Notes for notes.
The Music Library Association has announced its publication awards for 2006. The Vincent H. Duckles Award for the best book-length bibliography or other research tool in music published in 2006 was presented to Diccionario de la Zarzuela: Espana e Hispanoamerica, 2d ed., under the direction of Emilio Casares Rodicio (Madrid: Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales, 2006). The MLA Publications Awards Committee noted that "the musical stage works known as zarzuelas remain relatively obscure in North America. However, by its sheer volume of 2,087 pages, the Diccionario de la Zarzuela affirms the importance of this genre on the Iberian peninsula and throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas. With entries for composers, performers, countries, and individual zarzuelas, the Diccionario provides a wealth of detail from a cadre of experts, and bibliographies and discographies at the end of articles point to even more information in the field. Even the sepia-toned illustrations throughout the Diccionario recall readers to the heyday of the zarzuela in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For its exploration of this important facet of musical life in the Spanish-speaking world ... it will remain an essential reference tool on the zarzuela for many years to come." The Eva Judd O'Meara Award for the best review published in Notes in 2006 was awarded to John Wagstaff for his review of Katharine Ellis's Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). The review appeared in Notes 63, no. 2 (December 2006): 355-58. The committee stated that "John Wagstaff's perceptive observations about French cultural preoccupations serve as an effective framework for evaluating Ellis's study. Politics and music intertwine as he skillfully summarizes the book's content, and his commentary reveals a sophisticated understanding of the subject at hand. Wagstaff relates Ellis's book to her previous work in this area, investing his review with the advantage of a deeper perspective. By contrasting historiographical method in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music studies, he offers a starting point for further discussion. Moreover, his engaging writing makes this review a pleasure to read." The Richard S. Hill Award for the best article on music librarianship or article of a music-bibliographic nature was awarded to James Deaville for his article "Publishing Paraphrases and Creating Collectors: Friedrich Hofmeister, Franz Liszt, and the Technology of Popularity," published in Franz Liszt and His World, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs and Dana Gooley(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 255-88. The committee commented that "Deaville's article offers a new look into the symbiotic links between composer, performer, and publisher, and how these relationships functioned in the world of nineteenth-century commerce. Supported by path-breaking work with unpublished letters and previously inaccessible business records, Deaville explores how one publisher, Friedrich Hofmeister of Leipzig, both responded to and helped create the nineteenth-century Liszt craze. His study clarifies and augments our understanding of early Liszt publishing practices, of 19th-century German music collecting, and of how one particular publisher, Hofmeister, met the emerging cultural needs of the time."Other MLA Awards. The 2008 Dena Epstein Award for Library and Archival Research in American Music was given to two recipients, Steven Robert Swayne and Nikos Pappas. Mr. Swayne, associate professor of music at Dartmouth College, will develop a book proposal for the first comprehensive study of the life, times, and music of William Schuman (1910-1992). Currently, his working title for the book is Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life. Mr. Swayne has conducted a significant amount of research already at the New York Public Library, which holds the William Schuman papers. He will now travel to the Library of Congress to tackle the composer's papers and music manuscripts residing there. Nikos Pappas is a doctoral candidate in musicology at the University of Kentucky. His proposal, entitled Sacred Musk Tune Index of Trans-Appalachian and Southern Antebellum Source Material (1760-1870), follows the initiatives of earlier' scholars in American sacred music. His project involves the documentation of tune repertories, musical performance, and composition, with its dissemination to the American West and South from the Eastern Seaboard. Unlike earlier studies, this project utilizes surviving publications and manuscript compilations of hymn tunes, printed collections of text-only hymnals, and other supplementary descriptions of performance in journals and newspapers, diaries, broadsheets, sermons, and miscellaneous other sources.
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 Anne Shelley, Katharine (Kasey) Chandler, David Winjum, and Laurie Lake. Anne Shelley is a master's candidate in library science at the University of Iowa and will graduate in May 2008. She currently works as a graduate assistant (evening circulation .supervisor) at the Rita Benton Music Library. Katharine (Kasey) Chandler is in her first year as a librarian in the music department of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Previously, she received her M.S. degree in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign. David Winjum is completing a dual ML1S/MM program at Dominican and Northwestern universities in Illinois, where his work includes internships in music librarian ship. He has a B.M. in music recording technology from Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania. Laurie Lake is completing an MLS degree at Indiana University. She has worked in a variety of orchestra library positions and is an active member of the Major Orchestra Librarians' Association (MOIA). Ms. Lake is currently head of the music library of the Interlochen Center for the Arts.
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 librari-anship. The award this year was given to Kristine Nelson to further her research toward a study of the "working musicians" who actually produced the recording sessions in Las Vegas during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. It is her intent to compile an annotated discography of the sessions in question, as well as to prepare articles and papers providing an overview of musical life in Las Vegas.
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 Jocelyn Arem to support her multifaceted research project on the Gaffe Lena Collection in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. This study focuses on the cultural impact of the 1960s folk revival movement with an emphasis on Caffe Lena, America's oldest continuously running coffeehouse. Ms. Arem's goal is "to document and preserve the story ... [and] enable continued professional development of the Caffe and its archive" through her survey of the collection, indexing and cataloging work, oral interviews, analyzing and cross-referencing materials, cultivating the acquisition and organization of additional materials for the archive, and the creation of an interactive Web site at www xaffelenahistory.org (accessed 20 February 2008) which will relate the Caffe to the larger socio-political ideas of the 1960s. Ultimately, her work will support the production of a thesis-length narrative in the folklore curriculum at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
The Arthur Friedheim Library of the Peabody Institute has recently acquired two first-edition piano-vocal scores of operas by Hector Berlioz, Beatrice et Benedict (Paris: G. Brandus & S. Dufour, 1863), and the second part of Les Troyens (Paris: Choudens, 1863). Both scores came from the library of Danish conductor and composer Asger Hamerick (1843-1923), director of the institute from 1871 to 1898. Hamerick was closely associated with Berlioz in Paris and later claimed to be Berlioz's only pupil. One score is signed by Hamerick, the other by Berlioz to Hamerick. Both are currently on display in the Friedheim Library.
The Music Division of the Library of Congress reports the following new acquisitions from an auction sale at Sotheby's on 23 May 2007: Several important first editions of works by George Frideric Handel (1685-1750), including Alessandro (J. Cluer, 1726); Scipio (J. Cluer, 1726); Semele (Walsh, ca. 1750); and The Triumph of Time and Truth (Walsh, 1757), as well as a group of seventeen unpublished autograph letters of Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924), written to George Maxwell, Ricordi's agent in New York, and the first president of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). These previously unknown letters discuss La fanciulla del West, and include a request for Maxwell's help in getting an agreement from David Belasco so that the work could be turned into an opera. Other works covered in these letters include Tosca and La boheme.
In November 2007, Jack Butterworth donated more than 100 cue sheets from silent films from 1919 to 1929. Among the noted items in the jack Butterworth Collection of Silent Movie Cue Sheets is a rare cue sheet for Excess Baggage (1927).
DENIse Gallo
Library of Congress
H. Wiley Hitchcock, a leading scholar of American music and the founding director of the Institute for Studies in American Music (ISAM) at Brooklyn College, passed away on the morning of 5 December 2007 after a lengthy illness. He was 84. Born 28 September 1923, in Detroit, Michigan, he attended Dartmouth College (A.B., 1944), and the University of Michigan (M.M. 1948, Ph.D. 1954)--studying in 1949 at the Conservatoire Americain (under Nadia Boulanger)--and taught at the University of Michigan, New York University, and Hunter College, before going to Brooklyn College in 1971. Wiley was brilliant, a true man of letters, a model musicologist with multifaceted interests, impeccable standards, and path-breaking publications. His highly esteemed work in American music studies (the New Grove Dictionary of American Music: his Prentice Hall textbook series that included his Music in the United States [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969; 4th ed., 2000]; studies on Charles Ives, etc.) was built upon his excellent contributions to the fields of French and Italian Baroque music (Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Giulio Caccini, et ah). His last completed work was a critical edition of the 129 songs by Charles Ives published in 2004 (Music of the United States of America, vol. 12; Recent Researches in American Music, vol. 47 [Middleton, WI: Published for the American Musicological Society by A-R Editions]). He was a staunch advocate for American music of all kinds. In 1966, he was elected president of the Music Library Association (MLA), and in 1990-92, president of the American Musicological Society (AMS). The Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College would like to rename ISAM as the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music, in his memory.
Professor Hitchcock is remembered by scores of students and colleagues. Here, D. W. Krummel (emeritus, University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign), offers a personal remembrance of him:
H. Wiley Hitchcock, who died on December 5th, was President of MLA in 1966-67. His wonderful mixture of charisma, style, and good will, quiet energy and thoughtful brilliance, made him a near-deity to many of those who were privileged to work closely with him (as I was, beginning in his First American music class in 1949). Wiley was the last of the several notable MLA presidents who were not themselves music librarians; it was his championing of American music that inevitably led him into the music library world, beginning with a delightful Notes essay in 1955 on "The Indian Princess." His work lives on in our collections, from "Amerigrove" on our reference shelves, to the publications of his Institute for the Study of American Music, and his Da Capo reprint series on American music. Just as important is the breadth of his definition of American music, from colonial times to current popular music, from classic jazz to avant garde composers. He would have appreciated a toast.
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| Publication: | Notes |
|---|---|
| Article Type: | Awards list |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Jun 1, 2008 |
| Words: | 1944 |
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