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COLLECTION |
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COLLECTION |
"The collection was not brought together by writing big checks to leading dealers. On the contrary it represents days and weeks spent in the bookstalls and shops of London, Paris and Berlin, thumbing over dust-laden stacks of music and piles of books. It represents many hours of study, many hundreds of letters. It was never the sort of collection gathered just for exhibition purposes, but a working library..."[1]
Alexander Mackay-Smith's "working library" today forms the nucleus of the University of Virginia's Music Library. The Mackay-Smith Collection, presented to the University in 1946, includes complete runs of what at that time constituted virtually all the major musicological journals, an impressive array of major reference works, bibliographies, printed library catalogues, monographs, and, above all, scores.
An accomplished amateur violinist, Mackay-Smith acquired much of his chamber music for purely practical purposes. His chamber music partners included his brother, Carleton Sprague Smith, flutist and chief of the New York Public Library's Music Division from 1931 to 1943 and again from 1946 to 1959; Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, pianist, composer, and patroness of music; and Constance Darden, violinist and violist, wife of the University of Virginia's President, Colgate Darden.
The collection's greatest strength is in contemporary editions of 18th-century instrumental music, particularly trio sonatas, which art now housed in the Special Collections Department of Alderman Library. The majority of the works represented in this catalogue were purchased in Paris and London between 1928 and 1934, while Mackay-Smith spent several years in Europe after graduating from Harvard in 1924. He recalled that, "I bought my first early music from Harold Reeves in London in the summer of 1928 when I was able to acquire virtually all the 18th century editions, particularly of trio music, which he then had in stock, going back not only through his current but also through earlier catalogues, picking out numbers which remained unsold. It is almost a shame today to think of the prices at which such things were then available, one or two pounds apiece." [2]
Following World War II, Mackay-Smith deposited his entire music collection with the University of Virginia Library. He had decided that, "The University seemed like a logical place to deposit [it], since my children are descended from Thomas Jefferson; since, as you well know, Jefferson played the violin almost every day of his life..." [3] "It is particularly fitting, I think, that the chamber music for violin which Thomas Jefferson so enjoyed playing should now be fully represented at the University which he founded." [4]
The Mackay-Smith Collection in fact shows a remarkable similarity to the music section of Jefferson's own catalogue of 1783. It is scarcely coincidental that the trio sonatas of Carlo Antonio Campioni (1720-1788), one of Jefferson's favorite composers, are especially well represented. Jefferson had at one point taken the trouble to transcribe some 38 incipits of works by Campioni already in his library, with a note in the margin to a London dealer asking for any other works he had also composed, "Solos, Duets, or Trios. Printed copies would be preferred..." [5]
It was in much the same systematic fashion that Alexander Mackay-Smith developed his own collection of instrumental chamber music, with special emphasis on the trio sonata. A lawyer by profession, Mackay-Smith might also confess, as had Jefferson, that "music is the favorite passion of my soul." [6]