Constructing a Relevant Past: Mel Powell’s String Quartet of 1948

Jeff PerryLouisiana State University

jperry@lsu.edu

From the Register to the Mel Powell Papers, Yale University Library:

Series I contains an extensive collection of Powell's music from the mid-'40s to the early '90s, variously in the form of sketches, masters, photocopies, and publications. Powell's manuscripts are themselves a history of the technology of music reproduction. Up through the 1960s, Powell made master copies in india ink on transparent paper, and then produced blueprints from these masters. By the early 1980s, improved photocopiers enabled him to write his master copies with pencil on ordinary paper. Just a few years later, he began using a Macintosh computer; the voluminous sketches for "Duplicates" are mostly computer printouts. Some of Powell's published works have been professionally engraved, but many are reproductions of his own impeccable calligraphy.

[…][Quartets, strings. Beethoven analogs] Quartet for two violins, viola and 'cello

/ Mel Powell. 1 ms. score (35 p.) ; 36 cm. 

Holograph (photocopy)Cover: "String Quartet" crossed out; "Beethoven Analogs" written in orange

ink. 

SELECT LIST OF SOURCESCaplin, William E. 1998. Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Function for the

Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (Oxford University Press, 1998).

Hepokoski, James, and Darcy, Warren. 2006. Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late Eighteenth-Century Sonata. (Oxford University Press, 2006.)

Neumeyer, David. The Music of Paul Hindemith. (Yale University Press, 1986.)Perry, Jeffrey. “Mel Powell and the String Quartet.” In Intimate Voices: The

Twentieth Century String Quartet, Vol. 2. (University of Rochester Press, 2009).

Register to the Mel Powell Papers MSS 70. Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University. http://www.library.yale.edu/musiclib/muslib.htm

Straus, Joseph N. Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition. (Harvard University Press, 1990.)

Straus, Joseph N., Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory, 3rd edition. (Prentice Hall, 2004).