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Posted by: Cait Miller
The following is a guest post from 2011 Junior Fellow Jarek Ervin. My name is Jarek Ervin, and I spent my summer working as a Junior Fellow for the Music Division at the Library of Congress. During the year, I am a graduate student studying Music History at Temple University. My research is mostly focused …
Posted in: Guest bloggers, Special Collections
Posted by: Cait Miller
The following is a guest post from 2011 Junior Fellow Dana Barron. The familiar titles were there: Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Puccini’s Tosca, Wagner’s Parsifal. Others were slightly less well known: Lighthouse by Peter Maxwell Davies and Castor et Pollux by Jean-Philippe Rameau. And some were downright obscure: La morte di Oloferne, the sole surviving …
Posted in: Guest bloggers, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
In the Muse hopes our readers in the Northern Hemisphere are having an enjoyable summer. Things have been hot in Washington, and Morris S. Silver and Tom Confare’s “Sunbeam,” from the Historic Sheet Music, 1800-1922 collection in the Performing Arts Encyclopedia, may provide cool solace in the form of song. This illustration of a demonic sun — undoubtedly a …
Posted in: Sheet Music, Sheet Music of the Week, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by Senior Music Specialist Ray White. Lucille Ball was born one hundred years ago, on August 6, 1911, in Jamestown, New York. Her career took her from very inauspicious beginnings—she was dismissed from drama school as a teenager by instructors who declared that she had no future as an …
Posted in: Birthdays, Exhibitions, Guest bloggers, Musicians, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
In the Muse can’t believe it’s been a year since the Music Division joined the Library of Congress’s efforts on Flickr Commons. On July 30, 2010, we uploaded the first batch of photos from the William P. Gottlieb Collection to the popular photo sharing site. And it is a happy coincidence that we belatedly celebrate …
Posted in: Birthdays, Musicians, Pic of the Week, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by Rachel Weiss, an intern whom we interviewed on Monday. Just after the turn of the twentieth century, the Music Division was still a fledgling organization. In 1902, Oscar Sonneck was named its first Chief, and he laid the groundwork for the development of many of the division’s wonderful …
Posted in: Composers, Guest bloggers, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
Composer Albert Gumble’s most popular song was “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” but his IMDB entry has a surprising series of credits: more than a dozen cartoon and comedy shorts, including the Bugs and Daffy vehicle “Duck! Rabbit! Duck!” These soundtrack listings come from Gumble and Bryan’s “Winter,” a popular musical cue for snowy cartoon scenes. The …
Posted in: Sheet Music, Sheet Music of the Week, Special Collections
Posted by: Cait Miller
I could hardly let the would-be birthday of eminent conductor Serge Koussevitzky go by without a blog post! Born in 1874, Koussevitzky began his musical life as a performer. He studied numerous instruments, though excelled at the double bass – he even composed a concerto for double bass, which he premiered in 1905. In the …
Posted in: Birthdays, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
Thanks to Sharon McKinley, Senior Cataloging Specialist, for conducting these interviews with Carolyn Turner and Rachel Weiss, two of this summer’s crop of interns. What made you want to do a volunteer internship at the Library of Congress? Carolyn: My older sister Jessica was a Junior Fellow when I was twelve years old and she …
Posted in: Interviews, Musical Instruments, Special Collections, Staff Interviews