Parts Per Million

Breaking Character: About twenty percent of the Samuel French Collection at Amherst College is comprised of “musical masters” – full scores bound in leather, individual parts for all the instruments, piano and vocal scores. Printed on a variety of types of paper, none of these “masters” are pristine or neat. Instead, as I open each box, I find messy stacks of curling sheets that are littered with notes (actual musical notes of course, along with scribbled annotations from who knows who).