Notes for Notes.
The Music Library Association has announced its publication awards for 2005. The Vincent H. Duckles Award for the best book-length bibliography or other research tool in music published in 2005 was presented to Mary Lewis for her monumental study, Antonio Gardano, Venetian Music Printer, 1538-1569 (New York: Garland; Routledge, 1988-2005). The MLA Publications Awards Committee noted that this work was "... published over the course of seventeen years, and is now complete with volume 3 appearing in 2005. It stands as a major reference work on Gardano's music editions, some of the most important sources of sixteenth-century music and is a remarkable study of Renaissance publishing. Lewis is meticulous in her work, employing a number of approaches in her study of Gardano's role, including bibliographical, historical, and cultural considerations. This work will certainly stand as a major reference work and will be a shining example for all future works on Renaissance music printers and publishers." The Eva Judd O'Meara Award for the best review published in Notes in 2005 was awarded to Ruth A. Solie for her review of George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture, ed. Michael Musgrave (New York: Palgrave, 2003). The review appeared in Notes 61, no. 3 (March 2005): 732-34. The committee stated "Solie's review strikes the perfect balance between providing readers with a summary overview of the contents of the book and engaging the multiple contributors as an intellectual peer. Solie finds a veritable feast of interesting material in the volume at hand--she refers to the inclusion in the end matter of Grove's note on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as 'for dessert.' Her ability to synthesize information about the book and deliver it to readers in a spirited and enlightening way reflects Solie's own distinguished career and writings. This contribution should serve as a model for all who would undertake reviewing for Notes." The Richard S. Hill Award for the best article on music librarianship or article of a music-bibliographic nature was awarded to Jeremy L. Smith for his article "A Newly Discovered Edition of William Byrd's Psalmes, Sonets & Songs: Provenance and Significance" published in Notes 62, no. 2 (December 2005): 273-98. The committee comments "Jeremy Smith uses his discovery of a hitherto unknown edition of William Byrd's Psalmes, Sonets and Songs as a springboard to examine the intersection of politics, publishing, and book collecting. Juxtaposing the fates of two copies from this edition, one worn and forgotten and the other carefully preserved by a succession of notable owners, he explores the nexus of context and content to which they likely owe both their creation and survival. Smith's masterful reconstruction of each copy's provenance, as well as his examination of the clandestine activities of certain publishers and collectors, lead to thought-provoking speculation about the relationship between religious and political strife and the popularity of this collection."Other MLA Awards. The 2007 Dena Epstein Award for Library and Archival Research in American Music was given to two recipients, Sarah Dorsey and R. Allen Lott. Ms. Dorsey, music librarian at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, is developing a book proposal for a biography of the pioneering American composer, pianist, and educator, Louise Talma (1906-1996). According to Dorsey, Talma "was a member of the generation of composers who invented the American voice. Along with Copland, Bernstein, and others, Talma is an integral part in the creation of the national style of art music." Despite this, an in-depth study of Talma's life does not exist, chiefly because Talma's own materials have not been accessible to researchers. Ms. Dorsey, on sabbatical leave, recently processed the extensive collection at the Library of Congress of Talma's scores, correspondence, photographs, programs, and other materials. To complete her work on Talma, she will return to the Library of Congress to conduct further research, as well as travel to Yale University to research the significant amount of material relating to Talma in the Beinecke Library. In addition, Ms. Dorsey will visit several research facilities in New York that hold material relevant to her research, including the Juilliard School, the New York Public Library, and Hunter College. Mr. Lott, professor and chair of Music History at the School of Church Music at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, plans to conduct research for a critical edition of nineteenth-century American hymnody for the series Music in the United States of America (MUSA), administered by the American Musicological Society and published by A-R Editions, Inc. Lott states that the purpose of this edition is "to document America's original contribution during the nineteenth century to the ongoing hymnic tradition." As such, this publication will aid in gaining a better understanding of "the history of a tradition that is still very much alive." Mr. Lott's research will require the manual search of numerous hymnals for hymn tunes and related information. To do so, he will visit two of the largest hymnal collections in the United States, those at the Library of Congress and at Emory University, as well as at his home institution.
The Kevin Freeman Award supports aspiring music librarians in offsetting the cost to attend the annual meeting of the association. This year, awards were granted to Amy R. Pennington, Amanda Evans, Janelle West, and Kristine Nelsen.
The Walter Gerboth Award is given to a member of the association who is in the first five years of his or her professional career, and who is seeking financial support for research in progress in music or music librarianship. The award this year was given to Michelle Lynn Oswell, humanities librarian for music and literature at Haverford College. Ms. Oswell is a graduate of the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University (M.L.S.), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Ph.D., Musicology). Her proposal, entitled "The English Lute Song Database Project," is to create an online database of specific information, both musical and literary, for the English lute song from 1597 to 1622, using PHP scripts to access a MySQL database. The project will initially cover lute songs in facsimile and printed editions and later index lute songs in manuscript. She plans to model her project on the style of another catalog, David Fallows's A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415-1480 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). The award committee states that this project, which would "put a body of musical works never before brought under such control into an online database, searchable by a number of parameters, was found to have real merit and real world, practical use. Her proposal is feasible and will be useful to librarians, musicologists, and students immediately upon the project's completion."
The Carol June Bradley Award supports studies that involve the history of music libraries or special collections; biographies of music librarians; studies of specific aspects of music librarianship; and studies of music library patrons' activities. The award this year was given to Gary Galvan. Mr. Galvan will research the acquisition and growth representation of Henry Cowell's materials in the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in the Free Library of Philadelphia. With the approval of the collection's curator, he has undertaken the digitization of over 300 documents from the Henry Cowell files and compiled a massive annotated list. The resulting DVD will be donated to the Fleisher archives. The award committee comments that "the research not only sheds additional light on one of the most prominent pioneers of modern American music, but also directly benefits one of the country's outstanding music collections."
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Lewis Music Library has received a significant donation from Lionel Kinney (Class of 1953) to support the Music at MIT Oral History Project. Established by the library in 1999, this project documents the distinguished history of music at MIT. For over 100 years, music has been a vibrant part of MIT's culture. Through recorded audio interviews with current and retired MIT music faculty, staff, former students, and visiting artists, the Music at MIT Oral History Project is preserving this legacy for the historical record. The Kinney gift will expand the project by providing the funding needed to conduct in-depth interviews with five individuals per year for the next five years. Interviews will be conducted by Lewis Music Library staff member Forrest Larson. As they are completed, these interviews will be available for listening in the library. Written transcripts will also be available. For more information about this project, see http://libraries.mit.edu/music/oralhistory/index.html (accessed 21 February 2007).
PETER MUNSTEDT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cornell University's Sidney Cox Library of Music and Dance has received the late Sidney T. Cox's collection of Giuseppe Verdi scores, recordings, and related materials. Mr. Cox, a Cornell alumnus (B.A., 1947; M.A., 1948), had been a longtime and generous supporter of Cornell and particularly of the Music Department. In addition to establishing the Cox Fund for Contemporary Music, Mr. Cox's support of the Music Department's Lincoln Hall renovation and expansion allowed the Music Library's space to increase by seventy percent. In recognition of his support, the library was named in his honor in 2000.
Mr. Cox died on 19 October 2005, leaving his extensive Verdi collection to the Music Library. Highlights of the early and first editions of the operas include an 1846 vocal score of Attila (Milan: F. Lucca), an 1844 vocal score of Ernani (Milan: Ricordi), a signed 1894 vocal score of Falstaff (Paris: Ricordi), and an 1896 Russian vocal score of Aida (Moscow: Jurgenson). The collection includes autograph letters from Verdi to Leopoldo Mugnone, Clara Maffei, and Francesco Pasetti. Mr. Cox also had assembled an extensive library of secondary source materials, including books, reviews, and auction records, to support his research and collecting activities. Many of the nineteenth-century scores and librettos have been added to the Music Library's Special Collections, and the secondary source materials will be added to the circulating collections. The letters are housed in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University.
BONNA J. BOETTCHER
Cornell University
The passing of Edward Colby, music librarian at Stanford University, was noted in the March 2007 issue of the journal (vol. 63, no. 3: 581-82). Here, his colleague Garrett Bowles offers a personal recollection:
Mimi Tashiro's announcement of the death of Ed Colby means that the pre-World War II generation of music librarians is now all gone! I owe him a great debt of gratitude as my mentor. I first met Ed when I interviewed for a job at Stanford University cataloging music in 1965. This was a heady time at Stanford--they were just emerging from difficult financial times, and I was one of several librarians hired that year to beef up the libraries professional staff. At that time, the music library occupied the ball and banquet rooms in the old president's mansion called "The Knoll" because it was sited above the campus on the shores of "Lake Lagunita" (a sizable reservoir). Through his diligent efforts, Ed had eked out the monies for a respectable reference and musical monuments collection. Like many librarians at Stanford during the years following World War II, the emphasis had been on collection development and reference services; technical services were deferred.
I was hired to work in the main library catalog department as their first "full time" music cataloger; there were already two part-time music catalogers. I was told to see about establishing cataloging services in The Knoll. When I went up there, I was amazed to find unsorted boxes of catalog cards stashed throughout the building and a card catalog in desperate condition. Ed explained that while the cards were filed in the main catalog, he had no staff to file the cards into the music library's catalog, so I spent my first couple of months reconstructing the catalog.
The support staffing at The Knoll was minimal, and Ed often had to take care of manning the circulation desk. He was a quintessential reference librarian, always polite and diligent in assisting his patrons. He knew his collection thoroughly--after all, he had handled every book, and knew their contents! He knew how to focus his efforts to achieve the best results in providing service to the library's patrons. I learned from him that in collection development, one should thoroughly know and understand the needs of the library's patrons and focus one's efforts on providing the materials they needed. Unused books were an extravagance.
But how did that philosophy lead to his development of the Archive of Recorded Sound? Actually the archive fit it perfectly, because Ed understood that these were the performance practice research materials of the future and that they fit the Stanford music department's large and active performance practice program. Though the program was focused on the baroque, Ed understood that recordings were the documentation of changes in twentieth-century performance. Ed was also concerned that catalog access needed to be provided to the archive collection and convinced the library administration to have me develop a plan for a catalog. David Weber, the Director of Libraries at that time, had heard that discussions were underway between representatives of Yale University, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, and encouraged me to become involved with them. Those discussions eventually led to the Associated Audio Archives project and to catalog access to more than 600,000 78 rpm recordings.
I'm thankful to Ed for being my mentor, and for the many opportunities he provided me. He saw to it that my job duties were early on expanded to include the role of assistant music librarian, and gave me responsibilities in reference services, collection development, and in teaching the graduate music bibliography course. His vision of collection development and public services directed Stanford into the forefront of music libraries."
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| Author: | Munstedt, Peter; Boettcher, Bonna J. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Notes |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Jun 1, 2007 |
| Words: | 2282 |
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