JAVS Fall 2008

AVS R ETROSPECTIVE T HE M AURICE W. R ILEY C OLLECTION AT PIVA

by Tally OldroydTurner

Bigelow received a Research and Creative Activity award from the BYU College of Fine Arts and Communications in the amount of $7,500.00 to create the Maurice W. Riley Collection within PIVA. In the summer of 2006, following my first year of graduate school at BYU, I was chosen as the graduate assistant to work on this project. At that time the collection filled twenty-seven cardboard boxes, which had been stored in the basement of the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU. These boxes were full of the drafts for The History of the Viola , old music periodicals, manuscripts of Riley’s arrangements for viola and orchestra, hundreds of letters, materials from past viola congress

the estate, and collected the mate rials to be sent to PIVA. Upon receiving the materials, Dalton commented: “The Riley materials arrived at the BYU Library in seven very large cartons. When I opened the boxes and glanced inside, I said to my colleague, Claudine Bigelow, ‘Close them.’ It was immediately obvious that the sons, under duress, had simply done their best to load everything in the boxes that seemed pertinent without any opportunity to assem ble things in neat or logical order.” Claudine Bigelow later examined the contents of the boxes and literal ly “took out the trash,” placing the materials into smaller boxes, organ izing them into general categories.

In the Foreword to The History of the Viola , William Primrose wrote: “I have no way of perceiving how many documents passed through Riley’s hands, or crossed his desk, but I am persuaded that he made full use of them. Nothing has been wasted.” Thousands of documents contain ing research, correspondence, music, and other materials passed through the hands of Maurice Riley as he set forth to write the unprecedented The History of the Viola. For the past two years those materials have been sorted, organ ized, and archived to create the Maurice W. Riley Collection within the Primrose International Viola Archive at Brigham Young University. BRINGING THE COLLEC TION TO BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY At the 1989 International Viola Congress held in Redlands, California, Maurice Riley and David Dalton discussed Riley’s desire to have his viola library and papers donated to PIVA following his death. Riley passed away less than a decade later, and following the passing of his wife Leila, the Riley sons John, Ben, and George sorted through the house, settled

Riley Collection in organized boxes.

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