Horace Reynolds papers (Ms.Reynolds)

Correspondence, account books, ledgers, invoices, documents, and music manuscripts, relating to music, musicians, and the music-publishing industry in Boston from 1802-1838. There is a small section of materials Persons represented are:

• John Rowe Parker
• Johann Christian Gottlieb Graupner
• Samuel Greene
• John H. Grillier
• Karl Keller
• The Parker family
• John H. Shaffer
• Benjamin Tighe

Post cards in the file labeled "Correspondence about purchase of Parker-Graupner material" suggest Reynolds purchased the Parker-Graupner materials from rare book dealer Benjamin Tighe of Worcester around 1953. While it is not clear what his motives were at the time, the collection contains several laid in notes and two folders of notes that Reynolds made on the collections (in one case with the help of his son, John H. Reynolds, later a prominent geophysicist) showing a marked interest in the career of Gottlieb Graupner and a few drafts of text suggesting he may have been intending to publish something about Graupner.

Gottlieb Graupner, the central figure of the collection, was a German-born musician, teacher and music publisher who arrived via Canada and Charleston, South Carolina before settling in Boston in 1797. He became the major publishing figure in Boston in the early decades of the nineteenth century but he was also well known as a music teacher and oboist. (see Lee, Douglas A. "Graupner [Graubner], (Johann Christian) Gottlieb" in The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (NY: Grove's Dictionaries, 1986)). John Rowe Parker, a music dealer and publisher, worked with or for Graupner in Boston before establishing his own Franklin Music Warehouse in 1817. He is primarily known as the publisher of the Euterpiad: or Musical Intelligencer, one of the most important early American music journals (1820-1823) (see Shapiro, Anne Dhu "Parker, John Rowe" in The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (NY: Grove's Dictionaries, 1986)).