When he finally performed the suites, which had been considered to be pedestrian exercises for cello students, in a concert hall, they were received with great acclaim. At the age of 13, Casals discovered the sheet music in a second-hand bookshop off Barcelona’s Ramblas, was gripped by what he saw, and spent many years mastering the suites. Siblin relates how an almost forgotten and greatly underrated work by Bach was resurrected by the great Catalan cellist Pau (Pablo) Casals (1876-1973). The book is written in an accessible American middle-brow non-fiction style – heavy-handed editors in American publishing houses ensure that every non-fiction book reads as if written by the same author for readers with a high school education, but that is a subject for another ramble. These thoughts were prompted, in a rather roundabout way, by reading a book about Johann Sebastian Bach’s six suites for unaccompanied cello, The cello suites: in search of a baroque masterpiece, by Eric Siblin (2011). I became increasingly aware of librarians’ world-wide and timeless striving for universality, for building collections that are comprehensive in respect of genre, geography, and time – a self-imposed burden which causes librarians and information workers always to be looking both backwards, to retrieve, record and preserve the documentary heritage of the past, and forwards, to keep up with and anticipate the flood of new information-bearing media and to ensure that they can provide future users with prompt access to it.
While working on the first chapter of my book on international and comparative librarianship (Lor 2019), I spent some time looking at the history of international librarianship, and I tried to identify a suitable periodization for the topic. I seem to get less done, probably because I’m slower.
I shall indulge myself by meandering through it as thoughts strike me, in no particular order and to no particular plan.Īs I grow older, I have become more aware of the passing of time. It is a pervasive, multidimensional theme, which impacts the library and information professions in many ways.
#Bach original manuscripts series#
The Bach Archiv foundation said that "technically highly demanding, these organ works document the extraordinary virtuoso skills of the young Bach as well as his efforts to master the most ambitious and complex pieces of the entire organ repertoire".This is intended to be the first of a series of blog posts under the rubric, Reflections on librarians and time. The organ works that Bach copied were chorale fantasias called Nun freut euch lieben Christen gmein (Be joyful ye Christians) and An den Wasserfluessen Babylons (By the waters of Babylon). The researchers say the latest find is more significant than the discovery last year of a previously unknown vocal piece by Bach, which was also among the papers removed from the library.īach's script was quite distinctive, the researchers said, although there was some similarity to Boehm's. They confirm that he was a student of the organist Georg Boehm in the north German city of Lueneburg. The fire at the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, part of a 16th-Century palace, destroyed about 50,000 books.Īccording to Bach experts Michael Maul and Peter Wollny from the Bach-Archiv foundation in Leipzig, the manuscripts shed new light on the career of the young Bach. The Bach manuscripts survived because they were stored in the building's vault. They were among archives taken from a library in Weimar, east Germany, which was ravaged by a fire two years ago. The handwritten manuscripts, dating from about 1700, are copies of organ music composed by Dietrich Buxtehude and Johann Adam Reinken.Īt the time Bach was 15 - and these are the oldest known manuscripts by him. Researchers in Germany say they have unearthed two previously unknown manuscripts written by Johann Sebastian Bach when he was a teenage organist. Experts say the composer's script was quite distinctive
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