J. A. Hudleston
(1799-1865)
A Guitarist in Nineteenth Century India Seminar given by Michael McCartney at The Queens University of Belfast 12 March 1997.

Discovery of Josiah’s Collection of Classical Guitar Music:
During recent years, through the work of numerous scholars and publishers, the works of the great guitarists of the nineteenth century have become much more familiar to us. The names of guitarist-composers such as Napoleon Coste, Johann Kaspar Mertz, Giulio Regondi, and Marco Aurelio Zani di Ferranti are no longer relegated to obscure footnotes in equally obscure reference books, but are now making frequent appearances on guitarists’ concert programmes and recordings. It was an interest in this particular repertoire that prompted me to come to Europe in 1991 to see what was still collecting dust in old libraries, and what had not yet been republished. My researches began in Brussels and Paris, where I was attempting to catalogue as much of the guitar music as I could find in the Bibliotheque Royale Albert 1 and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Before my departure from the U.S., 1 had also written to various libraries in the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia – as well as to the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. John O’Sullivan,...