Significant music acquisitions 2016-2017
Some of the significant acquisitions in music acquired last year are highlighted here. A more complete list may be found on the Music Library’s web page. We are grateful to our endowed fund donors whose contributions made most of these purchases possible.
Expositions and world fairs were responsible for creating a lot of popular music, as the collection recently added shows. The sheet music provides a fascinating view of these events, from the colorful cover art, to the stories and descriptions contained in the lyrics. The 1893 Chicago, 1904 St. Louis, and 1915 and 1939 San Francisco fairs are especially well represented. The collection includes more than 20 songs from the 1915 Panama-Pacific Fair held in San Francisco. Some of them are Romanoff Caviar, Meet Me in Frisco and We’ll Go to the Fair, That’s How They Spent Their Honeymoon, 1915 Rag, Frisco You’re a Bear. The earliest example in the collection is The Exhibition Quadrille, its cover shows a lithograph of the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.
