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Category: Sacred music

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A Fragmented History in the Giant Bible of Mainz

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 …

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Documenting Jessye Norman’s “Sacred Ellington” Concerts

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 …

Woman with dark hair, fancy dress and pearls with eyes closed and mouth slightly open, singing

Music in Time of Pestilence, Part Two

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.

Woman with dark hair, fancy dress and pearls with eyes closed and mouth slightly open, singing

Music in Time of Pestilence, Part One

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.