Music

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Debussy, Claude. Trio En Sol, 1880. Music Library.

Piano Trio in G Major was written by an 18-year-old Claude Debussy in 1880 in Fiesole, Italy. Most of the autograph of the work was thought to be lost until it was discovered in 1982 among the papers of Maurice Dumesnil and his wife Evangeline Marie Lehman, which were donated to the School of Music in the 1980s. Dumesnil was a pianist and conductor who studied with Debussy and was gifted this manuscript by Debussy’s wife Emma in 1932.

On October 20th 1985 the Michigan Chamber Players premiered the performance of Debussy’s Piano Trio in G Major at Rackham Auditorium. The entire manuscript is available through HathiTrust.

 

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Cat's Duett and Cat's Galop, by Berthold. From the Edison Sheet Music Collection, Music Library.

In the early 20th century, the Edison Phonograph Company amassed a large collection of 19th-century American sheet music in order to select from it works to record for the American public. Thomas Edison believed that having an enormous collection, and selecting the best from it, was a more scientific approach to recording music than that which his competitors had adopted. When the recording company closed in 1929, the sheet music was shipped from New Jersey to Henry Ford’s Edison Institute in Dearborn, the precursor to the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. Upon Ford’s death, the collection was inherited by his niece, who stored the music for years in a barn in Ypsilanti before selling it to Bly Corning, a Flint-area manufacturer, in 1964.

Corning gave several thousands of pieces to the William L. Clements Library and to the Music Library through the 1970s, and in 1989, largely with funds provided by an anonymous donor, the Library acquired the approximately 115,000 remaining American pieces. Today, large-scale efforts to digitize this collection and increase its accessibility are ongoing.

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