Two medieval manuscripts with a musical component are to be found in the Mellon Alchemical Collection, also preserved in the Beinecke Library. A third composer represented in the Mellon Chansonnier is Gilles Joye: the Chansonnier was last exhibited in Bruges as part of the exhibition commemorating the fifth centenary of Memling and was shown next to Memling’s portrait of Gilles Joye, now in the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth. In it are songs by two of the greatest names of medieval music, Johannes Okeghem and Guillaume Dufay. This beautifully calligraphed manuscript on parchment, clearly Neapolitan in origin and dating from the mid 1470s, may have been prepared for the wedding of Beatrice of Aragon, daughter of the king of Naples, and Mathias Corvinus. Of the two secular music manuscripts, one is a series of sixteenth-century hunting calls (MS 200) and the other, MS 91, one of the world’s most celebrated collections of medieval songs, known as the Mellon Chansonnier after its last private owner, who presented it to Yale in 1940. Shailor’s 1988 exhibition “The Medieval Book,” are MS 18 (a fourteenth-century French missal), MS 42 (a late fifteenth-century Florentine gradual), and MS 205 (a mid fifteenth-century processional that originated from a Dominican nunnery). Among the great treasures of the collection, some of which were part of Barbara A. Shailor’s Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Beinecke Library, the first volume lists and describes ten items that are chiefly or significantly musical, to which one must add seven that are partially so (often only because of the presence of an unrelated music manuscript “recycled” as binding material) the second volume contains seven musical manuscripts, and four manuscripts with a partial musical component and the third volume, devoted to the manuscripts that were collected for Yale by Thomas Marston, 1927, lists one important musical manuscript (the thirteenth-century Austrian missal catalogued as Marston MS 213). Sacred music also occupies a distinguished place among Beinecke’s early books and manuscripts. Both books were printed in New Haven both are in the Beinecke in several editions, as well as the three parts of Read’s Columbian Harmonist, published in 1793–95, and a number of subsequent editions. Yet it was in New Haven that there lived and worked one of the main artisans of the postrevolutionary American musical renaissance, Daniel Read, whose compositions first appeared in Simeon Jocelin’s The Chorister’s Companion, or Church Music Revised (1782) and, three years later, in his own American Singing Book, or, A New and Easy Guide to the Art of Psalmody (1785). The fact that sacred music needed advocates in colonial America is well documented in the Beinecke collections, with printed sermons entitled Regular Singing Defended (1728, by Nathaniel Chauncey) or The Nature, Pleasure and Advantages of Church-musick (1771, by Zabdiel Adams) and pamphlets such as The Lawfulness, Excellency and Advantage of Instrumental Musick in the Publick Worship of God Urg’d and Enforc’d (1763, by James Lyon). They are not precisely identified, nor do they seem, in any event, to have survived, as no such titles are recorded in the reconstituted 1742 Library preserved on the ground level of the Beinecke glass tower. One Psalm-Book is listed (was it the ninth edition of the Bay Psalm Book, published in Boston in 1698, the first one to contain music?), and one theoretical work on psalmody. Revealingly, there is no section devoted to music in its first printed catalogue, compiled by Yale president Thomas Clap in 1742 and published in New London the following year. It was not always so in the entire history of the Yale Library. Although it represents a numerically small proportion of the Beinecke Library’s some three-quarters of a million printed books and millions of manuscripts, music has recently come to represent a more and more significant part of the collections.
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