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By: Brian McCurdy
For this week's NLS Music Notes blog post, we look at the incredible life of Francis "Frank" Johnson (1792-1844). Celebrate Black History Month with us as we pay tribute to an African American composer, band leader, and pioneer.
Posted in: NLS Music Notes
We are so pleased to introduce Khadijah Camp, who has joined us temporarily from the Library Collections Service Group’s Employee Resources Management & Planning Team. She is working as an Innovation Specialist on the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud (CCHC) initiative. CCHC is supported by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. …
Posted in: The Signal
New BARD additions, January 2022 It’s a new year, and we’re still here! This month we have added more titles of music appreciation content from Smithsonian Folkways, and from our braille collection, more titles from our international partners via the Marrakesh Treaty. They include music instruction from the Tradition of Excellence series for flute, bassoon and …
Posted in: NLS Music Notes
By: Stephen Winick
In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both videos together in an easy-to-find blog post. We're proud to continue the series with Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, an American roots music duo based in New York's Catskill Mountains. They are best known for their work on the soundtrack of Ken Burns's PBS documentary series, The Civil War. Jay's composition "Ashokan Farewell" became the musical centerpiece of the Grammy-winning soundtrack and was nominated for an Emmy. Their performance left a lasting impression on everyone who tuned in. Jay’s fiddling is known for playfulness, drama, soul and technical verve, as he explores many musical styles and idioms that he has internalized and made his own. Molly’s inventiveness on piano and guitar supports the tunes and follows the flow of the melody. Her rich and expressive vocals round out the experience of their award-winning concert presentations.
Posted in: Folklife Today
By: Juliette Appold
Who are Baba Yaga and Gnomus? This blog shows how Mussorgsky represents them in his piano suite "Pictures at an Exhibition," and what kinds of related NLS materials you may be interested in.
Posted in: NLS Music Notes
By: Nora Scheland
Do you hear the people sing, singing the songs inspired by the public domain? Broadways musicals have a long tradition of pulling inspiration from the plays, short stories, operas, and more in the public domain. Let's take a look at five musicals and what inspired them.
Posted in: Copyright
By: Melissa Lindberg
We are pleased to announce the publication of a new guide describing the Prints & Photographs Division’s large and varied collection of cartoon and caricature art. Martha H. Kennedy, now retired Curator of Popular & Applied Graphic Art and author of the guide, describes the appeal of this collection material: “The Library’s vast, diverse collections …
Posted in: Picture This
By: Naomi Coquillon
Inspiration for winter activities for families from the Library's Japanese woodblock print collection.
Posted in: Minerva’s Kaleidoscope
By: Katie Rodda
This blog post continues the NLS Music Section's series of American Music from A to Z. This week, we take a look at the life and music of Hazel Dickens.
Posted in: NLS Music Notes
By: Jan Grenci
The collections of the Prints & Photographs Division of the Library of Congress include thousands of photochroms. These early color prints were photomechanically reproduced so they weren’t photographs in the traditional sense. I spent some time looking through the photochroms, most of which date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while working on …
Posted in: Picture This