{"id":211,"date":"2012-03-23T17:29:56","date_gmt":"2012-03-23T17:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/?p=211"},"modified":"2012-03-23T17:29:56","modified_gmt":"2012-03-23T17:29:56","slug":"connecting-to-past-lives-through-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/2012\/03\/23\/connecting-to-past-lives-through-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Connecting to past lives through music"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Posted by Jared Cowing, M.L.S. candidate at U. of Rhode Island, and Cataloging Coordinator at U. of Hartford, Allen Memorial Library]<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>As part of an internship in my pursuit of a library science degree, I\u2019ve been cataloging a collection of music from the Watkinson Library.\u00a0 While I\u2019d expected to find interesting items, I was surprised at just how unique many of the materials were, and how intriguing their history proved to be.\u00a0 Connecting some items to an interesting person in history took a little research, such as in the case of items signed by previous owners who turned out to have significant local notability.\u00a0 One item, however, was easily recognizable as truly special at first glance as its history was written out right on the title page.<\/p>\n

This item was a collection of piano trios by French composer Ignaz Pleyel<\/a>.\u00a0 While written by a composer who is today lesser known, Pleyel\u2019s music is not necessarily rare or difficult to obtain.\u00a0 However, this particular copy had a sizeable note dated 1861 and written by Elias Nason, a Massachusetts clergyman and author.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>According to the note, Elias obtained the piece in 1861 from the ruins of a house belonging to Confederate cavalry captain Mottrom Dulany Ball.\u00a0 The house had been plundered in the Union takeover of Alexandria, Virginia in April of that year.\u00a0 Nason refers to the plunderers as the \u201cGaribaldians,\u201d who were the 39th New York Infantry Regiment, known as the \u201cGaribaldi guard\u201d as it was comprised primarily of Italian immigrants who had previously fought under Italian revolutionary Giuseppi Garibaldi.\u00a0 Interestingly, Garibaldi himself had been offered a leadership position in the war by Abraham Lincoln, which he turned down as he expected both control of the entire Union army and the outright abolition of slavery as conditions of his joining the war effort.\u00a0 As for Captain Ball, he was captured during the Alexandria campaign and survived the war only to later in life make his greatest contribution to history as the highest ranking US official in Alaska, which was at that time still an unorganized possession of the United States government.\u00a0 He then went on to become Alaska\u2019s first unofficial delegate to the United States Congress, and then Alaska\u2019s United States district attorney.<\/p>\n

What struck me was not only how diligently the history of this piece of music was recorded, as though Elias Nason knew that in the future this piece would make its way to a library where his note would be read with great interest, but also how this item–which at first glance could be disregarded as mundane–represented a tangential intersection of the lives of such a widely separated group of people: a Union regiment of Italian revolutionaries, a Massachusetts clergyman, and a Virginia-born confederate captain who went on to become one of the founders of Alaskan government.\u00a0 It just goes to prove that it\u2019s not only in movies like \u201cThe Red Violin\u201d that you can find a fascinating story of many different people whose lives are all linked together by music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Posted by Jared Cowing, M.L.S. candidate at U. of Rhode Island, and Cataloging Coordinator at U. of Hartford, Allen Memorial Library] As part of an internship in my pursuit of a library science degree, I\u2019ve been cataloging a collection of music from the Watkinson Library.\u00a0 While I\u2019d expected to find interesting items, I was surprised […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":217,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions\/217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}