Eric McLean was a Montreal newspaper critic, historian, and pianist. Multimedia in scope and content, the Eric McLean Collection consists of textual records, recordings, photographs, scores, musicological monographs, and an extensive long-playing (LP) record collection of over 7,000 items.
Of particular significance is the concert diary inherited by McLean from Hugh Poynter Bell upon the latter’s retirement as music and art critic of the Montreal Star. Handwritten and consisting of more than fifty pages, Bell’s diary constitutes a unique record of Montreal concert life during the period from 1923 to 1949. Entries in Bell’s diary correspond directly to his concert reviews and as such underscore the importance of Montreal as a major North American musical centre throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
