score of Purcell's Te Deum & Jubilate, Samuel Wesley's Magnificat and Carmen Funebre, Adalbert Gyrowetz's piano trio op. 22, and possibly Maurice Greene's Te Deum. Also among the more important items are several volumes of English sacred music and a full score for Handel's Coronation Anthems in the hands of Handel's principal copyists, bearing the bookplate of the Oxford Musical Society (where Handel conducted a performance of the work).

The Finney collection has been cataloged by staff at Harvard University as part of their work with RISM A/II, a joint international project to locate and catalog music manuscripts dating from 1600 to ca. 1825. Detailed catalog records describing the Finney manuscripts are accessible on the World Wide Web at: http://www.rism.harvard.edu/rism/DB.html. See the Appendix for an overview of the RISM Project and for information on how to search online for Finney manuscripts.

Other early music manuscripts collected by Finney are housed at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the Music Library at UCLA. Printed scores, books, and other materials once belonging to Finney are in the Music Library of the University of Pittsburgh (which is named after him) and the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

In the volume list which follows, titles in quotation marks are taken from the manuscripts themselves; other information has been supplied by the cataloger.

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Restrictions

Access

Open for research

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Administrative Information

Acquisition

Purchase, 1970

Processed by

Dell Hollingsworth, 1998

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 Theodore M. Finney Collection--Appendix 

I. The RISM Project -- An Overview

The RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales) was begun in the mid-1950s, its goal to update the two major existing finding tools for musical sources: Robert Eitner's Biographisch-Bibliographisches Quellen-Lexikon der Musik und Musikgelehrten and his Bibliographie der Musik-Sammelwerke des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts. The project was conceived of in two corresponding series:

Series A, a listing of sources by individual composer, to be divided into two subseries: A/I for music imprints before 1800, and A/II for music manuscripts ca. 1600-1800.

Series B, catalogs of systematically arranged repertories of music and writings about music.

The largest part of the project, RISM Series A/II, has been underway for more than a decade. It is coordinated by the RISM central office in Frankfurt, Germany, which receives contributions from more than thirty participating countries. While the other series have been and continue to be published in book form, Series A/II was considered to be better suited to an electronic format and was conceived from the beginning as an online database. More than 200,000 bibliographic records are now accessible.

The project's boundaries have been established with reference to composers' dates of birth and death. It includes manuscripts containing music by composers who were born after 1580, and who died prior to 1770. Because composers meeting these guidelines could have remained active through the mid-nineteenth century, and because their work has often been transmitted with music of composers born in 1770 or later, however, many manuscripts inventoried include music of later composers as well.

In the United States, RISM Series A/II has been the major project of the U.S. RISM Office at Harvard University since 1985. More information is available on the RISM home page at http://www.rism.harvard.edu/rism/Welcome.html.

II. Searching RISM Online for Finney manuscripts

Each volume in the Finney collection is represented by a main cataloging record in the RISM Series A/II database, which is located at http://www.rism.harvard.edu/rism/DB.html. Clicking on the Series A/II link in the database directory will take you to the search form. Select “Call Number” and “Contents” from the drop-down menus of search indexes at the left.

Combining a Call Number search (e.g. Finney 1) with a Contents search (using the keyword “contains”) will retrieve each main record. Exceptions are Finney 6, 9, 14, and 33-36, which are single works and can be searched by call number alone. Finney 46 cannot be searched by call number, but it can be retrieved with an ID Number search on MAHR1000112585. Finney 26 is not in the RISM database.

The main records for collective volumes have a “Linking notes” field containing an arrow icon. Clicking on the icon will retrieve records for all the items contained in that volume, sorted numerically. (By contrast, a call number search alone for a particular collective volume will retrieve all the records for that volume, sorted alphabetically.)

There are 53 main cataloging records and 2318 records for items within collective volumes. The online help documentation is thorough, and generally searching for materials in the database does not present a problem. However, it is not possible to quickly and easily call up a list of the 53 main entry records, so printouts have been made available along with the printed finding guide in the HRC Reading Room.

The Finney manuscripts housed at UCLA are represented by 207 records in the RISM database, which can be retrieved by combining the name Finney with the library sigla US LAum (for the Music Library) and US LAuc (for the Clark Library).

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Volume List with Composer, Title and Date of Manuscript

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 Theodore M. Finney Collection--Index 

(Including composers, former owners, authors of texts, and copyists.)

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