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Posted by: Morgen Stevens-Garmon
In the following guest post, Music Division Archives Processing Technician Dr. Rachel McNellis investigates a musical connection within the recently digitized Giant Bible of Mainz from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. On April 4, 1952, Lessing J. Rosenwald donated an exquisite treasure to the Library of Congress: the Giant Bible of Mainz. The …
Posted in: Sacred music
Posted by: Morgen Stevens-Garmon
The following is a guest post from Jessica Grimmer, Ph.D., an MLIS student at the University of Maryland completing her field study at the Library of Congress as a member of a team processing the Jessye Norman Papers. In her 2014 memoir, Stand Up Straight and Sing, American opera star Jessye Norman recounts a chance …
Posted in: African American History, Jazz, Sacred music, Women in Music
Posted by: Morgen Stevens-Garmon
The Moldenhauer Choirbook, a sixteenth-century liturgical manuscript, reveals its history as a work of many hands.
Posted in: Guest bloggers, Sacred music, Special Collections, Staff
Posted by: Paul Sommerfeld
The concluding part of this two-part survey of music and disease looks at examples that arose from pandemics in the 19th and 20th centuries, including: works by Stephen Foster and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel written in the wake of a series of cholera outbreaks, and the sometimes curiously lighthearted musical response to the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Posted in: Composers, Copyright Deposits, Guest bloggers, Newly Cataloged, Sacred music, Sheet Music, World War I
Posted by: Paul Sommerfeld
Part one of this two-part survey of musical responses to past pandemics focuses on sacred music from the years that the Black Death ravaged medieval Europe. Texts such as the Stella Celi Extirpavit and Recordare Domine illustrate the penitence and fear of the wrath of God that prevailed until the Enlightenment.
Posted in: Composers, Guest bloggers, Sacred music