Rice Collection for 17th-Century Music Research
Contributions are Needed for the Rice Collection for
Seventeenth-Century Music Research!
Advisory Board
Jeffrey Kurtzman, Washington Univ. in St. Louis
Anne Schnoebelen, Rice University
Gregory Barnett, Rice University
The Rice Collection for 17th-Century Music Research was conceived by Jeffrey Kurtzman and Anne Schnoebelen to gather in one place research materials no longer used or needed by themselves and other scholars. Active scholars in the seventeenth century typically collect large quantities of microfilms of prints and manuscripts, facsimiles or films of documents, transcriptions of early editions and manuscripts, records of research, databases of various kinds, and sound recordings. When scholars retire, these materials are often no longer needed and tend to disappear from sight, whether they are given or bequeathed to widely scattered university and college libraries, only to languish unused there, or they eventually disappear with the distribution of a scholar’s estate to his or her heirs.
The purpose of the Rice Collection for 17th-Century Music Research is to encourage scholars to donate or bequeath no longer needed research materials to a single institution, where the accumulation of such material will eventually constitute one of the most significant collections of seventeenth-century music research resources outside Italy. The Rice Collection, held by the Fondren Library at Rice University, Houston, Texas, has already received a large quantity of material from Stephen Bonta and Anne Schnoebelen, and both Schnoebelen and Jeffrey Kurtzman have made provision in their wills for the transmission of their research materials to the Collection. Several other senior scholars have likewise promised that no-longer-needed materials will be donated or bequeathed to the Rice Collection. In order to build this Collection toward its ultimate goal, the Advisory Board of the Collection wishes to encourage other scholars to make provision for the transmission of their seventeenth-century research materials to the Rice Collection when they are no longer required for the scholars’ own research.
