Preliminary work on the project began by surveying repertoire to locate compositions that were in the public domain. Only a few viola compositions published in America before 1923 1 are widely known, namely Ernest Bloch's Suite, published by Schirmer in 1920, and chamber works by Charles Martin Loeffler featuring the viola: the Deux rapsodies, for oboe, viola, and piano (published by Schirmer in 1905); and the Quatre poëmes, op. 5, for voice, viola, and piano (published by Schirmer in 1904). Library catalogs and bibliographies of string music were examined to locate music suitable for the project. One public-domain work identified early in the project was a viola sonata by the New York-native Frank Limbert (1866-1938), published in 1892. In this instance, rather than scan a copy for inclusion on the AVS Web site, the organization requested that the Sibley Music Library scan its copy and add to its institutional repository at the University of Rochester. 2 More problematic for the project was the dearth of research focused on the viola in America prior to the twentieth century. So, the initial छ