Hidden in Plain Sight

Written in one hand in Latin and Italian, with examples in Hebrew and Greek, this volume is a handbook on alphabets, leter writing and language, calendars, chronology, and music theory. The first part of the volume includes Giovanni Andrea Salici's Osservationi nella lingua vogare and Girolamo Capharo's Orthografia, as well as alphabetical tables and astronomical diagrams. The final twelve leaves of the manuscript are devoted to music theory: Regola per imperare il canto figuarto and Regola per impare il canto gregoriano.

These two leaves, originally from an English printed instruction on playing the gittern, were discovered bound into a copy of Anglo-Saxon laws published in London in 1568. Presumed to be a Tudor version of a 1551 French publication by Adrian LeRoy (Briefve et facile instruction pour apprendre la tablature), the instruction does not otherwise survive in either language. The English gittern of this time is thought to have been a four-course guitar with gut strings.

A chronicle of events in Florence beginning with the assassination of Alessandro de'Medici in 1537, to the year 1555, this volume details numerous civic festivals and celebrations. The single musical work found among the volume's pages is a partsong, transcribed alongside the description of its performance on carnival night, 16 February 1550. The chronicler recorded that one of the floats in the carnival procession featured the jaws of Hell and a large devil, flames spewing from his mouth. A group of singers, accompanied by ducal troops dressed in red, sang the song "Uscite dello inferno, anime furiose." This anonymous work is written in the tradition of the Florentine canti carnascialeschi, which were typically performed at festivals during the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Much of the surviving repertory remains unattributed, though the genre is also known from settings by, among other composers, Heinrich Isaac and Alexander Agricola.

A presentation score of Rossini's 1823 opera inscribed: "Mr. Chs. Cardini of Leghorn who on the 23d of February 1826 was elected an honorary member of the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia humbly presents to the society itself." Cardini is likely Carlo Cardini, a tenor active in Italy in the 1820s.
 

Joseph J. Mickley maintained an active career in Philadelphia as a piano builder, tuner, and teacher; he also repaired stringed instruments and sold accessories. His customers included some of Philadelphia's musical and social elite, among them Charles Hupfeld, Benjamin Cross, William Fry, R. La Roche, the Biddles, and the Wetherills. His day book includes a record of his accounts from January 1840 through May 1848. Detailed are his services and the fees paid by his customers (who lived as far away as Wilmington, Delaware) for piano lessons and tuning and for the sale of instrument-related items, including bows, rosin, and strings.

The photographer and artist Félix Nadar (1820-1910) maintained an autograph album in his Paris studio in which he collected the signatures of his sitters. More than 400 names are represented in the album, comprising notables from the world of music, art, literature, dance, theatre, and politics. Most of the signatures are accompanied by a greeting or a representation of the signer's art--a drawing, poem, or musical fragment. In addition to Offenbach, whose improvised setting of an Henri Nicolle poem is exhibited here, the album contains signatures and autograph musical fragments by other composers, including Rossini, Thalberg, Verdi, Berlioz, and Johann Strauss.