We were delighted to read a very nice review of Diane Toutliatos-Miles’ A Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Manuscript Collection of the National Library of Greece, in Reference Reviews (Volume 25, Number 5, 2011, p50-51).
From the review:
The Ancient Greeks transmitted much of their music theory and performance practices to the Byzantines, who in turn added to and disseminated this information to their western and eastern neighbours. Thus it is easy to see the importance of surviving manuscript sources to present-day practitioners and scholars. I quickly warmed to this seemingly formidable work on reading the author’s Preface where she admits that she never dreamed, when as a young Fulbright musicology student at the National Library of Greece, she would ever compile a catalogue: “But I soon realized that there was no catalogue of the music holdings and that it was necessary to rely on bibliographic references to manuscripts or stumble upon them like a needle in a haystack, requesting various numbered manuscripts without assurance that they contained music”. So she did something, and 34 years and 600 pages later we have an annotated catalogue of 242 music manuscripts from the eleventh century to the nineteenth.
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