Head of Acquisitions and Processing Denise Gallo recently pointed out the ingenuity of her staff’s Christmas tree, festively adorned with photocopied highlights from the Music Division’s deep coffers. The elves who assembled this holiday centerpiece were the music specialists and technicians who work in the archival processing section. Gallo notes that the tree is also constructed …
In the Muse has been under the weather lately, and would have otherwise paid timely homage to one of the twentieth century’s greatest entertainers. Francis Albert Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey on December 12, 1915. His long and storied career invited imitation …
The following is a guest post by Hope O’Keeffe, Office of General Counsel. This week marks the inauguration of the Copyright Office’s first blog, on the forthcoming digitization of copyright records. The digitization of copyright records for music will be an enormous boon to people trying to clear music rights. But it also has huge …
This week’s featured sheet music honors one of the great voices of American literature. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, best known by his pen name Mark Twain, was born on this day in 1835, two weeks after Halley’s Comet made its closest approach to the Sun. Celebrate the author’s birthday with the “Mark Twain mazurka” and the …
Last year In the Muse celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday with Geo. W. Morgan’s “National Thanksgiving hymn“, from the Historic Sheet Music, 1800-1922 collection in the Performing Arts Encyclopedia. This year the same collection gives us our featured holiday sheet music. As I noted last year, “The turkey gobbler’s ball” is not actually about Thanksgiving but is …
The following is a guest post from Music Archivist Chris Hartten. Laurence Picken (featured at right as our Pic of the Week!) first made his mark in academia as a scientist, but here in the Music Division we remember Picken as an eminent musicologist who spent nearly sixty years studying the musical traditions of East …
Some of our readership may be looking forward to a certain movie opening up in American theaters this weekend. In the Muse can not officially endorse the series (and in fact has not seen any of the movies or read any of the books), but hopes that interested readers will not be disappointed in the …
The third annual Washington Tweed Ride (the autumnal iteration of the Seersucker Social, which we mentioned in the late spring) is upon us again, in which local hipsterati don their finest and pedal vintage bicycles around our increasingly bike-friendly town. In honor of the dapper velocipedists primed to pedal among the hills of our great …
When I first heard about the new French film, Mozart’s Sister, I immediately marked November 4th on my calendar, because Rene Feret’s new film opens at DC’s E Street Cinema today! Feret has made clear that the film is largely fiction, with historical roots in the Mozart family dynamics and women’s status in 18th-century Austrian …
