Collection 013 - Montreal Mendelssohn Choir Collection

50 cm of music scores bound into 11 volumes

The first eight volumes were donated by the Montreal Mendelssohn Choir in 1895 to McGill University. Along with another 250 volumes of musical literature donated by the Choir to the University between 1895 and 1898, these materials formed the nucleus of a musical collection held at Redpath Library. In 1926 and 1927, the estate of D. Torrance Fraser donated another four volumes of sheet music from the Choir’s library. The volumes of sheet music from the Choir’s library were assigned Cutter classification. The volumes were likely transferred to the Music Library when it became an official branch library in 1965. In the 1980s, Kelly Rice, a music student, discovered the volumes in the Cutter section of the main stacks while working as a student shelver at the Music Library. Rice devoted his master’s thesis (1991) to the Montreal Mendelssohn Choir, reuniting the volumes donated by the Choir in 1895 with those donated by Fraser’s estate in the 1920s, and thereby created the Montreal Mendelssohn Choir Collection. Rice’s thesis contains a detailed inventory of the seven extant volumes donated by the Montreal Mendelssohn Choir (volume 6 was missing by this time), as well as the fourth volume (DTF2) donated by Fraser’s estate in 1927. The collection was subsequently moved to the storage section in the Music Library and eventually into the Rare Book room. In 2008, three of the volumes donated by the Montreal Mendelssohn Choir were catalogued (two completely, one partially) and integrated into the Music Library’s Rare Book collection. Eleven pieces from the volumes were digitized in 2012. In 2019, a decision was made to reunite all the volumes back into the Montreal Mendelssohn Choir Collection. The inventory published in Rice’s 1991 thesis has been used as the source for the item records in the present archival catalogue.

The Montreal Mendelssohn Choir Collection comprises several volumes of sheet music from the Choir’s library. The choral folios were compiled and bound into eight volumes at the time of their donation to McGill University in 1895. The estate of D. Torrance Fraser, a former Choir member, donated another four volumes of choral music in 1926 and 1927. Three volumes contain second copies of the pieces from the Choir’s library donated thirty years prior; the fourth volume donated in 1927 contains a number of pieces performed by the Choir but not found in the seven extant volumes from the Choir’s library.