Music Resources (UNH Durham)

Amy Marcy Cheney (1867-1944) was born in Henniker, New Hampshire. In 1883, at age sixteen, she made her professional debut as a pianist and later a soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. After her marriage in 1885, to Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, she shifted emphasis from performance to composition.

The Adrienne Fried Block papers consist of background research materials for the book Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: The Life and Works of an American Composer published by Oxford University Press in 1998.

The Alvah Sulloway Collection consists of thousands of pieces of sheet music, advertisements, subject files, and more. Some materials from Sue Stewart Sulloway are also included. The collection has been broken into 13 different segments to make materials easier to find.

Milton Prince Appleby (1923-2018) was a fiddler and farmer from Rochester, N.H., of New Brunswick French/English and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) heritage. This collection consists of scrapbooks, photographs, family correspondence, and related ephemera collected by Milton Appleby over the course of his musical and farming career. Detailed scrapbooks document the local musical and farming scenes in great detail, while photographs and ephemera illustrate the importance of oxen and fiddling in his life.

Charlie Baldwin was a prominent leader of square dancing in New England. The Charles Baldwin Papers consist of extensive correspondence, dance notation, some historical materials, and paperwork from running the New England Square and Round Dance Camp at Camp Becket, MA. The highlight is ca. 1500 letters to and from every well-known (and many lesser known!) callers and dancers across the country.

Bob Bennett was a teacher and caller of New England style square dances. He attended the Folkways School in Peterborough NH with Ralph Page and Gene Gowing in the summer of 1949. The collection consists of calling notebooks, music books, festival programs detailing his 1940s-1950s involvement in the New Hampshire Folk Festival, NEFFA, and other New Hampshire dancing activities, among other items.

Robert Sage Wilber, clarinetist, saxophonist, composer, arranger, and educator, was born in New York City on March 15, 1928. The Bob Wilber papers are divided into seven series. Series 1, Personal Life, documents Wilber’s life. Series 2, Musical Career, comprises the bulk of the collection and details his career from the early years to 2006.

The Country Dance and Song Society Collection includes office records, correspondence, programs and bulletins of events, various publications produced by CDSS and other related groups, subject files pertaining to various other folk dance and song groups and topics, and hundreds of photographs. The collection also contains the personal papers and collections of several individuals prominent in the study and teaching of Anglo- American folk dance and song, including: Mary A. Buckie, May Gadd, Russell and Frances Houghton, Frances H. Jackson, Mary P. Judson, Kate Van Winkle Keller, Genieve Taylor Shimer, Melville Smith, Stanley Watkins, and Evelyn K. Wells.

Some examples of folk dance recordings from the New Hampshire Library of Traditional Music and Dance.

The Dorothy Prescott collection conprises papers documenting the formation and operation of the New Hampshire Library of Traditional Music and Jazz (NHLTJ) from 1978 through Prescott’s death in 1988. The collection also includes memorabilia not realted to the library, such as articles, reviews, photos, and publicity that illuminate the Boston-area jazz scene, primarily of the 40s and 50s. Finally, there are photos, publicity, and epehemera related to the first eleven years of the Traditional Jazz Series, which began in 1979.

The Edward MacDowell Papers primarily contains musical works by MacDowell in both manuscript and printed form. However, the collection also includes correspondence from Robert MacDowell to his mother, a notebook, a sketchbook, letters from Marian MacDowell to Robert Manton, magazine articles and newspaper clippings, information about the MacDowell Colony, photographs, and a scrapbook commemorating Peterborough’s celebration of Mrs. Marian MacDowell’s 95th birthday.

Most of the Kerry Elkin Papers consists of sheet music, reflecting a wide variety of styles and interests. This includes Swedish, Cape Breton, Scottish, Irish, international folk dance, singing squares, swing dance, and New England genres. Some compositions are original; many others are hand-transcribed. Copious dance diaries exist for the years 1987-1993, along with dance cards, chord charts, and field and commercial recordings.

This collection consists of ca. 1500 78s, 45s, and 33 1/3 RPM records, as well as a small amount of cassette tapes. It is housed with the archive’s main audio collection and is fully searchable in the repository’s catalog.The collection is particularly strong in Baltic and Slavic music produced in the United States and Europe. A through collection of Western square dance repertoire, New England contra dance, English country dance, and Morris dance repertoire is also included. Of particular note are the early Ralph Page recordings on Moses Asch’s Disc New York label.

Henderson N. White owned and operated a musical instrument manufacturing business in Cleveland, redesigning twenty eight instruments during his career. The H.N. White Company produced the “King” brand of instruments. The Henderson N. White sheet music collection consists of 16 individual pieces of sheet music, 14 of which were published by the H.N. White Co. of Cleveland.