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Posted by: Cait Miller
Are you a fan of American Idol? Remember the Gong Show? Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour was the granddaddy of today’s top amateur talent shows. During its radio heyday in the mid-1930s, thousands of hopefuls traveled to New York City to audition, competing for a handful of slots on the weekly broadcast. Along with the …
Posted in: Special Collections
Posted by: Cait Miller
The Music Division’s archival collections feature the archives and personal papers of some of the most significant and influential artists and figures in music history, particularly 20th-century composers, conductors, scholars, and publishers. When researchers and performers think of the Music Division’s archival collections, names like Leonard Bernstein, George and Ira Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Serge Koussevitzky, …
Posted in: Special Collections, Women in Music
Posted by: Cait Miller
The following is a guest post from Senior Music Reference Specialist Kevin LaVine. As an author, musicologist, conductor, composer, pianist, teacher, theoretician, cultural ambassador and lexicographer, Nicolas Slonimsky’s contributions to music scholarship are both inestimable and enduring. Slonimsky was born in Tsarist Russia in 1894 and pursued his initial musical studies in his native St. …
Posted in: Guest bloggers, Special Collections
Posted by: Cait Miller
It’s a big day for baseball fans as the St. Louis Cardinals face the Boston Red Sox tonight for game six of the World Series in historic Fenway Park. It’s been an exciting series, and we would be remiss not to take this opportunity to highlight our historic baseball sheet music – particularly that …
Posted in: Sheet Music, Special Collections
Posted by: Cait Miller
Tomorrow, Tuesday, October 29, the Music Division will sponsor a lecture by musicologist Nigel Simeone based on his new book, The Leonard Bernstein Letters. Simeone’s book includes 650 letters spanning Bernstein’s adolescence to the end of his life that provide a rare glimpse into the more private side of the great conductor and composer. Tomorrow’s …
Posted in: Composers, Special Collections
Posted by: Cait Miller
The following is a guest post from Archivist Janet McKinney. Mesdames et Messieurs, it is with deepest pride and greatest pleasure that we welcome you to the In the Muse blog. And now, we invite you to relax, pull up a computer chair, as the Music Division proudly presents: The Howard Ashman Papers. Howard Ashman …
Posted in: Exhibitions, Special Collections, Theater
Posted by: Cait Miller
Composer Amy Beach (1867-1944) was the first American woman to achieve widespread recognition as a composer of large-scale works with orchestra. Read about correspondence between Oscar Sonneck, first Chief of the Music Division, and Beach regarding her Piano Concerto and the idea of sending manuscripts to the Library of Congress for preservation.
Posted in: Birthdays, Composers, Special Collections, Women in Music
Posted by: Cait Miller
Every six months the Performing Arts Reading Room looks forward to the installation of a new exhibit in the reading room’s foyer. Over the years staff and readers have learned about the riches of the Music Division’s collections by exploring exhibits on topics ranging from the Ballets Russes, to Music and Animation, to the Federal …
Posted in: Curators, Exhibitions, Special Collections
Posted by: Cait Miller
The following is a guest post from Senior Music Reference Specialist Robin Rausch. A recent visit to a friend in Indiana took me to the quaint little town of Crawfordsville, Indiana, home of General Lew Wallace, author of the eternal classic Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, a book that has not been out of …
Posted in: Guest bloggers, Special Collections