Jacob Coopersmith collection of Handeliana
Collection
0089-SCPA
Jacob M. Coopersmith (1903-1968) was an American musicologist, Handel scholar, performer, conductor, teacher, and music librarian. In 1932, Coopersmith completed his dissertation, "An Investigation of George Friedrich Händel's Orchestral Style," the first thematic catalogue of Handel's works, at Harvard. He published a critical edition of Handel's Messiah in 1947, incorporating all known variants of text and music. The Jacob M. Coopersmith Collection covers the period from 1709 to 1967, with the bulk of the materials dating from 1930 to 1967. The collection consists of books, scores, manuscripts and facsimiles, catalogues, libretti, and articles collected by Coopersmith during his career.
There are no restricted files in this collection.
Materials from this collection must be used in the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library's Irving and Margery Morgan Lowens Special Collections Room, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, Monday through Friday. Contact the curator for an appointment: http://www.lib.umd.edu/scpa/contact
7.50 Linear Feet
The Jacob Coopersmith collection of Handeliana covers the period from 1709 to 1967; the bulk of the materials date from 1930 to 1967. The collection consists of books, scores, manuscripts and facsimiles, catalogues, libretti, and articles collected by Coopersmith during his career as a musicologist and Handel scholar.
Jacob Maurice Coopersmith (20 November 1903 - 12 May 1968) was a musicologist, Handel scholar, performer, conductor, teacher, and music librarian. He was educated at New York University, Columbia, and Harvard, where he completed his dissertation in 1932, a twelve volume thematic catalogue of Handel's works, "An Investigation of George Friedrich Händel's Orchestral Style."
Coopersmith published many articles on Handel and other musical topics and, in 1947, a critical edition of Handel's Messiah, which incorporated all known variants of text and music. He was a member of the American Musicological Society (AMS), for which he served as Treasurer (1950-1953), Vice-President (1954-1955), and at various times was a Member-at-Large and served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the AMS. Coopersmith held the post of Senior Music Cataloguer at the Library of Congress from 1949 until his death.
This collection is organized into seven series.
No provenance information could be determined in the files at the University of Maryland. It is quite likely that the collection was a gift of Coopersmith's widow sometime in the mid-1970s. The present collection incorporates a gift originally made to the University of Michigan and transferred to UMD in June 2011.
Part of the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library