from Project Archivist Christina Taylor Gibson
The most interesting thing in the file is a nondescript piece of scrap paper, thin and cheap, halved. Scrawled slantwise across the middle are three words and a date: “Kevin Oldham died 3/10/93.” The discovery of this cryptic note in the middle of a file full of organizational paperwork sends me off on a journey to find out who Kevin Oldham was, why he died, and how an organization like ACA came to preserve the occasion in their official papers with this little note.
My first clues come from the context of the discovery itself. I’ve found the paper in a file labeled “AIDS Support Activities” which is in Box 43 of American Composers Alliance Official Records and Score Collections (part of the American Composers Alliance Official Records and Score Collections at Special Collections in Performing Arts at the University of Maryland (SCPA)). Most of the other papers in the folder document ACA’s involvement in the AIDS Music Emergency Network (AMEN). The stationery for AMEN lists both Rosalie Calabrese (then the Executive Director of ACA) and Kevin Oldham as members. All the papers in the file date from the early 1990s, approximately 1992-1994. In addition to the scrap of paper noting Oldham’s death, and formal correspondence on stationery, the file contains meeting summaries, advocacy plans, and press clippings.
AMEN flier - Box 43: “AIDS Support Activities”
By the time I make it to Google, I have already surmised that Oldham is a composer and performer who suffered from AIDS himself and was working to raise money and awareness when he died. Google adds three important things I did not already know: 1) Kevin Oldham was 32 years old when he died, 2) his Andante Tranquillo (youtube link) is gorgeous, 3) his papers are at the New York Public Library.
At this point, I have all the tools I need to research and write at least two term papers, one about Kevin Oldham’s legacy and activism, and another about the classical music community’s response to AIDS. If I continued to dig into the materials at SCPA, I would find the Michael Seyfrit collection, a significant personal collection documenting another composer affiliated with ACA who lost a battle with AIDS in the 1990s. Either topic promises to tell a great deal about the classical music scene of the 1990s, and neither would have emerged as potential topics if I had not browsed the American Composers Alliance collections, lingering in files that seem intriguing for one reason or another.
AIDS & Classical Music (press clipping) - Box 43: “AIDS Support Activities”
The process of learning through primary sources by cultivating serendipity is one of the great joys of humanistic research. At Special Collections in Performing Arts at the University of Maryland (SCPA), part of our mission is helping researchers find those moments in ways that further their growth as performers, scholars, and humans. We do this by partnering with organizations like ACA, and making their materials accessible to a broad community.
The Collections
The complete ACA collections, which include 25 linear feet of organizational records, over 1200 contemporary music scores, and over 65 linear feet of affiliated personal collections, play an important role in helping us realize that mission. The earliest item is a score dating from 1905, but the bulk of the materials are from the later part of the 20th century, particularly 1970 and forward. In this way, the ACA collections augment SCPA’s other holdings, including institutional records and scores from the 21st Century Consort and the Contemporary Music Project. Because of the overlap of years and the nature of the materials relating to each of these organizations, performers and researchers alike have a wide variety of material to draw from at SPCA when investigating the period, including scores, recordings, and administrative paperwork.
ACA has a foundational history that makes it particularly interesting. It was created in 1937 by Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Marc Blitzstein, Colin McPhee, Douglas Moore, Marion Bauer, and others, as one of a number of efforts to make art music composition a viable career path in a tenuous economic time. The stated mission of the organization was to increase the availability of scores, and to ensure fair compensation and credit to composers when their music was performed.
The future of ACA became more secure in 1944 when they entered an agreement with BMI, which allowed ACA to partner with a nascent licensing organization in a flexible rights model. This means that composers enter specific agreements with ACA for a score or a set of scores, permitting revenue-producing prints and performances in exchange for safe-keeping, promotion, and affiliation.
The support offered to ACA composers has been strengthened through an affiliation with SCPA, where the scores have been stored since 2000. In recent years, SCPA has created a searchable database of the scores, and finding aids for all the relevant collections, so that these materials are accessible and appropriately contextualized. Except for breaks in response to the COVID pandemic, reference and borrowing privileges have continued, and we anticipate a high interest in the collection post-pandemic.
Current Uses
From its inception ACA strove to provide services and representation to composers who did not have careers in the commercial market. It also participated in relevant advocacy and promotion efforts. As a result, ACA scores offer a collection of lesser-known works representing all styles and approaches toward composition, and the official records and archives provide context for the nature and value of those scores.
During the past several years the growing call for greater equity within the Classical music community has provided an opening to revisit collections like ACA’s, where composers facing bias found professional support. There is a treasure trove of music by composers of color among ACA collections-pieces often unavailable by any other means. Requests for such scores have been growing over the past few years; we routinely pull works by T.J. Anderson, Leslie Adams, Frederick Tillis, and Dorothy Rudd Moore.
One request for a Dorothy Rudd Moore score sent me on another research journey. What I found was an intriguing interrogation of the meaning of freedom in Moore’s opera Frederick Douglass, especially in the aria paraphrasing Douglass’s famous Fourth of July speech. When combined with the paperwork documenting the bias Moore faced in her own career, a rich meditation emerged. The result was a small exhibit of her scores and papers in the Lowens reading room outside SCPA’s offices, allowing many more people to become familiar with her art.
The ACA organizational papers document the continual work involved in keeping such composers in the public eye. It was this aspect to the collections that drew William Robin, Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Maryland. In spring 2019, he brought a class of students to SCPA to study ACA’s records as part of a graduate-level seminar. Each student was required to identify several documents of musicological significance; one student wrote a paper on the relationship between ACA and BMI.
In select instances composers have donated personal collections; these collections provide researchers with additional context for their work. For example, over the past several years we have heard from several researchers interested in studying the music and career of Aaron Avshalomov, who is known for his works blending Chinese and Western musical traditions. Researchers interested in Avshalomov come to us because, in addition to the 20+ ACA scores, the Avshalomov family donated around 30 manuscript scores and over 50 printed scores to SCPA as part of a personal score collection. Collectively these resources demonstrate the evolution of Avshalomov’s work over time, and allow intensive study of particular pieces and compositional themes.
Future Uses of the ACA Collections
The future of the ACA collections at UMD depends on our collective ability to recognize and capitalize upon the integral value of the materials at our disposal. In practical terms, the work runs the gamut from continued processing and preservation measures to creative collaborations with composers, performers, and scholars. SCPA and ACA continue to share the benefits of a close partnership with a shared goal to bring greater attention and appreciation to this body of American music.
Since the collections arrived, we’ve made a great deal of progress. Apart from some small exceptions, the ACA archive collections, official papers, and affiliated collections have been processed and are fully searchable through online finding aids and our score database. Now that the University of Maryland is reopened to full service, we are able to welcome researchers to our reading room, and we continue to provide assistance through the many virtual tools available to us.
We are aware that the research areas mentioned above are likely to be central to music studies in the future, including exploration of lesser-known composers and the study of the institutions supporting and furthering the creation of new music. SCPA’s focus on acquiring and promoting material that documents the new music scene in the U.S. will allow researchers to make connections among various collections in the repository, including those under the ACA umbrella.
And yet, although ACA materials have already been used in interesting, creative ways, there are so many more possibilities. The scores represent a wide range of styles and instrumentations-we have graphic, dissonant scores for just one instrument, traditional opera or symphony orchestra scores for large ensembles, and everything in-between. Most present an opportunity to play or hear music that is largely absent from the current soundscape, but is nonetheless representative. The history of ACA as an organization deserves more attention in our narrative of American music history, because it shows the benefits and frustrations of collective advocacy over nearly a century. Most of all the documentation available allows researchers to trace connections between the sound and culture of ACA to the American zeitgeist more generally and back to other performing arts organizations in the country.
Benefit Concert for United AIDS Relief Effort - Flier, 1993
Funding continues to be an obstacle for both organizations, and there will always be projects that we want to launch or accelerate but cannot. Right now there is an ongoing effort to deal with preservation issues across the score collections. Several scores suffer from sticky ink where pages stick together in such a way that peeling them apart renders the scoring illegible. When we run across such a score, we send it to preservation where they freeze it so that the pages can be separated, and refile it with interleaving pages to prevent the problem from returning. Right now this project is slow and piecemeal-we simply do not have the staff and freezer space to do large batch remediation. Similarly we would like the database that allows us to search across the collections to be publicly available through the SCPA website, but that is a large project that requires time and money resources.
This is not to say that preservation is our only or greatest wish for the ACA collections, although it is a necessary focus of our attention. Unfettered by practical concerns, there are endless possibilities for these holdings. For example, imagine a post-COVID concert reflecting on pandemic music that used the AIDS crisis materials mentioned at the beginning of this article. It could involve performances of music by Michael Seyfrit and Kevin Oldham alongside exhibits of related archival materials, and classes on the music and advocacy.
No one should be limited by my imagination. The best way for each of us to ensure the continued health of the ACA collections is to simply stay engaged with them. If we keep having a steady stream of performers, composers, scholars, and researchers asking questions about this repertoire and organizational history, we will be as relevant (or more) to the next generation of musicians as we are to this one. SCPA’s staff is here to help folks realize their creative projects, in all forms and contexts
Christina Taylor Gibsonfrom The 21st Century Bulletin: Volume 2, October 2021.
The relationship between SCPA and ACA is part of a wider circle that includes the UMD School of Music, with two distinguished faculty scholars who are American Music specialists, and numerous performance faculty who have an outstanding record of commissioning and premiering new music and new American works in particular. The Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts and the National Orchestral Institute are also partners in commissioning and presenting new American work, so the environment at UMD comprises a synergistic merging of interests that strongly support the mission of ACA to preserve the past and build a future for new American Music.
Robert L. Gibson
Professor of Composition (UMD) and Board of Governors (ACA)