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December 8, 2005

Music library scores Moe manuscripts

Librarian Jim Cassaro may want to add a word of thanks to hungry termites and poet Alfred Corn when he catalogs the latest large donation to the music department’s library.

Both played a role in prompting Pitt music professor Eric Moe to donate the drafts and manuscripts of his musical compositions to the Theodore M. Finney Music Library.

Of course, the biggest thanks goes to Moe himself for the delivery of manuscripts dating from the late 1970s to the present. The composer was honored last week at a reception commemorating the gift — the library’s first such acquisition from a faculty member.

“I was ready to give my drafts and materials to someone,” Moe said, confessing that his personal system of preservation was decidedly random.

“When the piles on the piano got too big, I’d throw them into a box. When there got to be too many boxes, I’d throw them in the basement,” he said.

He got a bit of a wake-up call when he discovered that termites had eaten his undergraduate work — devouring all but the very edges of the pages. A comment by poet Alfred Corn, who mentioned over dinner one night that he’d sold his papers, prompted Moe to ponder further.

“I thought, ‘Ha, they are worth something,’” he said. Selling the boxfuls of materials wasn’t for him, however. Impressed with the work music librarian Cassaro has done to the build library’s collection, he decided to keep them in good hands close by.

“I felt like they should be here,” he said as he looked over the pages recently in their new home in the basement of the Music Building.

“The kick is seeing the manuscripts themselves,” he said. Holding them in his hands prompts memories of the writing, performing and recording of the works, he said. “It takes me back,” he said with a fond smile of recognition as he gently leafed through the pages. Moe said he feels closest to the works he’s played himself — either solo piano or piano plus ensemble — but it’s impossible to choose an overall favorite.

In spite of the sentiment the scores elicit, leaving the papers to the library’s care wasn’t difficult. “When I’m done with a piece, all the stuff that went into making it has served its purpose,” he said. “The focus becomes getting a good performance.

“It’s a nice thing to have your work cataloged and preserved. It’s very nice that someone’s looking after it.”

He plans to continue giving his work to the library for safekeeping. “I write four or five pieces per year. They end up here,” he said.

And that’s fine by Cassaro.

“You try to collect as much as you can of your (faculty) composers’ output,” he said.

“We have recordings of all Eric has put out in the library’s collection, but not everything he has written has been recorded,” he said.

Cassaro could not place a dollar value on the donation, which includes a draft of Moe’s piano concerto “Kicking and Screaming” and a manuscript of his 1996 Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra commission, “No Time Like the Present.”

On some of the oversized leaves of manuscript paper, entire sections are crossed out or revisions pasted overtop the original pages.

“I think they’re probably priceless,” Cassaro said.

Moe’s initial donation, made last year, gave the library his works from 1979 through 2000, which have since been cataloged and archived. Arranged chronologically, they now reside in acid-free folders inside a dozen archival storage boxes in the library’s closed collection. His latest donation will bring the library’s holdings of his work up to date.

The collection includes both pencil drafts and computer generated final manuscripts for most of the works, Cassaro said.

“It shows the processes the composer has gone through from the conception through the finished piece,” he said. With the widespread use of computer composing software supplanting the old fashioned way of notating manuscripts by hand on paper, the ability to examine a composer’s changes is being lost.

“This is why this is so valuable for research,” he said.

Moe agreed.

He characterized his method of composing as “a lot of pencils and erasers,” adding that he dislikes the limitations of composing on computer. “You have to work too linearly,” he said, adding that when he writes, he likes to have the freedom to pencil in carets and add entire sections, or cross out parts that don’t work. It’s only when the piece is finished that he will engrave the manuscript on computer.

“The fascinating thing is to look at any composer’s work or any writer’s work and see how they arrived at artistic decisions,” he said.

“It gives insight into an individual’s creative process. I’m hoping someday this will allow people to start doing that with my work.”

—Kimberly K. Barlow

Filed under: Feature,Volume 38 Issue 8

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