October 2013 Dinner Meeting

Speaker: Shawn Keener

“Five Centuries of Music and Stage Discoveries from the Mayer Brown Libretto Collection”

Eminent early music scholar Howard Mayer Brown (1930-1993) bequeathed to the Newberry Library his rich collection of texts related to theatrical music, including hundreds of opera libretti, orato- rios, cantatas, ballets, festival books, poetry anthologies, and program booklets. The material – spanning the 16th through the 20th centuries, with an emphasis on Italian and French libretti of the 17th and 18th centuries – was cataloged during the Newberry’s recent, years-long project cataloging its collection of French pamphlets. Keener will explore the process and pleasures of cataloging Brown’s collection. She will consider bibliographic control, highlight the interplay of form and function in the materials, and share the team’s favorite discoveries, from snarky marginalia to foundation documents in music history.

Keener is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago while also working in Special Collections there; she has studied in Italy on a Fullbright, and has spoken to the Renaissance Society, the American Musicological Society, and many symposia.