The music of three Dublin musical societies of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: The Anacreontic Society, The Antient Concerts Society and The Sons of Handel. A descriptive catalogue.

The assimilation of this thesis began as an attempt to highlight that which lay uncatalogued, and therefore unknown about, in libraries. This was due to an unfortunate lack of qualified staff, time, or funding. Enquiries into the collections in The Royal Irish Academy of Music revealed the music of the three societies upon which this thesis focuses. Although musicologists have attempted to gather information from these collections, it was almost impossible. The scores and manuscripts were distributed throughout the entirety of the storage stacks of the library in disarray: uncollated and uncatalogued. The librarian, Philip Shields, had attempted to collate the items. However this was a time-consuming task and one which was impractical due to other responsibilities. The first task in compiling these catalogues was to examine every item which was stored in the stacks of the library to ascertain those which may have been used by the three societies under examination: The Anacreontic Society, The Sons o f Handel or The Antient Concerts Society. A large quantity of scores and manuscripts were discovered from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The decision was made that, for this purpose, only items which bore the mark of the society would be included in the catalogue. A digital image was then taken of the title page of each item (if one was extant), and of each distinguishing feature of the items. This resulted in a ‘virtual’ copy of the collection, from which the catalogue was compiled. These digital images are used throughout the catalogue for reasons threefold. First, the items are at least 150 years old, and many are in bad condition. One will now be able to view the scores and manuscripts without touching the items. Secondly, the inclusion of the images removes subjective descriptions of the imprints, stamps, signatures, pictures and other idiosyncrasies found within the collection. Thirdly, musicologists will be able to compare or identify, with relative ease what was not ascertainable within the scope of this project. The accompanying CDs include photographs taken from the aforementioned ‘virtual’ copy of the collection. Each contains directories which divide the photographs into specific areas e.g. copyist signatures, markings of societies, publisher’s markings, local supplier’s markings etc. The individual photographs names are referenced within the context of the catalogue. These photographs highlight other possible areas of further research, for example into publishing in the nineteenth century