Tobias gives an insight into his fascinating research, searching for 'missing scores'
If you look into the concert programs of major orchestras, violin concertos always are an important and quasi necessary part of a season. But the performed repertoire centers around a few dozen works and among them only a handful British concertos. There are different reasons for that which I don't want to discuss and which are hardly going to change. But the tragic side effect is, that the hundreds of other British violin concertos more and more disappear from the music world's sight. It is no revolutionary conclusion that among these “disappearing works“ are master pieces which just had no success due to bad circumstances. For this reason it would be an important goal to preserve documents about these "disappearing“ compositions to give future musicians the chance to study them and bring them to life at a later point in time. To reach this goal it would be important to create something like a "violin gathering point“ where information and documents like scores and recordings are archived and made available for studies.
Over the past 15 years I researched about the compositions for violin concertante in the 20th century to build exactly this "violin gathering point“. I collected information about nearly 13‘000 compositions and published them in an encyclopedia titled "The 20th century violin concertante“. Additionally I searched for recordings of these compositions. This led to an extensive sound archive with recordings of more than 6000 compositions. I also collected hundreds of scores, so the "violin gathering point“ already and really exists – it is my archive!
In case of scores, the music publishers and music information centres do a good job. Therefore I focussed on unpublished scores which are not well represented through the mentioned institutions. Although I could find information of the whereabouts of many scores I failed for around 2000 compositions, among them also British works. For this reason I would like to ask for the help of the public to find the location of scores or manuscripts of violin concertos by, for example, Paul Corder, Henry Geehl or Theodore Holland to name just a few. One can find a complete list of missing scores of British works here. For a complete list containing works by composers from all countries I would refer to my website at:
www.tobias-broeker.de/lost-scores
I would be grateful for information on any composition on that list, especially about the location of a score or the autographs of course. This information will be included in the next edition of my encyclopedia and so will be available for the public. I publish a new edition each summer, actually the second edition is available free of charge as an ebook from my website!
If I get the chance to find a manuscript autograph I typeset the composition and make them also available free of charge from my website. For example one can find the pdf-scores for the "Concertstück for violin“ by Bruce Steane and the "Harlequinade for violin and orchestra“ by Gerald Walenn - both British-born composers - on my homepage.
I am looking forward to any comments. You can reach me through my website or via the e-mail address violinconcerto@gmx.de
Where are the scores resp. manuscripts of the following compositions by British-born composers? I only included works by deceased composers for which I could not neither find a score nor own a sound recording, which means that I don't know anything about the compositions. Of course I would like to change that.