Klarinet Archive - Posting 001119.txt from 1997/12

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: Rosario Mazzeo's music collection
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1997 11:59:20 -0500

At Rosario's funeral, I was chatting with Al Rice of Claremont
college. He told me that Rosario's wife was planning to donate
his rather extensive music collection to the University of
California, Santa Cruz which is where Rosario was teaching prior
to his death, though he may have stopped teacher there altogether
some time ago. I did not keep up with it and I believe that
Mark Brandenburg is now teaching there.

Anyway, Al was asked by Rosario's wife to catalog the entire
collection and she could not have chosen someone better qualified
than he to do the work. He has the right combination of knowledge,
reliability, and scholarship to enable him to figure out the
extraordinary collection that Rosario built up over his entire
working life.

Al just sent me a copy of the catalog and it runs to 1734 individual
items, both printed and manuscript. This occupies 34 typed, single-
spaced small print pages. In addition there are 32 items that are
photocopies in microfilm form.

Now I always knew that Rosario had a big collection by virtue of
having seen the cabinets that held it over my many visits there.
But I had no idea that it was this big, this broad, or this deep.

I won't even try to show the comprehensiveness of the collection
by mentioning this or that extremely rare item, there are so many.
And I also cannot possibly estimate the value of this remarkable
collection, even though I had to do just that before donating
my collection to the ICA library. It is a very valuable and
extensive collection and I doubt if there is a bigger one in
private hands anywhere in America today. There are few musical
schools that could match it.

I mention this because when Bellison died, his fabulous collection,
including his clarinet choir music all in manuscript, just
disappeared and it was years before anyone found out that Mrs.
Bellison had donated it to Hebrew University in Tel Aviv.

So for those interested in the future, look for it at the Univ.
of California, Santa Cruz (which, for you old timers, is where
Tom Lehrer still teaches).

Would you believe that Rosario's collection contains the manuscript
of John Bavicchi's divertimento for violin, clarinet, and trombone?
Now that's a combination!

=======================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
Rosanne Leeson, Los Altos, California
leeson@-----.edu
=======================================

   
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