Oberlin Observer. 1987-02-12

              rlin, Ohio
THORSDAY 12 FEBRUARY 1987
Reception to celebrate violin-book collection
Oberlin College is now the home of what
Itzhak Perlman calls "the most significant
single collection of literature in the world
about the making, playing, and teaching
of stringed instruments" and what Yehudi
Menuhin^recognizes as "a valuable re¬
source for the world of stringed-instrument
players."
Assembled by the late Herbert K. Good-kind
(1905-1982), author of Violin Iconog¬
raphy of Antonio Stradivari, the collec¬
tion was purchased jointly by Oberlin
College and the Violin Society of America
(VSA). There will be a public dedicatory
reception for the collection in the Good¬
rich Room of Mudd at 4 pm Saturday 21
February.
Reciprocal arrangement
The presidents of both institutions agree
that the joint acquisition of the collection
marks the beginning of a continuing rela¬
tionship between the VSA and the college.
In addition to housing the collection, the
college will have available to it on a
revolving-loan basis a selection of the best
instruments and bows by gold medalists
and certificate winners in the VSA's inter¬
national biennial stringed-instrument com¬
petitions.
"With this new agreement, the VSA has
established its only permanent public pres¬
ence," says VSA President Hans Tausig.
"Although the VSA had received an offer
from a prestigious East Coast university, it
selected Oberlin as its first choice to house
the collection because of the college's
midwestem location and renown as a
music center, as well as its superior reputa-
Collection highlights
Among the items included in the Good-kind
Collection are:
•The first edition of Leopold Mozart's
treatise on violin playing, published in
the same year his son Wolfgang Ama-deus
was bom, 1756.
•An album of 60 original albumen
photographs of Franz Liszt, eight of
them with Liszt's signature.
•A 1747 treatise on the physics of violin
tone production that is so rare that
Edward Heron-Allen, in his 1894 bibli¬
ography of the violin, knew of only one
other copy in existence—in the Bodle¬
ian Library of Oxford University.
•An early 18th-century volume entitled
The Art of Playing on the Violin, pub¬
lished in London, attributed to violin¬
ist/composer Francesco Geminiani,
and thought to be the first work of its
kind.
•A French treatise on the violin pub¬
lished in 1687 that Heron-Allen called
"one of the oldest and rarest works on
the theory of bow instruments."
•Forty books on early 19th-century
violin virtuoso/ composer Niccolo Paga-nini,
including works published during
Paganini's lifetime.
•Twenty-four books and pamphlets
about varnish published between 1776
and 1968.
tion both for library conservation and for
making materials easily accessible to schol¬
ars." He adds, "Oberlin is now the place to
go to explore virtually all that has been
written on the construction, performance,
teaching, and collecting of stringed in¬
struments and bows."
"Oberlin is honored to become the
permanent headquarters of the VSA,"
says President S. Frederick Starr. "It is a
tribute to the new vitality and expanding
ambitions of the Conservatory of Music at
Oberlin. We look forward to a long and
fruitful collaboration with the VSA and
hope that its presence here will serve as a
magnet to other musical organizations,
societies, and businesses."
The Goodkind Collection comprises
over 2,000 books and auction catalogs
from the 17th through 20th centuries,
2,500 periodical issues from the 19th and
20th centuries, and various other mate¬
rials, including correspondence and pho¬
tographs. Several of the earliest items are
so scarce that they are not listed in Edward
Heron-Allen's exhaustive 1894 bibliog¬
raphy of the violin and are not to be found
at either the Library of Congress or the
New York Public Library.
An exhibit of outstanding materials
from the collection will open at the dedica¬
tory reception, where there will be infor¬
mal remarks by Starr, Rachel Goodkind
(daughter of Herbert K. Goodkind), Tau¬
sig, dean of the conservatory David Boe,
and director of libraries William A. Mof-fett.
There will also be a brief concert
comprised oftwo performances ofa move¬
ment from Mozart's Divertimento in E-flat
major, K. 563, for violin, viola, and
cello—one performance with new instru¬
ments by gold medal winners from past
VSA biennial instrument-making compe¬
titions, and the other with old instruments.
The new violin is by Amos Hargrave of
Charlotte, North Carolina; the new viola
by David Burgess of Ann Arbor, Michi¬
gan; and the new cello by Edward C.
Campbell of Boiling Springs, Pennsylva¬
nia. Three Oberlin faculty members—
violinist Marilyn McDonald, violist Jef¬
frey Irvine, and cellist Steven Doane—will
perform.
Painting of Stradivari
On loan from the Goodkind family will
be a painting depicting Antonio Stradivari
at work. The painting, commissioned by
Herbert K. Goodkind from artist Alton
Tobey in 1972, will be on display as part of
the dedicatory exhibit, which will be on
view in the Goodrich Room through 2
March. Also on display during the recep¬
tion will be two violins and a viola by VSA
gold medalist Campbell.
GAR gift
The GAR Foundation of Akron has
granted $100,000 to the college for a
scholarship fund. The grant will be
invested as part of the college's per¬
manent endowment, and the income
from the investment will be used each
year to provide scholarships for eligible
students. This is the GAR Founda¬
tion's second grant to Oberlin. In 1983
it contributed $50,000 toward the pur¬
chase of a VAX-11 / 750 computer sys¬
tem for the computer science program.
Herbert K. Goodkind was a founding
member of the VSA, which was estab¬
lished in 1973 to bring together concert
artists, professional and amateur players,
makers of instruments and bows, collec¬
tors, dealers, music lovers, and conserva¬
tories and libraries of music. The VSA
holds annual conventions throughout the
US in addition to biennial international
competitions for makers of new stringed
instruments and bows. It publishes ajour¬
nal, edited by Professor Albert Mell of
Queens College, and provides scholar¬
ships to aspiring instrument and bow
makers.
Beginning next fall, a dozen stringed
instruments and an equal number of bows
by VSA gold medalists and certificate
winners will be on display in the conserva¬
tory and will be available for Oberlin stu¬
dents, serious professional and amateur
musicians, and instrument and bow mak¬
ers to play and to study. "This arrange¬
ment with the Violin Society will give our
students the opportunity to familiarize
themselves with some of the best instru¬
ments and bows being made today," says
Stephen Clapp, professor of violin.
Illustration from TheDivision-Viol, or the
Art ofPlaying upon a Ground, by Chris¬
topher Simpson, (London, 1667), one of
the books in the Goodkind Collection.
Lectures to celebrate
Zinn's installation
Two lectures today will mark the occasion
of Grover A. Zinn's installation as Dan-forth
professor of religion. Francis Oak¬
ley, president of Williams College and also
professor of history there, will give a lec¬
ture entitled "Constance to 1688: The
Vision of a Whig Pope" at 4:30 pm in King
106, and Zinn himself will speak at 8:30
pm in the same room; his topic will be
"Imagination and Intellect in the Mystical
Quest." Zinn's appointment as Oberlin's
fourth Danforth professor of religion was
announced last spring (Observer 27 March
1986).
Oakley's book, Omnipotence, Cove¬
nant, and Order: An Excursion in the His¬
tory of Ideas from Abelard to Leibniz,
which was published in 1984 by Cornell
University Press, was based on the Mead-
Swing lectures he presented here in No¬
vember 1981. He has written several other
books on medieval history, including The
Western Church in the Later Middle
Ages, published by Cornell in 1979. Bom
in England and a naturalized US citizen,
he has the BA degree from Oxford Uni¬
versity and the MA and PhD from Yale
University. Hejoined the Williams faculty
in 1961, became dean of the faculty in
1977, and was named president in 1985.
He has held fellowships from the Gold¬
smith's College of London, the Weil Insti¬
tute, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and
the National Endowment for the Humani¬
ties, and he has received many other
awards.
Recent publications
Chapters by Zinn have been included in
two books published in the last year.
"Suger, Theology, and the Pseudo-diony-sian
Tradition," appears in Abbot Suger
andSaint-Denis:A Symposium, published
by New York's Metropolitan Museum of
Art; and "Sound, Silence, and Word in the
Spirituality of Gregory the Great" is in
Gr'egoire le Grand: Colloque International
du Centre National de la Recherche Scien-tifique,
published by Editions du CNRS.
Zinn has also been named coeditor of the
"Dictionary of Medieval France," to be
published by the Garland Press. Last
month Zinn gave two lectures in Illinois,
speaking on "Dynamics of Love and Lov¬
ing in the Victorines" at the divinity school
of the University of Chicago and on "Love
in the Mysticism of the Victorines" at
Northwestern. In June he went to Nantes,
France, to participate in a conference
entitled, "Spirituality of Love in the
Twelfth Century, East and West."
Zinn's other publications include his
translation of writings of Richard of St.
Victor, for which he also wrote the intro¬
duction, and a book on Gregory the
Great, both for the Paulist Press series
"Classics in Western Spirituality." He con¬
tributed a chapter, "The Regular Canons,"
to Christian Spirituality: Origins to the
Twelfth Century, published by Crossroad
Press, New York. Zinn has been active in
professional organizations and was elected
councillor in the Mediaeval Academy of
America.
In 1985 Zinn received from Oberlin a
curriculum-enrichment fellowship to de¬
velop a course on popular religion and
also an H.H. Powers grant to visit shrines
and pilgrimage centers in Europe to study
popular religion. He taught the course in
the spring of 1986. In 1982 he was awarded
a travel grant from the American Council
of Learned Societies, and in 1972-73 he
received a National Endowment for the
Humanities fellowship that he combined
with a research-status leave from Oberlin.
He has been a member of the Oberlin
faculty since 1966.