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Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by Reference Specialist Caitlin Miller, who will soon be joining me as a regular blogger for In the Muse. About every six months or so, the Music Division welcomes a new exhibit into the Performing Arts Reading Room foyer. We are currently thrilled to host an exhibit dedicated to …
Posted in: Digital Collections, Musical Instruments, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by Jan Lancaster, Music Division. Works of art on paper invite contemplation. Drawings express an artist’s most immediate thoughts. They have a purity, an elegance. Every touch of the pencil, pen, or brush distills and crystallizes a moment in the artist’s thought process. Printmaking – the art of making …
Posted in: Digital Collections, Musical Instruments, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
Earlier this week the Library announced this year’s inductees into the National Recording Registry. Among the inductees is Morton Subotnick’s “Silver Apples of the Moon,” a piece composed on one of the unlikely treasures of the Music Division’s instrument collection. The following is a guest post by Steve Antosca, a composer living and working in …
Posted in: Guest bloggers, Musical Instruments, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
Guitarist and inventor Les Paul was born on this day in 1915. Paul helped develop the Gibson Les Paul solid-body electric guitar, an instrument so iconic that the foreword to Les Paul’s memoir was written by none other than Paul McCartney. Les Paul died last year, but his handiwork continues to be heard from the …
Posted in: Birthdays, Musical Instruments, Musicians
Posted by: Pat Padua
Modern music lovers with a penchant for the Baroque may assume that the much-loved timbre of the harpsichord has been popular ever since its development in the 15th century. But according to Grove Music Online, the instrument fell almost entirely out of favor by the early 19th century, owing to the emergence of the piano. …
Posted in: Concerts and Events, Musical Instruments, Musicians, Special Collections, Women in Music
Posted by: Pat Padua
This post is adapted from notes by Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, Exhibition Curator, Music Division. The exhibition As the Old Sing, So the Young Twitter takes its inspiration from the musical and verbal relationship between birds and flutes. In the often archaic definition of words like “twitter,” “chatter,” “record,” and “warble” are links between birdsong and human music …
Posted in: Exhibitions, Musical Instruments, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The Music Division’s bonnie collections offer a variety of ways to celebrate this St. Patrick’s Day. Play an Irish bagpipe from the Dayton C. Miller Flute Collection. Follow along to the reels described in Rinnce na h-Éireann : a simplified work on the performance of the dances of Ireland, from An American Ballroom Companion: Dance Instruction Manuals. Develop …
Posted in: Dance, Musical Instruments, Sheet Music, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by Julianne Mangin, Library Services. National Kazoo Day, recognized on January 28th, celebrates what is perhaps the most accessible of all musical instruments, the kazoo. If you can hum a tune, you can play a kazoo, which takes your voice and changes its timbre to give it a comically …
Posted in: Musical Instruments