Here is the second installment relaying information about newly accessible special collections from Section Head Vincent Novara and the Music Division’s archival processing teams.
The Music Division is again sharing with you some new finding aids from a recent batch completed collections. As a reminder, our finding aids (contextual guides to archival collections) are now appearing in a new look. This design makes use of three tabs organized in a bar (of two shades of blue) for researchers to select the information they wish to consult. Along the left side of the page is a grey sidebar that contains quick links to navigate the finding aid. Later this year, we will have more to say about the features of our new archives management system. Now, to the collections …
The papers of lighting designer and educator Beverly Emmons is a collection we seem to have a lot to say about. Archivist Morgen Stevens-Garmon has presented on this collection at conferences and within the Library, as well as published an earlier blog post, “Finding Gus Solomons jr in the Beverly Emmons Papers.” We are that excited about this collection. Spanning from 1935 to 2020, the collection contains records that Emmons created and collected primarily as a lighting designer for the stage but also includes material connected to her work as an arts administrator, student, and educator. Project Files is the largest series and features work that Emmons created and collected while designing lighting for concerts, dance, musicals, operas, plays, and other staged productions. Here, researchers can discover annotated scripts, clippings, color gels, contracts, correspondence, cue sheets, design renderings, drawings, fabric swatches, facilities schematics, financial records, hookups, lighting and equipment information, magic sheets, production documentation, and programs. This series also contains approximately 2,500 oversized renderings of ground plan, light plots, and section drawings for venues across the United States and western Europe. This is the crux of her creativity. The collection also offers her Business and Personal Papers for work outside the field of lighting design, such as her time as artistic director at Lincoln Center Institute and other arts organizations. Emmons’s personal papers include calendars, programs, and her student assignments from high school and college. Also featured are the records of Technical Assistance Group (TAG) Foundation, which Emmons co-founded in 1972 with Maxine Glorsky and William Hammond. TAG Foundation provided financial and technical advice and support to non-profit performing arts organizations. The smallest series, Teaching Materials, contains lecture notes and resources that Emmons created and collected while leading classes and workshops on various aspects of lighting design for stage. She taught lighting design at several colleges in the northeast and created a website “The Lighting Archive” to serve as a resource for students. Emmons’s digital files are still in-process and will be available in the future.
The Rusty Warren Music Manuscripts document the musical numbers Warren performed throughout her successful career as a bawdy musical comedian, as seen in her live shows or heard in her popular and high-selling recordings. The materials date from 1892 to 1970, the bulk of which covers the later portion of that time from about 1959 to 1970. Though a classically trained pianist and one-time instructor at the New England Conservatory, the collection focuses on her music materials from the comedy career for which she is best known. This includes manuscript scores, parts, lead sheets, lyric sheets, and fragments of music that Warren used in her acts or recording sessions. Manuscripts often note collaborations with composers, arrangers, and lyricists, such as Kellie Green, Bob Ayars, Richard “Dick” Hieronymus, Bill E. LeBlanc, Bob Sisco, Marge Cameron, Karen Anders, Baird Jones, Ron Kramer, Len Livera, Kelly Lee Gordon, Tupp Turner, and Marty Helm. The collection also contains a variety of songbooks, scores, parts, and lead sheets that Warren annotated.
The Music Division is currently home to three collections pertaining to Stephen Sondheim – most notably his own papers. Correspondence he penned, however, is found throughout more than 30 of our holdings with many of his collaborators and peers. Yet, the Larry Miller Collection on Stephen Sondheim primarily documents a friendship struck up through a correspondence between the composer and Miller. Featured here are Sondheim’s side of the conversation over a few decades. The collection also features correspondence from some of Sondheim’s associates, such as Arthur Laurents, Hal Prince, Mike Nichols, Mary Rodgers, and others. The collection spans from 1959 to 2006 and also has programs from Sondheim musicals and concerts, as well as award ceremonies where he was honored. There are also Miller’s subject files related to Sondheim and his work. Larry Miller (1935-2018) worked in the advertising industry in New York City during the 1950s and then moved in 1963 to Boston, where in 1979 he co-founded Larry Miller Productions, Inc., which offered marketing, creative, and technology services for ad agencies and corporations.
Lastly, we have the Ken Gross Research Materials on Cy Feuer, a research collection featuring an oral by an author on an important theater producer and director, as well as composer and trumpeter. While this collection primarily consists of interview transcripts documenting Gross’s recorded conversations with Feuer in 2001 and 2002, including a subject index to the transcriptions, as well as Gross’s business records of this research project. The collection also has Gross’s proposal and initial draft for “Raising the Curtain: The Amazing, True Rocket Ride of an Obscure Brooklyn Horn Player into the Last Great Broadway Showman,” a book later published in 2003 as “I Got the Show Right Here.” The unpublished portions of Gross’s oral history with Feuer will prove a great primary source for scholars looking to dig deeper into the history of this celebrated Broadway figure.
To see the post on finding aids that preceded this, see: New Finding Aids from the Music Division. To browse more finding aids, please visit: https://www.loc.gov/research-centers/performing-arts/researcher-resources/finding-aids/. To request materials from any of these collections, please be sure to reach out through the Performing Arts Reading Room Ask-a-Librarian. We hope that you will visit soon and have a look at these inspiring archival resources. Enjoy!