Laura Allen and Professor David A. Day, Harold B. Lee Library Music Special Collections

Almost forty years ago, a Hungarian immigrant named Aristid von Wurtzler created a quartet of harpists known as the New York Harp Ensemble. Throughout the Ensemble’s career, they played in over 60 countries, performed at the White House on many occasions over the course of four administrations, and even performed for Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. From standard works by Beethoven to jazzy Gershwin pieces, from beautiful works of Saint-Saens to familiar tunes such as Yankee Doodle, Wurtzler created over 200 arrangements for this quartet. The year 1997 brought the death of Aristid von Wurtzler, and with his death also came the end of the New York Harp ensemble. His arrangements were never published; all that the Ensemble used were his original manuscripts. So with his passing, his arrangements have all but disappeared from the harp world, and his legacy is fading.

All of Wurtzler’s works were given to the International Harp Archives at the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University. This past year I was able to look through the handwritten manuscripts of Wurtzler. My goal was to copy some of his music into a readable form and get it published in order to allow harpists everywhere to have access to the music.

The first step was to choose which pieces I should transcribe. It took careful consideration to decide which music to copy. Not only was it important to choose songs that would have wide appeal, but many came with numerous copyright issues. After listening to recordings and poring over the manuscripts, I finally narrowed the selection down to ten different pieces. Out of the ten, I chose to start with Wurtzler’s arrangement of Asturias by Albeniz. I had originally planned to copy anywhere from five to ten manuscripts. However, the process was much more complex than I had originally suspected.

The first problem I encountered was a discrepancy between the score and parts. Many of the notes in the score were different than the notes written in the individual parts. Sometimes entire rhythms were different. Since my goal was to be as true as possible to the original piece and how it was performed, it was necessary to listen many times to the recordings as well as use my music theory background to discern which notes were correct and which ones were mistakes.

Another surprise I found was the intensity of the detail work that goes in to getting a manuscript publisher-ready. Wurtzler had many unique markings, and my quest to make this copy as accurate as possible took a lot more work than I had expected. Although I had worked with the software Finale several times before this project, I soon realized that my previous projects had merely scratched the surface of a very intricate computer program. Often I would enter pages of notes into the computer, only to find out that I needed to redo everything in order to make the unusual barrings, markings, and dynamics align with the original work.

Throughout the whole process, I met with ShruDeLi Ownbey, director of Lyon and Healy West, several times. After she saw my first draft, she agreed to help get it published. After more meetings and more drafts, I finally completed the piece and submitted it to ShruDeLi Ownbey. I had originally planned to do several pieces, but quickly realized that that was an unrealistic goal, especially since I had chosen such an ambitious piece. Although I was only able to finish one piece, my biggest hope was to get at least one piece published. I am happy to report that within the next few months, this piece will be published by Lyon and Healy, the leading publisher of harp music.