Notes for Notes.
The Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music (Kyle Smith, curator) in the Free Library of Philadelphia has acquired the performance library of The Women's Philharmonic. Founded in San Francisco in 1981, the Women's Philharmonic has been pivotal in the growing prominence of women composers and conductors in the U.S. Their concerts and recordings, prior to the disbanding of the orchestra in 2004, are counted as turning points in the careers of many women musicians. Included in the gift are scores and parts to works by Esther Williamson Ballou, Lili Boulanger, Teresa Carreno, Emma Lou Diemer, Jacqueline Fontyn, Fanny Mendelssohn, Maria Theresia von Paradis, Florence Price, Camilla de Rossi, and Ruth Crawford Seeger.The Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in the Free Library of Philadelphia is the world's largest lending library of orchestral performance materials, with over 21,000 titles. It is a unique source for many rare and otherwise out-of-print works, with large holdings of American, Latin-American, Swedish, Russian, and Moravian titles, and has a long-standing commitment to promoting new, noteworthy, and little-known orchestral music. The collection is open Monday through Friday 9:00 am-5:00 pm, and can be reached by phone at (215) 686-5313, or by e-mail at fleisher@library.phila.gov.
The University of Pennsylvania Library (Richard Griscom, head, Otto E. Albrecht Music Library) is pleased to announce the completion of a project to preserve 532 tape recordings of Philadelphia Orchestra concerts broadcast on Philadelphia radio station WFLN-FM between February 1960 and April 1977. The original broadcast recordings were donated to the University Library by the Philadelphia Orchestra and WFLN in 1987, and the preservation project was funded in part by a $40,000 grant awarded in 2004 by the GRAMMY Foundation.
The collection documents eighteen seasons of the orchestra's programming, featuring standard repertory as well as less frequently performed works. Included in the recordings are a number of world-premiere performances of works by American composers Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, Samuel Barber, David Diamond, and Roy Harris.
As music director during this period, Eugene Ormandy appears most frequently as conductor, but the recordings also include programs conducted by Ormandy's predecessor, Leopold Stokowski, his successors, Riccardo Muti and Wolfgang Sawallisch, as well as Otto Klemperer, Georg Solti, Seiji Ozawa, Claudio Abbado, James Levine, and other noted guest conductors. Featured soloists include the foremost performers of the day and a number of Philadelphia Orchestra first-chair players. Many of the recordings include interviews with conductors and soloists that were originally broadcast as intermission features.
The original tape recordings have been transferred to archival compact discs, and the master copies are preserved in the library's off-site storage facility. Copies for use by researchers augment other primary sources, such as the personal papers of Eugene Ormandy, donated to the University of Pennsylvania Library by Ormandy's widow in 1987. Together with the marked scores in the Ormandy Collection, the recordings provide a body of primary source material of interest to researchers studying twentieth-century orchestral performance practice.
The collection is currently being cataloged on RLIN, the union catalog of the Research Libraries Group (RLG), and will be accessible as well through the Penn Library catalog. Upon completion of the cataloging in fall 2005, the recordings will be available for listening in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library in the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center at the University of Pennsylvania. For more information on the Rare Book and Manuscript Library and its holdings, visit the library's Web site at http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/, or contact Nancy Shawcross, curator of manuscripts.
The Mildred P. Allen Memorial Library, University of Hartford (Linda Solow Blotner, head), announces a gift of $75,000 from a gift annuity agreement established by Margaret Z. Larsen in 1995 in celebration of the 75th anniversary of The Hartt School. This gift creates the Larsen Fund at Hartt and will be used to increase holdings of Hartt's internal libraries as well as the Allen Memorial Library. Hartt's libraries include the Performance Library of orchestral and choral music and the Music Education Resource Library. The Larsen family has been strong supporters of The Hartt School and the University of Hartford for many years. Margaret "Margot" Zerbe Larsen was born in Euclid, Ohio. She was the wife and widow of Roy E. Larsen, president of Time, Inc. Her decision to support the music library at the University of Hartford may have been influenced somewhat by her son Christopher, who served on the University's Board of Regents. He and his wife Janet have been long-time supporters of the Hartt School at the University. Additionally, Janet Larsen serves on the university's Library Board of Visitors.
The New England Conservatory of Music is pleased to announce the publication of Guide to the Archives at NEC, made possible through the generous assistance of the National Historic Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). Interested institutions may obtain a copy at no cost by contacting Jean Morrow, Director of Libraries, 33 Gainsborough St., Boston, MA 02115.
The Texas A & M University Library at College Station has purchased significant collections that will support the music degree in the Department of Performance Studies, which was established in 1999. These collections include the majority of the Howard Mayer Brown Collection, the Edward Downes Collection of Scores and Libretti, and a large part of the Mary Schieffelin Collection. These were acquired from the firm of J. & J. Lubrano. In addition, collections of complete works of composers and a large music reference collection have been purchased from this same firm.
The Major Orchestra Librarians' Association (MOLA), for the first time in its history, will have its annual meeting outside of North America in 2006. The Tonhalle Orchestra will host the 24th Annual Conference 30 March-4 April in Zurich, Switzerland. The agenda will include presentations on Swiss composers; copyright issues in Switzerland, the EU and U.S.; various performance events and visits to area libraries; and an opportunity to meet representatives from the major European publishing houses. Any interested party may attend all events (except for closed sessions for members). Consult the MOLA Web site (http://www.molainc.org) for registration and agenda information as it becomes available.
Notes News. "Warp, Weft, and Waffle: Weaving Information Literacy into an Undergraduate Music Curriculum," by Beth Christensen (Notes 60, no. 3 [March 2004]: 616-31), has been selected for the American Library Association's Library Instruction Round Table's (LIRT) list of top instruction articles for 2004. LIRT is dedicated to advocating library instruction in school, public, special, and academic libraries. The Continuing Education committee read and reviewed more than one hundred articles published in 2004, and there were many quality articles from which to choose. LIRT's Top Twenty 2004 appears in the June 2005 issue of the Library Instruction Round Table News available at http://www3.baylor.edu/LIRT/lirtnews/.
Melva Peterson (1925-2005) passed away at her home in New York of a heart attack or stroke. She had nearly completed physical therapy following knee replacement surgery in February and otherwise appeared to be in good health. She would have celebrated her eightieth birthday in October.
Melva retired from her position as music librarian at the City College of New York (one of the senior colleges of the City University of New York) in 1995, after 39 years of service and transforming what was essentially a departmental collection into a substantive library. Previously she had been performing arts librarian at the Kansas City Public Library. She served three terms on the Music Library Association's (MLA) Board of Directors as recording secretary in the 1960s, and was a member of the Commission Internationale Mixte, the IAML/IMS joint committee that governs RILM, in the 1980s and early 1990s. Melva was active in representing MLA in such groups as the MLA/MOLA/MPA joint committee, the Council of National Library and Information Associations, and IAML-US/MLA joint committees. In 2001, she was awarded the MLA Citation for distinguished service to music librarianship. From 1957-77, she edited a quarterly book review column for Pan Pipes of Sigma Alpha Iota.
Melva was undaunted by age or infirmity. Despite the disabling effects of her impending knee surgery, she traveled to Oslo, Norway last summer for IAML, and what turned out to be a final visit to her beloved Denmark. She was an avid concert- and museum-goer and sang with a choral group at her church. She followed MLA-L with interest.
RUTH HENDERSON
City College of New York
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| Author: | Henderson, Ruth |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Notes |
| Article Type: | Obituary |
| Geographic Code: | 1U2NY |
| Date: | Dec 1, 2005 |
| Words: | 1375 |
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