Twitter thing (7)

Have set up a Twitter account, without difficulty and probably quite quickly. Have yet to see how or why it could be useful or sufficiently interesting to spend much time on it.

Things 5 & 6

Doodle is a useful discovery, and has already been employed ...

Have set up a calendar and it may be useful, but have had difficulties in seeing in on the three different computers the I regularly use. None of them allowed cookies, and letting them in and managing them is something I do not really understand. Cookies seem a bit big brotherish, and I am a bit suspicious of them. And if it means I constantly have to do something about them every time I move to another computer it will sour my attitude towards them even more.

Thing 4

Now that took some time -- not having a picture editor or knowing how to download free software - now several hours later here is the image everyone else has probably had no problem in producing. And now funny things seem to happen when I added that image. It wanted the image to follow the text, so I typed the first sentence and then added the image. But the image put itself before the text inspite of that fact that I had made sure the curser was at the beginning of the next line. So I then went into the html edit and moved the "a href" ..."/a" (sorry I cannot use angle brackets) for the image to follow the text, and then started to type the next sentences, and now the image has disappeared... so I shall try to get it back and if it appears at the beginning of the text again I shall simply publish the page as is... and as you can see it has appeared at the top again.

(This has now been revised - the image is moved, but how do you prevent the text wrapping itself round the image ...)

Thing 3

I hope Cam23 will introduce me to a new world of internet experiences. I am not sure what 2.2 means. The only social network I have used (or not used very much) is Facebook, which I view with considerable distrust.

Aylesford MSS in the Fitzwilliam

The music manuscripts acquired by the Fitzwilliam Museum after the sale in 1918 of the Aylesford Collection have recently been catalogued on the Cambridge Unversity online catalogue "Newton".


Edward Dent, then a fellow of King's College, had a particular interest in the music of Alessandro Scarlatti, and was able to encourage the acquisition of not only several holograph manuscript, but also music by his contemporaries.
Much of the Earl of Aylesford's collection came from his cousin Charles Jennens (1700-1773), best know today at the librettist of Handel's Messiah. It contained a great deal of Handel, which now forms the basis of the Newman Flower collection in the Manchester Public Library. However it was Jennen's acquisition of music from the in 1742 from the library of the great patron of music in Rome, Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni (1667-1740) that is of importance in the Fitzwilliam collections. Of the 14 manuscripts from the Jennens library, 13 were originally owned by Ottoboni. Find them on Newton now!



Handel is famed for borrowing music from other composers, and since some of these borrowings are from music in the Ottoboni/Jennens collection, it seems likely that Jennens lent some of these manuscripts to Handel (see the record for Scarlatti's Dafni.)

John H.Roberts has written an excellen history of "The Aylesford collection" in Handel collections and their history (Oxford, 1993), p. 39-85, which also includes a decription of the collection and its present locations.