Where’s the work? Exploring archival scholarship via the manuscripts of Raymond Scott’s Lute Song
This paper reflects on a struggle to research the little-known 1946 musical Lute Song with a view to illuminating some bigger philosophical issues associated with archival research of musical theatre. Lute Song is an ideal vehicle for such an enterprise because it remains fairly obscure and because relatively few research materials are readily available to the researcher. Like so many musicals Lute Song was the product of a creative team. This included Raymond Scott, the pioneering Jewish-American composer and pianist. The Lute Song materials that are held in the Raymond Scott Collection at the University of Missouri are patchy and confusing. The researcher thus faces a struggle to interpret these sources, which may never offer a definitive picture of the show. The struggle to make sense of such sources raises questions about the approach that scholars tend to take towards musical theatre texts. It suggests the need for an alternative methodology that can accept that we might never be able to definitively establish certain textual details in relation to musical theatre works. These works are in any case team-authored, works-in-process and thus defy the textual fixity that archival research tends to ascribe to them. While contemporary scholarship certainly needs text-based facts upon which to base critical discourse, the inherited preoccupation with establishing notions of some underlying text obscures what might be a more holistic and useful understanding of musical theatre as a multi-authored, intertextual and flexible form.