The collection was not in an ordered state when I received it. My first task was to establish which pages belonged to each piece or group of pieces. There was no catalogue, but a box of index cards showed that Minter had started to assemble a rudimentary inventory. In their own right, the index cards made little sense of the collection as a whole: too many vital pieces of information were missing. But the cards became invaluable for identifying pieces when I had established from other sources information that led me to a narrower focus. These fragments of information included pencilled annotations in Minter’s hand. Also, some pages carried the imprint of the holding institutions of the primary source – some even had legible shelf marks. Over a period of time I sorted all but a very small proportion of the pages into discrete works. This part of the process was relatively easy when facsimiles were hard copies of microfilms also contained in the collections, but the majority were not. My main sources for identifying individual items in such cases were the facsimiles themselves and the somewhat ambiguous index cards.
Though I have ascribed some form of identification to most pieces, I am far from confident that every detail is accurate (this is no reflection on Minter’s annotations, which are meticulous). For this reason, it is important to note my reservations about the accuracy of all the information in this handlist, and to emphasise the need for users of this information to look at corroborating sources.
This handlist is mainly confined to works that contain trumpet parts, there are a small number of works that do not contain trumpets but were obviously of interest to Minter, so I have included them in the handlist in the interests of completeness. The collection contains four types of source:
Some items in the collection are related to others also in the collection. Such relationships are sometimes obvious – for example, where there is a printed edition and an autograph manuscript of the same piece. But there are more distant relationships and I have drawn attention to these in the commentary. I have not withdrawn pieces from the catalogue because they exist in two different versions, even when those versions are, to all intents and purposes, identical.
