For anyone who reads music, the sketchbooks literally record the progress of hisinvention. He would scribble his rough, unformed ideas in his pocket notebook andthen leave them there, unused, in a state of suspension, but at least captured withpencil on paper. A few months later, in a bigger, more permanent notebook, you canfind him picking up that idea again, but he’s not just copying the musical idea intoanother book. You can see him developing it, tormenting it, improving it in the newnotebook. He might take an original three-note motif and push it to its next stage bydropping one of the notes a half tone and doubling it. Then he’d let the idea sit therefor another six months. It would reappear in a third notebook, again not copied butfurther improved, perhaps inverted this time and ready to be used in a piano sonata.

Beethoven, despite his unruly reputation and wild romantic image, waswell organized. He saved everything in a series of notebooks that were organizedaccording to the level of development of the idea. He had notebooks for rough ideas,notebooks for improvements on those ideas, and notebooks for finished ideas,almost as if he was pre-aware of an idea’s early, middle, and late stages.

Scores Available for Adoption These items link to a listing of "tiff" files from a scanned set of printed scores. In several cases, we already have some items from the scores (see below). These items have already been granted copyright clearances. Note that these tend to be fairly large files. Alkan (various scores) Beethoven

Wellington’s Victory, Op. 91