THE SHEET MUSIC PROJECT
Saturday, January 7, 2012 What is Sheet Music? The only definition of sheet music that can be applied with certainty is to define it purely by physical format. Some have suggested that sheet music applies only to “popular” music, but a close look at these publications over the course of history shows that the musical content of these publications is as varied as the history of music itself. Especially in the mid-nineteenth century a publisher may have issued sacred and secular songs, Lieder, opera excerpts, potpourris, waltzes, marches and descriptive etudes side-by-side. Only the physical format remains constant. The difficulty occurs with the definition of “popular.” What is “popular” to one group may be “classical” to another. Musical taste is, like art and fashion, subject to extreme changes and subtle nuances. On this basis then, sheet music is best described as single sheets printed on one or both sides, folios (one sheet folded in half to form four pages), folios with a loose half-sheet inserted to yield six pages, double-folios (an inner folio inserted within the fold of an outer folio to make eight pages) and double-folios with a loose half-sheet inserted within the fold of an inner folio to produce ten pages.
About the Collection at Duke
The Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University holds an important, representative, and comprehensive collection of 19th and early 20th century American sheet music. The Historic American Sheet Music Project provides access to digital images of 3,042 pieces from the collection, published in America between 1850 and 1920. Drawn from the collections in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, this selection presents a significant perspective on American history and culture. The sheet music chosen for digital reproduction represents a wide variety of music types including bel canto, minstrel songs, protest songs, sentimental songs, patriotic and political songs, plantation songs, Civil War songs, spirituals, dance music, songs from vaudeville and musicals, “Tin pan alley” songs, and songs from World War I. The collection is particularly strong in antebellum Southern music, Confederate imprints, and Civil war songs. Also included are piano music of marches, variations, opera excerpts, and dance music, including waltzes, quadrilles, polkas, etc. In addition, some of this sheet music is illustrated. These illustrations represent an important, and in some cases almost unique, source of information for popular contemporary ideas on politics, patriotism, love,sentiment and more.
An examination of sheet music reveals something of the inner life of the American citizenry in a way distinguishable from diaries and newspaper accounts, while also more intimate than the historian’s descriptive synthesis. Use of these materials in conjunction with letters and diaries can make history more personal. A soldier’s mention of a song sung around the campfire in a letter to his family makes us more aware of the daily life of that man. To actually see the music and sing it ourselves transports us to that place and time for a moment. By examining the illustrations we can also study not only changes in fashion and dress, but expectations of appearance and behavior. The illustration series “Society and culture—Women” gives an interesting overview of the “ideal” woman from 1850 to 1920. We also can view less comfortably (through more modern eyes) overviews of how some groups Americans were depicted both in the illustrations and in the music.
The collections in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University have been acquired in a wide variety of ways. Many items are the gifts of generous donors. Some have been acquired by purchase. The acquisition of music related to Southern history, especially Confederate imprints, has been supported by the funds of the George Washington Flowers Memorial Collection.
The National Museum of American History’s Archives Center has a wonderful and extensive collection of sheet music. This tour shows you just a small sample of the sheet music that has a transportation theme. When I did my research at the Archives Center, I was looking for automobile-related imagery, so the covers you see together here are weighted toward the car. But all forms of transportation were widely used on sheet-music covers.
By the end of the 19th century, as theater, vaudeville, and the music circuit centralized, the stage was set for 20th-century show business to become a big commercial enterprise.
Publishing songs was a part of that business. A lot of America’s popular-music publishing industry was centered in New York City, on Tin Pan Alley. One 1890s Tin Pan Alley song, After the Ball, sold millions of copies. Others sold more modestly, but sheet music was widely available. Although performers used professional sheet music, scores sold to the public had lively and colorful covers. Sometimes they featured a performer’s photo, as well as an illustration. The covers can be used as historical evidence of what ideas and images were circulating in popular culture in the early 20th century.
Transportation played an important role in the spread of popular music. Performers traveled by trains, using the extensive rail network to perform in cities and towns around the country. And, as the covers and lyrical content of sheet music marketed for home use suggest, trains, automobiles, trolleys, bicycles, and mobility were featured in the music that the railroads helped disseminate.
In the 1890s, bicycling became a popular craze among those who could afford the new personal mechanical form of transportation. Both men and women rode bikes, and for women, they were often seen as providing the rider personal freedom. This sheet music cover links cycling to Coney Island, a site of opulent hotels and recreation since the 1870s. 
The Tolley Car Swing Song, 1912
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The Trolley Car Swing Song, from 1912, can be seen as a window into how gender played a role in people’s understandings of public conveyances.
Between 1905 and 1936, when these two songs were written, the numbers of cars on American roads rose from a little over 77,000 to just over 24 million. The covers of these pieces of sheet music can be read as a reflection of that change: in In My Merry Oldsmobile, the automobile is front and center, dominating the picture. In Trailing Along In A Trailer, the title suggests the trailer moves itself. And it, as well as the numbered road system, are much more visually dominant than the automobile
As cars became a dominant force in American culture—and a dominant form of transportation—even the fuel they used became the stuff of song. The sheet music for Gasoline was available with a number of different colored covers. Its lyrics extolled the virtues (and bemoaned the cost) of a product that, in the 19th century, was essentially a by-product of the petroluem distilling process.
Background of Music Publishing in the United States
Sheet music publishing was well established in the United States by the early 19th century. Much of the music was printed with engraved plates, although in the 1820s there was a fair amount of music published using the lithographic process. Lithography was not very common until the 1840’s, when the development of chromolithography made illustrated title pages economically feasible. Engraved and lithographed music continued to be issued throughout the period of this project. It is interesting to note that many of the Confederate imprints in this collection were lithographed - a process that requires less equipment and materials. Metal was, of course, a commodity required for the war and would have been in very short supply for civilian use. A fine example of Confederate lithography is Edmond Newmann’s Battery Wagner, lithographed by B. Duncan in Columbia, South Carolina in 1863 (left). The period after the Civil War saw a great increase in music publishing activity. The stereotype process allowed publishers to issue huge numbers of music for mass consumption. In his article, “Publishing and printing of music” in the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, D.W. Krummel suggests that this period could be called the “age of parlor music.” Significant numbers of sheet music continued to be issued in the twentieth century, centering around the area of Manhattan known as “Tin pan alley.” The sheer number of “hits” emanating from publishers such as Leo Feist, T.B. Harms, Irving Berlin, Shapiro & Bernstein, Von Tilzer and M. Witmark is remarkable. Sheet music became so popular that it was even issued as supplements to newspapers.
With the rise of parlor music in the 1860’s came a realization on the part of music publishers of the commercial value of printing advertising on the otherwise blank pages of music. Catalogs of songs and music were sometimes printed on earlier publications (see Schreiner’s catalog in Battery schottisch), but by the end of the nineteenth century lists of songs with melodies (see The Old Man Ain’t What He Used To Be) or entire pages reproduced for the user to “try over on your piano” became standard (see Over There). Companies even issued series of sheet music to help advertise their products, notably the Emerson Drug Company’s promotion of Bromo-Seltzer. During World War I publishers even promoted the war effort by using the margins of the music for such slogans as “Food will win the war, don’t waste it” (see The Dream of a Soldier Boy).
Preservation issues
One of the difficulties of caring for sheet music collections is that they tend to be treated as printed ephemera. Music was intended to be used, and people did exactly that. It may have rested on the music rack or in the piano bench, but, generally people played or sang the music. Anything that is used (well-loved, perhaps) will show signs of wear. Stains, tears, sewing thread repairs, and mending tape all appear in this collection. Some items survived better than others. Much of the music printed from engraved plates in the nineteenth century is in fairly good condition simply because the paper was usually made of rags rather than wood pulp. Paper that was used for printing from engraved plates tended to be a little thicker than paper used for ordinary purposes. Music printed on the cheap paper made of wood pulp tends to become very brittle, even in a short period of time. Newspaper supplements are precarious condition as they are printed on thin paper made of wood pulp and were probably expected to be of very short term use to the reader. In order to preserve the items, they have been placed in acid-free folders in acid-free boxes and housed in low light conditions in climate controlled stacks. By scanning the music, Duke University hopes to increase the use of the material without wearing them out!
Concert To Celebrate This Collection
On April 3, 1998, Ameritech, the Library of Congress and Duke University Libraries celebrated the awarding of the grant with a concert and dance demonstration. The Pitchforks, an a capella student ensemble led by Ben Ward, presented the music listed in the program and Barbara Dickinson, director of the Dance Program at Duke, demonstrated and then taught the audience how to perform the Cakewalk.
The American Memory Project- Duke University
The Library of Congress- Historic Sheet Music Collection
America on The Move- Historic Sheet Music Collection
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