The Vast Sarah Selwyn Music Collection
One of the projects that the John Kinder Theological Library has embarked upon is cataloguing the Sarah Selwyn Music Collection. Sarah Selwyn, nee Richardson, was the wife of the first Anglican bishop of New Zealand, Bishop George August Selwyn, and she left a prolific musical score collection in New Zealand, all of which is held at the Kinder Library archives.
The music collection is a large one – around 300 scores – and comprises a range of different musicians and musical styles. These are engraved scores dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries and include some handwritten music books, including the entire oratorio Judas Maccabaeus by Handel. The latter was owned by Lady Richardson, who was Sarah Selwyn’s mother. It is part of a collection of music that was left in New Zealand by Sarah when they returned to England in 1867.
The Long-S in the Musical Scores
An entertaining aspect of these old musical scores is the use of the long-s, which appears in older English as an f, without the full crossbar.
In older printings such as these scores of Sarah Selwyn’s, the use of a long-s appears often at the beginning and in the middle of words containing an s, though never at the end. On occasion, if there is a double-s in a word, the long-s will appear next to a short/regular-s, appearing as fs, or the symbol`ß’.
While the long-s stopped being used by the printers sometime in the 1780s, it has made some more humourous readings of these scores’ lyrics. See above image for an example of the long-s in action.