Music Meets Drama

  Festival March/Festival Prelude   Should the title be “Festival Prelude” or “Festival March” or “March Prelude” or simply “March,” should it be called “Festival Overture” or maybe just “Prelude?”  Is the work to be scored for full orchestra, smaller orchestra or arranged for organ, piano and violin?  These are the unnerving tasks of assigning a title and deciding what instrumentation works best for the music you are hearing in your mind.    Eventually Gena Branscombe used the titles “Festival Prelude” and “Festival March” interchangeably.   Writing to her publisher, Arthur Schmidt, on August 11, 1913, she reveals that she is busy orchestrating her “Festival March” and wonders, “How can one ever write well for orchestra - if one never can hear what one has written?”   Nearly a month later she tells Mr. Schmidt that her “Festival March” for orchestra was completed.   As a self-promoter, Miss Branscombe dined with a Mr. Reinald Werrenrat...

Collecting manuscripts, letters and autographs as a business and hobby dates back to Aristotle who amassed a library of maps and scholarly papers.   During the era of the Ptolemys beginning in 306 BC, autographs were acquired and preserved.   Empires conquering other empires helped themselves to these collections storing and preserving them until some other empire “borrowed” them.   Centuries of fallow collecting occurred until the 17 th century when a rekindling of interest in autographs and preserving documents became de rigeur.  England created a market place for autographs with auctions.   Collecting became a profit centered business.   Ushering in the Victorian era, people created autograph albums of a wide range of people who were unconnected.   One autograph may have been from a person famous in one field of expertise with the next autograph from someone far ranging from that knowledge.   Autograph hunting became an insatiable mania!...