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Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by Senior Music Cataloger Sharon McKinley. The Library of Congress Chorale’s Spring concert is this Thursday, June 7. Cinema in Concert will be presented at noon in the JeffersonBuilding, Coolidge Auditorium. It is free to staff and the public, so if you’re in the neighborhood, stop on by! It’s …
Posted in: Composers, Concerts and Events, Guest bloggers, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
Seeing a new Wes Anderson movie is like getting a new mix tape. The soundtracks to his films blend original scores — often by Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh — with pop music that summons an air of fragile nostalgia: Nick Drake, Nico, middle-period Kinks, French yeh-yeh music. Classical music also plays a part in his …
Posted in: Composers, Film Music, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by Judy Graves, Digital Project Coordinator, Digital Reference Section and life-long Girl Scout. On Saturday, June 9th, the Girl Scouts of the Nation’s Capitol will host a song fest on the National Mall. With 200,000 girls and adults expected, this will not be an ordinary songfest by any stretch …
Posted in: Guest bloggers, Sheet Music, Sheet Music of the Week, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by Senior Cataloger Sharon McKinley. This is already last week’s news, but we wanted to note the passing of a singer who had a profound and lasting effect on legions of performers and a horde of admirers through a large part of the 20th century and beyond. How does …
Posted in: Guest bloggers, Musicians
Posted by: Pat Padua
The 2011 National Recording Registry selections were announced this morning, and as always the titles are great fodder for an eclectic, historically important, culturally influential mix-tape. Among the titles is one of my very favorite albums, Love’s Forever Changes, a relic of 1967 whose lush string arrangements, rich melodies, and alternately pastoral and visionary lyrics make …
Posted in: Musicians, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by Sharon McKinley, Senior Music Cataloger. Old sheet music can be brittle. The pages are often dissected and bound into volumes by previous owners. Sometimes a piece is simply missing pages. With all that, do you ever wonder how Library of Congress catalogers can identify a piece? I did …
Posted in: Newly Cataloged, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
As seen from the Earth, the planet Venus will move across the face of the sun on June 5, 2012. This week’s featured sheet music celebrates this rare orbit with John Philip Sousa’s commemorative march, part of a Transit of Venus presentation created in the Performing Arts Encyclopedia with the help of NASA scientist Sten …
Posted in: Sheet Music, Sheet Music of the Week, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
When I prepared the Martha Graham Collection for digitization some years ago, I looked at hundreds of clippings that the legendary choreography kept in her detailed scrapbooks. Something struck me about the dance reviews. Regular columns by certain music critics were accompanied by a thumbnail photo of the author. In the scrapbook pages of the Graham …
Posted in: Pic of the Week, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
Fans of the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows were saddened by the death last week of star Jonathan Frid, who played the vampire Barnabas Collins. This week’s featured sheet music does not speak of vampires or other shadowy figures. But its lyrical plea to “meet me in the shadows” is at once romantic and sinister, and …
Posted in: Sheet Music, Sheet Music of the Week, Special Collections