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The Practitioners of Musick have obtained a recently discovered Caspar Schaffner manuscript, a remarkable document in the history of music in North America. The manuscript, when purchased, was known to have been one
of two volumes, the second of which was presumed lost. The manuscript consists of a personal collection of music for the keyboard, compiled in the early 1790’s by a member of the German-American musical
community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Schaffner served as organist for the German Reformed Church in that city.
The volume owned by the Practitioners contains 244 pieces of music from the early Federal period for which few sources are presently available. Most interesting is the large number of pieces of German origin,
including works by Sorge, Naumann, and C.P.E. Bach, as well as pieces using the French violin clef, which do not appear in the published music known to have been circulating in America at that time. The manuscript
will yield a great deal of new information about music and musical life in early Federal period America and will provide the basis for a number of forth-coming concerts. The distinguished scholar Kate Van Winkle
Keller, who has already reviewed the document, said that, “...further study of the 244 pieces found in the ... Manuscript will shed considerable light on an area of early Federal music history in America.”
In an extraordinary serendipity, the whereabouts of volume two were revealed in the summer of 2006 as a result of communication with Dr. Philip T. D. Cooper, an authority in Pennsylvania German Organ literature , who
indicated that he in fact was working with the second volume of Caspar Schaffner’s manuscript. This volume is presently one of the treasures in the Rare Book and Archives section of the Lancaster Theological
Seminary Library. There are plans to record on appropriate Pennsylvania-German organs music from both volumes. The Practitioners announce that as of Spring 2007, the first volume of the Schaffner manuscript will be
the subject of a doctoral dissertation at Princeton University. Graduate student Christa Pehl has already begun to locate sources for her work.
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