Music Library Association. Notes

A View of Music Librarianship As Seen Through Its Journals: A Comparison of Notes and Fontes Artis Musicae, 1977-2007

MLA's Notes and IAML's Fontes Artis Musicae are well known as two primary channels of printed scholarly communication in music librarianship. This article evaluates the similarities and differences between the content of these journals over a thirty-one-year time span in an attempt to identify their strengths and weaknesses, and to determine whether their strengths lie more in the field of music, or in librarianship. Trends in overall subject coverage, and the contributions to the journals by...

Self-Publishing and Musicology: Historical Perspectives, Problems, and Possibilities

Although the terms "publishing" and "self-publishing" have meant quite different things at various times and to various individuals, publishers today decide which documents will be produced and for what purposes. This article examines the evolution of self-publishing past and present, especially (but not exclusively) insofar as musicology is concerned. Important self-publications discussed or at least mentioned are John Milton's Areopagitica; editions of music by Telemann, C. P. E. Bach, and ...

Louise Talma's Christmas Carol

Discovered in 2009 at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, Louise Talma's 1959 Christmas carol, playfully titled Chorus Angelorum, Piccolassima Fughetta, Molto Tonale, Sopra un Téma, Torentoni Niventis Wilderi, is a fugal motet for three voices. Written for Thornton Wilder, Talma's collaborator on her opera The Alcestiad, the work is unusual in that it represents a completely tonal work by Talma during a period when she was working in her own distinct nonstrict se...

Notes for Notes

Ralph served as vice-chair and chair of the Music OCLC Users Group (MOUG), and was the driving force behind the NACO Music Project, a cooperative effort to manage and build a database of authorized headings for music names and uniform titles. According to his wishes, there was to be no funeral, burial, or memorial service.

The Life of Haydn

[...] the third image, which in fact concludes The Life of Haydn, is painted by the composer's early biographer Georg August Griesinger, and fittingly confirms the relevance of such an enterprise by calling Haydn-as early as 1810-"founder of an epoch in musical culture" (p. 226). Haydn experts and non-specialists alike will perhaps regret, for instance, the very sparse endnotes, which leave us in the dark regarding the original source for many a fascinating detail. [...] one could imagine h...

Elliott Carter: A Centennial Celebration/Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents

The first impression of Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents is that of a "coffee table book," with outstanding color facsimiles of more than fifty manuscripts of Carter's works, as well as a plethora of black and white photographs showing the composer with many classical music luminaries of the twentieth century. Compiled by Felix Meyer, director of the Paul Sacher Foundation (Basel, Switzer - land), and Anne C. Shreffler, chair of musicology at Harvard University,...

Five Lines, Four Spaces: The World of My Music

In addition to presenting more general analytical concepts, Roch - berg provides explanatory notes and analyses of his own works, such as the in-depth and revelatory discussion of his 1965 works Contra Mortem et Tempus and Music for the Magic Theater in chapter 8, "Unlocking the Past." Chapter 6, blatantly titled "Breaking with Modernism," addresses the Third String Quartet and how the media event of Rochberg's "break" upstaged what the composer himself deemed a natural step in his creative ...

Terry Riley's in C

[...] I think what I was experiencing in music at that time was another world. Besides just the ordinary music that was going on, music was also able to transport us suddenly out of one reality into another.

Reminiscences of an American Composer and Pianist

[...] I approached his autobiography with real interest and curiosity. In the final chapter of the memoir, entitled "Ruminations," he summarizes: "In my effort to create substantial works that have a strong musical profile and an elegance of construction, I have attempted to contribute something unique to the repertoire of various genres and to dispel the latent belief that a black composer is incapable of producing music that extends beyond a racial divide" (p. 177).

The Lives of Ingolf Dahl

[...] Dahl was a Jew; second, he was homosexual; third, he was an aesthetic iconoclast, or at least became one in later life. In 1971 the Pacific Southwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society established the Ingolf Dahl Prize for the best student paper in musicology, and in 1981 the annual Ingolf Dahl Lectures on music history and theory were first presented at USC, where many of his papers and manuscripts are kept today. The absence of footnotes and bibliography is understandable...

Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician

[...] Copland early on championed Mahler, even writing a letter to the New York Times in 1925 defending the Austrian composer from the aspersions of New York's critics; and he absorbed a good deal of Mahler in his own music-all this while Bernstein was a mere child. [...] Seldes (a footnote qualifier notwithstanding) ignores the fuller context of Copland's quote, which reads, Mahler's faults as composer have been dwelt upon ad nauseam.

György Kurtág: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages

[...] a legendary coach of chamber music, Kurtág has an exceptional ear for nuance that also informs his compositional work-in his music, every single note seems to be a matter of life or death. Many works were inspired by friends and colleagues, and the book provides invaluable information on a number of them, often revealing new layers of meaning in the music.

Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981): A Life Unfinished/Cornelius Cardew: A Reader

Copula Press, an imprint of Matchless Recordings (noted for consistently excellent recordings of experimental improvisatory music), provides rich material for readers interested in the intersection of experimental music and Marxist- Leninist activism as manifest in Cardew's life and work. Official inquiries name a hit-andrun automobile collision as the cause of death, though the failure of official agencies in providing information, and the failure to locate and detain the guilty parties, ha...

The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Legacy in Country Music

[...] there were relatively few notices about his death in the contemporary press at all and even the term "Country Music" would have had little meaning at the time. [...] academics in other fields of popular music have used notation or simplified notation for analyses of Beatles songs, jazz solos, and other forms, but it is still a rarity in country music studies, owing either to the unfamiliarity with notation by most authors or to the targeted readership.

The Ghosts of Harlem: Sessions with Jazz Legends

Historical photographs from the Renaissance period, whether of the speakers or of the individual people and places discussed at length, and reproductions of 78 rpm jazz record labels are placed wherever appropriate in the interviews. The jazz musicians he spoke with thought the decline of jazz in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s was due to the diminishing number of venues to play, as well as fewer places for them to go when not performing.\n Drugs (especially heroin) and crime became more p...

Heavy Metal Music in Britain

Susan Fast's book on Led Zeppelin combined musical analysis, ethnography, and phenomenology and other cultural theory in an illuminating study of how bodily performance, gender and sexuality, sounds, and symbols create meaning for fans and musicians Susan Fast, In the Houses of the Holy: Steve Waksman's treatment of "cock rock" merged sophisticated cultural theory with musical specificity to explore the complex positioning of men and women with respect to music that simultaneously perpetuate...

Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections

In chapter 8 he rehistoricizes the term "Orientalism" itself, in order to allow Said's critique to interact in free counterpoint with other views. [...] liberated from doctrinal status, Said's writings nevertheless remain an important reference, not least in examination of gender.\n In chapter 3 Locke reminds us that there is such a thing as a universal exotic style which does not depend on specific cultural borrowing, but (unlike Dahlhaus, who espoused a similar idea) Locke does not think t...

Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America

With essays focusing on a wide variety of case studies from around North America, some underrepresented in the literature, this volume from the University of Illinois' fine Music in American Life series demonstrates what makes Native American music native. [...] it is not surprising, but still unfortunate, that this volume took over a decade to come to press. Combining ongoing fieldwork with significant historical research, Aplin's essay on the Fire Dance of the Fort Sill Chiricahua Warm Sp...

The Irishness of Irish Music

To answer the question for Irish music, the author draws on fieldwork, popular media, and scholarly literature. Ireland is a particularly interesting case study in musical nationalism because during the last four decades rapid social change has transformed this island into a heterogeneous place interacting with the whole world, at the same time as Irish music has become a globally recognized brand. O'Flynn's findings match my own (in press) among American fans of Irish music; his more exten...

Pavel Vejvanovský and the Kromeríz Music Collection: Perspectives On Seventeenth-Century Music in Moravia

The essential outlines of the synergy between imperial ambitions of dynasty and Church during the age of both Habsburg consolidation and Catholic reclamation remain essentially intact, however much our conceptions of the inner workings of baroque ideology undergo a shift from their apparent emphasis on virtue and piety to the celebration of military might and valor an important theme of Maria Goloubeva's The Glorification of Emperor Leopold I in Image, Spectacle, and Text Mainz: [...] the fl...

Josef Myslivecek, 'Il Boemo': The Man and His Music

[...] Mozart's correspondence also provides the author with the single largest repository of information on Myslivecek. Since Myslivecek gradually included more arias influenced by sonata form in his operas, one potentially fruitful area of further study would be to investigate the ways in which his music parallels the evolution of instrumental sonata forms by other composers at this pivotal point in its development.

In Search of New Scales: Prince Edmond de Polignac, Octatonic Explorer

[...] in spite of Kahan's meticulous and thorough research, she is unable to pinpoint the cause behind Polignac's discovery; his adventurous nature combined with a thorough mathematical training and exposure to Greek tetrachordal theory are cited as the most likely catalysts. [...] her study will force scholars to rethink the current understanding of the octatonic and its dissemination in France.

The Art of French Piano Music: Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Chabrier

The author is a concert pianist who has recorded all of Debussy's piano works (Tall Poppies Records TP 094, TP 123, TP 164, and TP 165 [1997-2003]) and edited many of them with meticulous care and expert judgment for the Debussy Oeuvres complètes. The kinship with Asian music has been more difficult to document, but Howat makes a case for the effect of gamelan scales on Debussy's piano music that goes far beyond the usual obvious remarks of writers who point to works like Pagodes and the sec...

From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions

Russell himself has been instrumental in the revival of mission music, and his collaboration with the vocal group Chanticleer has produced a series of performances and recordings. [...] he envisions this book as a vehicle toward informed performance, and the many performing editions contained within the volume and its online appendices add a practical and welcome dimension rarely featured in musicological literature.

The Traditional Folk Music and Dances of Spain: A Bibliographic Guide to Research. Vol. 1

The opening section of the bibliographical guide deals with resources related to research institutions, bibliographical aids, and reference materials associated with Spanish music. [...] a bibliography related to conference proceedings and collected essays complete the first volume.

Art Song Composers of Spain: An Encyclopedia

The idea of major and minor composers has been problematized by musicology, and her approach carries with it the danger of instilling her personal opinion on this largely unexplored area of music history. In the same vein, Draayer's appendix, "A Selected Guide to European Spanish Song," offers a list of the published collections of Spanish art song, including the ISBN, which facilitates purchase of the music by an interested performer or teacher.

The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss

According to Heisler, these chapters "chronicle a gradual transformation from his modernleaning, parodic conception of classical dance in the years leading up to World War I to a belated obsession with romantic-era ballet during World War II" (p. 6). Perhaps the principle [sic] value of this book is the way in which Strauss's ballet collaborations . . . demand an inherently pan-disciplinary approach: the synthesis of published Strauss literature and materials . . . with unpublished and/or la...

Mozart On the Stage

[...] Andrew Steptoe in his The Mozart-Da Ponte Operas Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, while treating only three operas, includes discussions of Vienna and its history, the social class structure, Mozart's contact with Enlightenment circles, some biography, information on the singers, costumes, scenery, and fees (helpfully supplying a guide to the currency), spicing up the narrative with tidbits on social customs such as cicisbeos and post-feast purging.\n 161, but if the opera were t...

Music and the Book Trade From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century

Emphasizing the importance of international networks to the print trade, Fenlon maps the trade routes that linked Iberia with Western Europe and notes that music traveled to Spain via the same distribution routes that had long been established for books; at the same time, any music exported from the Spanish peninsula tended to go to the Spanish colonies. With evidence gleaned from the ledger books, press advertisements, and Haydn and Mozart biographical information, combined with a painstaki...

The Musician's Way: A Guide to Practice, Performance, and Wellness

[...] many of the participants have been motivated to further these goals, and as a result workshops, courses, and publications have proliferated in the ensuing years. "Fearless Performance" includes information about performance anxiety, as well as guidance in becoming a performing artist with information such as backstage techniques, connecting with the audience, dealing with errors, designing concert programs, auditions, and working in the recording studio.