Donor Richard Howe Honored at Dedication and Exhibition of His Collection at the Performing Arts Library, University of Maryland.
A grand opening of the exhibition "Mechanical Musical Marvels: Art & Industry in the Howe Collection of Musical Instrument Literature" marked the formal dedication of a large special collection at the Performing Arts Library in the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on the College Park campus of the University of Maryland on Sunday, November 4, 2001. The University’s Friends of the Libraries invited the public to the opening, which included a program and a reception to honor collector Richard Howe.
Howe, long recognized as the foremost collector of print materials related to mechanical musical instruments, donated his vast collection to the Performing Arts Library beginning several years ago. Howe’s collection encompasses the engineering, manufacture, and marketing of the wide variety of mechanical musical instruments that evolved in the 19th and 20th centuries. Represented are all types of pianos, including reproducing and player pianos; organs; cylinder-type and disc-type music boxes; orchestrions, nickelodeons, and band organs; and phonographs and jukeboxes. Among the more than 50,000 items (over two million pages of information) are many rare pieces. According to Howe, you "couldn’t duplicate" his collection now if you tried.
The program at the November 4th event in College Park featured remarks from Howe on his experience as a collector and formally dedicated his collection to public use in the Performing Arts Library. The afternoon also included video clips from Howe’s mechanical musical instrument collection in Houston, Texas, and demonstrations on reproducing pianos in the International Piano Archives at Maryland’s Piano Room of the Library. Dean of Libraries Charles Lowry served as master of ceremonies at the dedication.
Richard Howe is the retired president and chief operating officer of Pennzoil Company, where he served from 1978 to 1988. He received a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from MIT. Following his service in the Air Force, Howe worked first for Shell Oil, then for 20 years for Exxon. He currently spends more than half of his time working nationally on behalf of prostate cancer research and speaking to support groups. He has been active in a number of charitable activities in the Houston area and is a longtime member of the Automatic Musical Instruments Collectors Association whose archives were donated to the University Libraries in 1990.
In selecting the University of Maryland over six other institutions as the recipient of his gift, Howe desired that his collection be readily accessible in the secure environment of a research library for present and future collectors and historians. Bruce Wilson, Head of the Performing Arts Library, terms the collection "an incomparable resource" and says, "It is a source of pride to us that we can offer its use to the world of scholarship." The collection is under the care of Library faculty Bonnie Jo Dopp, Curator of Special Collections in Performing Arts, and Donald Manildi, Curator of the International Piano Archives at Maryland. More information on the Howe Collection is available online.
The Howe Collection invites researchers to discover stories of how inventors, engineers, manufacturers, advertisers, and retailers brought mass-produced music to market in the 19th and 20th centuries. Invention and craft combined cylinders, discs, gears, wheels, pulleys, pistons, air, and electricity to capture musical art for automated playback. Advertising art and retailers, appealing to people's need for connections to musical culture, encouraged them to buy the means of producing music. This intersection of musical art and industry created mechanical marvels for home and public consumption, and is the focus of the exhibition.
The exhibition, which was on display in the Gallery as well as the Main Reading Room of the Performing Arts Library, displayed the variety of materials in the Collection: advertisements, trade catalogs, technical drawings, sheet music, novelty items, postal covers, trade cards, bills of sale, and photographs produced in the course of designing, manufacturing and marketing pianos (including reproducing pianos), organs, phonographs, and "music boxes" of all sizes, mainly in the United States, but also in Europe, in the 19th and 20th centuries. A University video team visited Houston in the summer of 2002 to record Mr. Howe’s personal collection of mechanical instruments. The resulting video footage of the instruments provided both historical background and audio examples of the "mechanical musical marvels" represented in the print collection in the Library.
