THE BENJAMIN BRITTEN THEMATIC CATALOGUE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ONLINE RESOURCE

THE BENJAMIN BRITTEN THEMATIC CATALOGUE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ONLINERESOURCEAuthor(s): Lucy WalkerSource: Fontes Artis Musicae, Vol. 56, No. 2 (April-June 2009), pp. 138-149Published by: International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres(IAML)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23512560 .

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THE BENJAMIN BRITTEN THEMATIC CATALOGUE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ONLINE RESOURCE

Lucy Walker1

English Abstract A project to create an online thematic catalogue of the complete works of Benjamin Britten is un

derway at the Britten-Pears Foundation in Aldeburgh, UK. This article introduces the project, de scribes various printed predecessors to the current project, and outlines the numerous challenges

involved in cataloguing Britten's extensive manuscript sources and in deciding the best way to rep

resent this material online.

French Abstract

Un projet de création de catalogue thématique en ligne des œuvres complètes de Benjamin Britten est en cours au Britten-Pears Foundation d'Alderburgh, GB. Cet article présente le projet, décrit les diverses version imprimées qui précédèrent ce projet, et souligne les nombreux défis auxquels il a

fallu faire face pour le catalogage des nombreuses sources manuscrites de Britten, et pour trouver

le meilleur moyen de représenter ce matériel en ligne.

German Abstract

Bei der Britten-Pears-Foundation in Aldeburgh (Großbritannien) wird derzeit an einem Projekt zur Erstellung eines Werkverzeichnisses von Benjamin Britten gearbeitet. Dieser Artikel führt in das

Projekt ein und beschreibt verschiedene im Druck erschienene Vorläufer der aktuellen Arbeiten.

Außerdem skizziert er die zahlreichen Herausforderungen, die sich dabei einerseits durch die

Katalogisierung der umfangreichen, handschriftlichen Quellen Benjamin Brittens und andererseits

durch die Entscheidung für die beste Methode zur Darstellung der Materialien im Internet stellen.

The development of an online thematic catalogue of Benjamin Britten's complete works has been in progress since June 2006 at the Britten-Pears Foundation (BPF) at The Red

House, Aldeburgh.2 In collaboration with the School of Music at the University of East

Anglia, the project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the first

phase is due for completion in May 2009. The Red House - Britten's home from 1957 un til his death - is an increasingly active tourist attraction, not only because of the annual

1. Lucy Walker is the Research Officer for the Benjamin Britten Thematic Catalogue project based at the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh. The author wishes to thank James Spence, Sharon Choa, Chris Grogan and Caroline Harding for proofreading and many helpful comments.

2. Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) was one of the foremost British composers of the twentieth century. He was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk and, apart from three years spent in the USA during World War II, lived in Suffolk his whole life.

138



THE BENJAMIN BRITTEN THEMATIC CATALOGUE 139

Aldeburgh Festival, and contains an extraordinarily large and diverse collection relating to the lives and works of Britten and Peter Pears3 including approximately 97% of Britten's music manuscripts.4 Manuscript sources will constitute the core of the Britten Thematic

Catalogue and include text sources, holographs, copyists' manuscripts, interim material -

proofs and dyelines, often annotated and corrected by Britten - and Britten's conducting scores. Britten did not generally discard draft material, and neither did he adopt the prac tice of destroying works he was not happy with, which is why the collection of manuscripts is so unusually complete, and why the cataloguing task is so dauntingly large. Further

more, as the BPF holds in its archive not only manuscripts but photographs, correspon dence, performance ephemera and other collections relating to Britten's career, the the matic catalogue can also have realistic (although long-term) ambitions to incorporate references to relevant archival material into its records in order to provide as rich as pos sible an intellectual resource.5

Links with the School of Music at UEA are also strongly embedded in the short- and

long-term aims of the project. The connection between the BPF and the School has been

strong since the latter's inception in the mid-1960s. Britten was involved in an advisory ca

pacity in its establishment, and his conviction that the department should offer practical composition and performance as well as academic studies remains reflected in the syl labus to this day.6 Recently, these links are becoming more firmly established as a result of the thematic catalogue project through teaching and student involvement at The Red

House, and a Study Day at UEA was hosted by the project in April 2008. The project is staffed by three members of the School of Music (Dr Sharon Choa

(Project Director, and Lecturer), Dr Lucy Walker (Research Officer), and Jonathan Manton (Cataloguer)) and the project manager is from the BPF (Dr Chris Grogan). Since

June 2006 the team has established the structure of the catalogue and, with the project's technical consultant, produced a beta version which is already online. By May 2009 we will have catalogued Britten's extensive juvenilia and provided entry level records for the ma ture works, and we are currently in the process of planning for a further three years in or der to complete the project for the composer's centenary in 2013. Before describing the

project in detail, the first part of this article will discuss some earlier attempts to catalogue Britten's music and the way in which the current project both assimilates and transcends

previous efforts. The second part will describe the resources and content of the thematic

catalogue.

Precursors to the thematic catalogue

Two catalogues of published works were printed during Britten's lifetime: one to celebrate

his fiftieth birthday in 1963, and another in 1973 to mark his sixtieth (both were published

3. British tenor (1910-1986) and Britten's professional and personal partner from 1939 until Britten's death.

Pears also lived at The Red House from 1957 until his death.

4. Some manuscripts are held by other archives, such as the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge collection at the

Library of Congress and the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, and a very few have been lost over the years

(including two cabaret songs from the late 1930s entitled 'Give up Love' and 'I'm a Jam Tart').

5. Other archival projects at the BPF include: the cataloguing of the photographic collection, a Heritage

Lottery Fund project to catalogue the concert programmes, and a complete catalogue of items in The Red

House.

6. For further details see Michael Sanderson, The History of the University of East Anglia (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002), 94-98.



140 FONTES ARTIS MUS1CAE 56/2

by Britten's publisher, Boosey & Hawkes).7 These volumes listed original Britten works

as well as arrangements and realizations (including the folk songs and the Purcell real

izations) and the 1963 catalogue also included a list of unpublished works that had at some

stage been publicly performed. A four-page supplement to the 1973 catalogue was pub lished by Boosey & Hawkes in June 1978 listing Britten's final works. In 1999, Paul Banks8

published a further catalogue of published works which drew on the earlier volumes and

also included numerous posthumous publications.9 Table 1 below shows the number of

works listed in each instance.

1963 1973 1978 supplement 1999

Original works 91 130 10 202

Arrangements and realizations 38 43 2 64

Unpublished works 58 Not listed Not listed Not listed

1963 1973 1978 supplement 1999

Original works 91 130 10 202

Arrangements and realizations 38 43 2 64

Unpublished works 58 Not listed Not listed Not listed

TABLE 1 Previous Britten Catalogues

What may seem a surprising increase in original published works between the 1973 and 1999 volumes (far exceeding those listed in the supplement) indicates the extent to which Britten's unpublished works were made available during that period. Of the 58 unpub lished pieces listed in the 1963 catalogue, 23 had been made available by the 1999 cata

logue. The latter catalogue also includes some other works of juvenilia, such as Elegy for solo viola (composed August 1930, published 1985) and Rhapsody for string quartet (com

posed January to March 1929, published 1989). It should be explained that the function of these three early catalogues differs from that

of the one currently under construction. Their primary aim was to list all works which were publicly available for sale or for hire, and included arrangements of Britten's works

by other people. The bibliographical information for each work includes date of composi tion, dedication, place of composition (in the Boosey & Hawkes catalogues only) and the date and performers at the première - but does not include details of the manuscript sources. As Banks wrote in the introduction to his catalogue 'the result offers an outline of Britten's extraordinary creative fecundity, but an outline only.... The full picture will have to wait for publication of a complete catalogue of his works, and for this reason no

numbering of Britten's works ... has been attempted here.'10 It is principally the scale and

complexity of the cataloguing task that has in the past inhibited the production of a com

plete thematic catalogue of Britten's works; and before describing the current project in more detail it is worth mentioning an earlier attempt to conceptualize a Britten thematic

catalogue.

7. Benjamin Britten: A Complete Catalogue of his Published Works (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1963);

Benjamin Britten: A Complete Catalogue of his Published Works (London: Boosey & Hawkes and Faber Music,

1973). 8. Paul Banks was Librarian at the BPF from 1989-1998.

9. Paul Banks, Benjamin Britten: A Catalogue of the Published Works (Aldeburgh: The Britten-Pears Library, 1999).

10. Ibid. ix.




In 1992, Banks had devised a theoretical model for cataloguing Britten's manuscripts although he was not at the time planning to produce a complete thematic catalogue-and published an article outlining the various problems he encountered.11 Banks's article il lustrates very lucidly the extent of the particular problem of preparing a catalogue of Britten's works. The composer's productiveness and, more particularly, his retention of all

paper sources pertaining to the process of composition, performance, and publication, means that there is indeed a daunting 'plenitude' of material and this situation remains the same in 2008 as it was in 1992.

Banks chose the church parable Curlew River, op. 71 (1964), as a sample record, largely because of the complexity and extent of its source material. In the sample entry the sources are listed according to the type of material - libretto, holographs, etc - and in clude full bibliographical details for each manuscript source. Furthermore, the relation

ships between the different types of material - for example, which libretto was the basis of which holograph sketch - are also detailed, based on a series of stemma describing the

likely sequence of compositional activity. The sample entry also includes details of pro duction material, such as costumes and set designs, and extensive footnotes providing fur ther notes concerning the compositional process and other personnel involved. In total, the entry runs to some seventeen pages of A4; as Banks concedes, the 'richness of the re source presents the major practical difficulty. Although Curlew River presents an excep tional case, a rough estimate suggests that for the oeuvre as a whole a two-volume cata

logue threatens, and individual entries could be of considerable size and complexity.'12 Indeed, even though Curlew River may be an 'exception', entries attempting a similar level of completeness would certainly have resulted in an unmanageably-sized volume, espe cially if the juvenilia were to have been included.

Banks was, of course, providing a theoretical model for a printed thematic catalogue in 1992, well before the common use of the internet and even longer before internet re

sources of this nature became a viable possibility. As such, he faced the problem of

compressing vast amounts of information into a coherent form on the printed page. This

is the same problem that D. Kern Holoman faced in compiling the Berlioz catalogue in the 1980s. The Catalogue of the Works of Hector Berlioz embodies years of dedicated research and is monumental in its thoroughness; but its densely-packed references and reams of

incipits over several pages render it unwieldy as a reference resource.13 It is perhaps only in the last four or five years that generating academic material di

rectly on the internet has become an option. Concern that reliance on the internet has contributed to a cheapening or a diminishing rigour of scholarly enterprise, while valid in some cases, surely does not apply when the internet can provide infinitely more depth and potential for extendibility than a printed volume. Furthermore, as I shall now de

scribe, the structure and content of the thematic catalogue would not have been possible without online functionality and were indeed partly inspired by the internet's potential for deep-linking and data harvesting.

11. Paul Banks, 'Encompassing a Plenitude: Cataloguing the Works of Benjamin Britten', Studia Musico

logica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, T. 34, Fasc. 3/4 (1992), 317-343.

12. Ibid. p. 320.

13. D. Kern Holoman, Catalogue of the Works of Hector Berlioz, Hector Berlioz: New Edition of the Complete

Works, Vol. 25 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1987).



142 FONTES ARTIS MUSICAE 56/2

The Britten Thematic Catalogue

The Structure

While our solutions to the thematic cataloguing task have diverged quite significantly from the outline suggested by Banks, there are several points of contact and the original

challenge - the richness of the resource - remains the same. By exploiting the potential of the internet, however, the dissemination of the material can be carried out in a clearer

and more structured way; and instead of a stream of densely-packed data over several

pages, detailed source information and incipits can be found in discrete sections that are

accessed via a central front page. Each catalogue record, identified by a unique 'BTC'

(Britten Thematic Catalogue) number, will provide a portal for a wide variety of docu

mentary information, including: full details of manuscript sources, incipits in both music notation (transcribed from original manuscripts into a notation software programme) and

audio form, bibliography and discography, details of published scores and subsidiary publications, a chronology of composition, links to performance ephemera (such as con cert programmes, Britten's and Pears's programme notes, and reviews), and a live per formance calendar. We also intend to incorporate links to entries from Britten's diaries

(from 1928 to 1938 when he kept an extensive journal) and eventually to correspondence, photographs, archival video footage and the catalogue of The Red House collections. BTC1-200 are already available for viewing in a beta version of the catalogue at:

www.brittenproject.org.14 Although the online beta catalogue is still in the process of being refined, its function

ality is representative of our aims for the complete catalogue. Figure 1 shows the types of materials which are already accessible in the catalogue along with the material we aim to include in the future. A great deal of the data has been, and will continue to be, newly cre ated for the thematic catalogue and stored on a local server; but the catalogue also har vests data from a wide variety of extant online sources, and the technical structure un

derpinning it has needed to be robust enough to negotiate complex data flows. We are in the process of refining a relational database schema which captures the properties of mu sical works and we are also designing methods of integrating data describing resources related to those works (manuscripts, publications, performances, etc.) into our main data base.15 Figure 2 illustrates how the thematic catalogue front pages are populated not only from the newly-created data but by other datasources: the BPF's library and archive cata

logues, and the BPF's main website. The structure of the catalogue was further determined by the decision to catalogue the

manuscripts archivally rather than bibliographically. This decision was reached during the early stages of the project and was based on, among other factors, the arguments put forward by Jude Brimmer (archivist at the BPF): 'A ... problem with bibliographic de

scription for non-printed music material is its inability to record contextual and hierarchi cal information regarding the manuscript's origins.'16 Brimmer is referring here to the

14. Figures correct at the time of writing, although there will be more catalogue records available in due

course. The BTC numbers are currently provisional and will inevitably be subject to change as the cataloguing work progresses.

15. For further details on the technical structure see http://www.brittenpears.org/Ppage-/projects/ahrc/ technical.html.

16. Jude Brimmer, 'Providing a National Resource', Journal of the Society of Archivists 26/2 (October 2005), 215-232 (p. 222).




Each record includes some or all of the following:

BTC number and title

Subtitle

Opus number Performing forces

Text information

Performing forces Duration List of acts/movements

Dedication information

Composition notes

Incipits

and links to*:

Notation/audio incipits Manuscript sources

Publications

Recordings Production material

Bibliography Reviews of first performance

Photographs Current/recent performances Audio/visual material Britten's diary

Correspondence

*Bold type denotes elements already available on the beta version of the thematic cat

alogue. Non-bold type denotes elements which we hope to add later.

Each record includes some or all of the following:


Subtitle

Opus number Performing forces

Text information

Performing forces Duration List of acts/movements


Composition notes

Incipits

and links to*:

Notation/audio incipits Manuscript sources

Publications



Photographs Current/recent performances Audio/visual material Britten's diary

Correspondence

*Bold type denotes elements already available on the beta version of the thematic cat

alogue. Non-bold type denotes elements which we hope to add later.

FIGURE 1 Catalogue Records

particular problems of cataloguing manuscript - or non-printed - material bibliographi cally, where the object rather than the work is the focus. Hitherto, manuscripts have been catalogued in a bibliographical system17 and there are undoubtedly certain advan

tages to the system, particularly in relation to the physical description and location of a

manuscript 'object'. What a bibliographic system does not reveal, though, is the manu

script's context; and the advantages of cataloguing Britten's manuscripts by work are ob vious within a work-led structure. An archival system can provide a context for a manu

script by locating items within a hierarchical, archival system - a 'tree' - rather than as

17. See Banks, 'Encompassing a Plenitude', 319.




Local server §

Notation/audio incipits Reviews of first performances Audio/visual material

Britten's diaries

Front page information

Archive catalogue [CALM]§

www.brittenpears.org

(research resources) • Manuscript sources • Photographs • Programmes [in the

performance data

base] • Summary descriptions

of all collections • Minutes and papers of

English Opera Group • Britten's financial

papers • Administrative papers of

the London Boys'

Singing Association • Full inventory of

The Red House

(forthcoming)

Front page content and links


Subtitle

Opus number

Performing forces

Text information

Performing forces

Duration

List of acts/movements


Composition notes

Incipits

Notation/audio incipits

Manuscript sources

Publications



Photographs Current/recent performances Audio/visual material

Britten's diaries

Correspondence

BPF WebSite!

www.brittenpears.org • Bibiliography • Live performance

calendar • Biographical

information about

Britten and Pears • Britten in the news • Repertoire guides • Introductory films

to major works • Other projects at

the Foundation • Information about

visiting the Red

House

Library catalogue [Liberty 3]§

www.brittenpears.org (research

resources) • Publications • Sound and video

recordings

§ Elements in bold are those which feed into or will feed into the thematic catalogue. Elements in

italic are other features of the standalone catalogues

FIGURE 2 Data sources for the thematic catalogue




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part of a 'flat', bibliographical system (see figure 3).18 This appears to be or considerably more use in terms of tracing the chronological context and, more importantly, the com

positional process of a work and applies equally well to the juvenilia as to the larger-scale works. However, while the online functionality has allowed us to present information in a

more comprehensive way than would have been allowed in printed form, in other ways we have chosen not to carry out the detailed musicological tasks that Banks proposed, such

as researching the relationships between sources or providing a stemma. This means that

the research challenge - already a very large one - is rendered a little less onerous, the

cataloguing is achievable in the time given, and the opportunity for in-depth source re

search can be left open to scholars. The archival 'tree' shows all the possible types of material that will be catalogued using

the CALM (Cataloguing for Archives, Local Studies Libraries and Museums) system. Printed sources will be catalogued in the extant library catalogue (hosted by Liberty 3)

except any printed material which includes holograph/non-holograph annotations that are directly relevant to the compositional process. Such material would be catalogued in CALM and would include annotations on original text material - such as Britten's copy of Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw (which would be catalogued under libretto material) or annotations/additions reflecting significant changes to subsequent printed editions during the composer's lifetime (which would be catalogued under 'interim material').

The works

Once completed, the Britten Thematic Catalogue will comprise nearly 1,200 entries (see table 2 below for details) and this number includes unpublished mature works and any un realised or partially-completed projects; the 'non-original' works - realizations, arrange ments and performing versions; and, not least, Britten's entire juvenilia.

Juvenilia (1919-1932) c725

Works with opus numbers (1932-1976) 97

Published works without opus numbers (1932-1976) cl45

Arrangements of folk songs and Purcell realizations c80

Other arrangements/completions cl5

Unpublished works c40

Incomplete mature works/unrealized projects c75

TOTAL cll77*

*This figure will inevitably change as the project progresses

Juvenilia (1919-1932) c725

Works with opus numbers (1932-1976) 97

Published works without opus numbers (1932-1976) cl45

Arrangements of folk songs and Purcell realizations c80

Other arrangements/completions cl5

Unpublished works c40

Incomplete mature works/unrealized projects c75

TOTAL cll77*

*This figure will inevitably change as the project progresses

TABLE 2 Current estimated numbers of entries (December 2008)

18. Of course, strictly speaking, we have borrowed the structure from archival collections cataloguing and made it fit our purposes by superimposing it into the material. The Manuscripts of Benjamin Britten' becomes a 'collection', or 'fonds' and the works are subsidiary 'collections', or sub-fonds.




One of the principal findings of the first two years of research has been the remarkably large corpus of childhood works. Estimates of Britten's juvenilia have in the past conser

vatively ranged from 200 to 300 or so works but in fact there are approximately 750 works in this category. These works, as the beta version already shows, are sometimes frag mentary (marked as 'unfinished' in the catalogue) but many of them are complete and

demonstrate, collectively, a fascinating development of a child composer's mind at work.

Indeed, this is one of the key reasons for including the juvenilia in its entirety.19 The beta catalogue displays the first few hundred works in chronological order, begin

ning in 1919 with the six-year-old Britten's first known composition, a song entitled 'Do you no that my Daddy has gone to London today'. These early works often comprise a single manuscript source, but a few of them are based on a number of sketches and

drafts, and others are reworked and incorporated into other pieces. For example, the early song 'Beware!' (Nov 1922), which Britten revised much later in life (around 1967-8) boasts seven holograph sources; while Waltz (circa 1923) is discovered both to be an or chestral arrangement of a piano piece (Untitled Piece in B major from circa 1923), and an earlier version of Valse in B major from 1925. The piece was further made use of in the Sentimental Sarabande movement of the Simple symphony, Op. 4 (1934). A large propor tion of the juvenilia is unpublished and work on the material has involved a painstaking amount of detective work in order to identify the manuscript sources for each piece, to

arrange the pieces in a plausible chronological order, as well as to reunite sections of works which have become separated over time.20

The beta version also contains a sample record of Billy Budd which gives a preliminary indication of the density of source material pertaining to the mature works, some of which

(such as Curlew River) comprise upwards of 35 manuscript sources. Other works are

challenging for different reasons, particularly those that underwent significant revisions

(e.g. A Ceremony of Carols, Op. 28 (1942); Gloriana, Op. 53 (1952-53); or Billy Budd) and works at which Britten laboured over a number of years and which have numerous sources (e.g. Three Divertimenti (1933-1936)). Although the mature works have been studied to various degrees over the years, and in some cases their source materials examined in great detail,21 the structure of the Britten Thematic Catalogue requires a rein

vestigation of all the sources to ensure that consistency is achieved, and also that all the mature works - including the unpublished and incomplete works - are detailed with

comparable thoroughness.

A word on incipits

In 'Encompassing a Plenitude', Banks questioned the necessity of providing incipits for a

repertoire that (in the case of the later works) is largely published and recorded, and as

such did not require musical incipits for the purposes of identification. He suggested that

19. For a discussion of Britten's juvenilia and the rationale for cataloguing all the works, see Lucy Walker,

'How a Child's Mind Works: the "Value" of Britten's Juvenilia', Notes 64/4 (June 2008), 641-658.

20. For a short film pertaining to this last issue, see http://www.brittenpears.org/?page=/projects/ahrc/

material.html.

21. See John Evans, Philip Reed, Paul Wilson, eds, A Britten Source Book (Aldeburgh: The Britten-Pears

Library, 1987); Paul Banks, ed., Britten's Gloriana, Aldeburgh Studies in Music I (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1993); and Paul Banks, ed., The Making of Peter Grimes: Essays and Studies (Woodbridge: The Boydell

Press, 1996, 2000).




they be provided only for unpublished works, even though 'a catalogue which included

incipits for only some categories of work would be unusual.'22 Also, as Holoman's Berlioz

catalogue proves all too well, the provision of incipits for all works (including separate incipits for each movement or scene) in a printed volume generates dozens of extra pages. Since the Britten catalogue will be online only, this particular publishing question is not a problem, and, in fact, we can even provide lengthier incipits than the traditional few

opening bars found in printed volumes.

Nonetheless, the provision of incipits for the published works still requires some ex

planation. The presence of musical incipits in a thematic catalogue of a twentieth-century composer's works certainly raises questions regarding the viability of 'themes' as identi

fying elements of a work compared with similar uses in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century examples. However, during the course of the project we decided that the thematic element is in fact significant for Britten's repertoire in particular and for a number of different reasons. Firstly, it sheds light on Britten's creative identify as he develops from child

composer to mature creative artist. Secondly, it demonstrates his creative need to retain

strongly thematic elements in his mature works - for example, in self-consciously theme based works such as The Turn of the Screw, and certainly in the works for voice and

piano. And thirdly, the inclusion of incipits from Britten's childhood in the 1920s through to his maturity and conclusion of his composing life in the 1970s, traces the changing function of the thematic element in the output of a characteristic mid-twentieth century composer.

A further reason for including incipits for all works was the possibility of providing au dio as well as musical samples of every Britten work from 1919 to 1976. The mature works are well-represented by recordings, and where possible we will use extracts from Britten's

and/or Pears's own recordings (or that of a dedicatee where appropriate). A fair propor tion of the works, though, have never been recorded (many of the juvenilia, some of the film scores, and most of the unrealised projects) and these will be recorded especially for this project. While representing numerous logistical challenges - including the typeset ting of musical examples and the recruitment and assembly of numerous different groups of musicians - the recorded incipits will be of considerable value to the online resource.

Our overall objective is that the Britten catalogue will be an indispensable resource for a number of different user groups including musicologists, librarians and archivists, stu dents (undergraduate and postgraduate), and those with a general interest in Britten and the music of the twentieth century. Once the manuscripts have been comprehensively detailed, the catalogue will continue to expand as the ongoing archival work at The Red House continues and further catalogued collections can augment the work records. With the inclusion of the audio incipits we also aim to provide an audible record of Britten's

compositional development from childhood to adulthood which has already proved to be a mouth-watering prospect for many Britten scholars. In addition, we anticipate that the technical infrastructure of the Britten catalogue will serve as a model to other thematic

catalogues; and it is very much hoped that, even during its preliminary stages and while the beta version is still under construction, interested parties will visit the website and pro vide feedback on its content, usability and plans for future expansion.

22. Banks, 'Encompassing a Plenitude,' 320-321.




Timetable for continuation and completion

At the time of writing (December 2008) the first 200 records are available on www

.brittenproject.org, plus a sample record for Billy Budd. By the end of January 2009 we aim to display between 400-500 records and by the end of September 2009, the following will be available:

• Catalogue records for the complete juvenilia (approximately 725 records), including full ref erences of manuscript sources, incipits for a large majority of works, and detailed composition

notes where appropriate. • Catalogue records for mature works at entry level, detailing composition history and manu

script extent.

• Several large-scale works with full manuscript sources to demonstrate the extent of the cata

loguing task with regard to the mature works.

Between June 2009 and May 2012 we aim to achieve the following:

• Complete cataloguing of the manuscript sources for the mature works • Recording of audio incipits for large-scale juvenilia works - such as orchestral and choral

pieces • Recording of audio incipits for unpublished/unrecorded mature works. • Integration of Britten's diary entries into appropriate catalogue records (for works from

1928-1939).

The work will be complete by June 2012, but will inevitably undergo some alterations and refinement after that date. We will officially launch the Britten Thematic Catalogue during the composer's centenary celebrations in 2013.

For further information about the project and the Foundation please see www.brittenpears

.org or contact Dr Lucy Walker at: The Britten-Pears Foundation, The Red House, Golf

Lane, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, IP15 5PZ, telephone: +441728 451709, email: L.Walker@

brittenpears.org (9.30 am to 5.30 pm). Researchers interested in researching at the BPF

should contact Dr Nick Clark on +441728 451700 to arrange a visit. The Red House is also available for visiting between June and September (by appointment only) and group tours can be organised by arrangement at any time of the year (+441728 451700).



THE BENJAMIN BRITTEN THEMATIC CATALOGUE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ONLINE RESOURCE

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