By Jackson Cooper, Staff Writer

Published in print Jan 21, 2015.

This series, “From the Stacks” will be an ongoing series highlighting UNCG’s University Archives, one of the university’s many resources for research and preservation.

This week, I ascended the single staircase that lay past the Reading Room on the second floor of Jackson Library to profile the extensive Cello Music Collection UNCG has to offer scholars and students. 

  I was led and accompanied by Stacy Krim and William “Mac” Nelson, the Director and Cataloguer of the Cello Music Collection. Before the tour, I sat down with both to gauge more information on the history of the Collection and their involvement.

  “We realized that every musician can’t live in Greensboro,” said Krim. “So our focus is really outreach, we do a lot of promotion on Facebook. This has allowed me to connect with a lot of cellists around the world and the students of those cellists. A lot of my work is outreach and reproduction of pieces for cellists looking for a particular piece across our nine collections.” 

  The fact that there are nine collections of annotated scores, letters and photographs from such prominent historical figures like Bernard Greenhouse, Luigi Silva and Fritz Magg—names that are unknown to us but rank with the likes of Emily Dickinson, Leonard Bernstein and Jimmy Hendrix—is an incredible resource to have. 

  In 1963, Elizabeth Cowling, a Professor of Cello at UNCG, obtained the first collection of cello music materials from the estate of famed Italian cellist, Luigi Silva.

At the time, the school did not have an archival music collection (nor did it have a librarian to catalogue such items). After receiving support from the Friends of the

Library, the Silva collection was purchased and archived in Jackson library.

Since then, the Cello Collection has obtained a total of nine collections of music and records.

The Cello Collection offers students and researchers open doors to all of these records, so long as you make an appointment.

  While exploring the stacks with Krim and Nelson, I found myself in awe at the boxes of folders, containing different stories with each sheet of music. Stacey pulled out a Bach suite, annotated by Fritz Magg—a longtime cellist for the Met Opera Orchestra.

“This will take your breath away,” Nelson says with a smile. There was not a single unmarked note on the piece, etched bowings and scribbled words like “Softly” and “Sweeping” lay in the small sections between staves. It was like seeing the work of a genius, and holding it in your hands. 

Among the many finds in the cello collection, one stuck out to me most of all.

Lev Aronson, a cellist for the Dallas Symphony, fled Europe during WWII after being surviving the Holocaust (along with Laszlo Varga, a cellist whose collection now belongs to UNCG).

From a box, Krim revealed a hardbound score of a piece written by Aronson after escaping the Russian concentration camps to the American militarized zone of Berlin. While in Europe, he wrote under various aliases until he decided to sign his scores with his concentration camp number.

“As a historical artifact, it’s great because you realize that this was one of the only things in his suitcase he brought with him over to the States,” Krim explained.

The amount of history and impact that these cellists who make up the collection have had on the history of music and America would fill a collection in and of itself.

During our exploration of the stacks,. Krim and Nelson emphasized that the thing that makes UNCG’s Archives different from places like the Smithsonian is that the collections are so readily accessible.

“The trip here does not have to be necessarily research oriented,” Krim explains, “If someone were to walk in and say, ‘Show me something cool’, they will not be disappointed because there is always something interesting to find here.”

Nelson goes on to say, “There are hundreds of undergraduate, masters, and even doctoral papers just waiting to be written on what is in this collection.” 

A visit to the collection may just help you get an “A” in history this semester.

It is hard to imagine the sheer scope of the collection and how many people around the world are connected through these stacks. Within the boxes are stories of the history of the world. The scratched handwriting of unsung geniuses who may otherwise be lost to history are preserved and remembered by this extraordinary collection.

These artists deserve the continuing legacy that the Cello Music Collection gives them. To say that it is worth checking out would not do it justice. Perhaps weekly visits are in order so as to learn about what it means to persevere and what it truly means to be human.