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As the first body anywhere to concern itself with the performance of ‘early’ music, the Academy of Ancient Music (founded in 1726) is of some historical importance. When, in 1802, the society was eventually disbanded, its famous library was broken up and dispersed via the London sale rooms. Later on, some fifty or so manuscripts and a small group of prints somehow found their way into the library of Westminster Abbey, where they have lain unnoticed ever since. Included in the collection are several anthologies of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century madrigals and motets, but also, and more importantly, a large number of orchestrally accompanied psalm settings and mass movements by a variety of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composers, mainly Italian, chief among whom are Bassani, Bononcini, Colonna, Lotti, and Pergolesi, as well as the virtually unknown Francesco Negri, whose Gloria was hugely popular in late eighteenth-century England. Also included is the autograph of yet another Crucifixus setting by Antonio Lotti, most probably written for the Academy in 1731, and a totally unknown stile antico setting of the Credo composed for them by Fortunato Chelleri, who was briefly a member in 1726–7. This article identifies all those manuscripts (and prints) in the Westminster Abbey collection (and elsewhere) which were once in the Academy’s library or were in some way connected with that body of musicians. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A previously unknown manuscript (shelfmark BRm630.85Go42) at the Henry Watson Music Library, Manchester, contains a number of pieces by the composer Sir Edward Golding together with a small collection from Matthew Locke's Little Consort. On the basis of the appearance of the copying and the presence of inscriptions apparently indicating price, the manuscript is identified as an example of a 'manuscript publication'. The consequences of this hypothesis are explored throughout the article, both in order to elucidate the likely origins of the source and to evaluate its potential to increase our understanding of the wider phenomenon of manuscript publishing in mid-seventeenth-century England. Considerable attention is also devoted to establishing the identity of Sir Edward Golding (a composer who seems to have been misidentified in an earlier study), and to the analysis of the pieces from Locke's Little Consort, the texts of which shed new light on the history of this work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offers a look at the extent of the music collection of Thomas Bever, an English music collector in the 18th century. Role of private collectors in the preservation of rare music books and manuscript; How the World War II reduced and damage some of the collections of Bever; Description on the sources discovered at the library in Hamburg, Germany.