Musical Mainstream is one of two magazines produced by the NLS music section for our patrons. Music librarians, including myself, compile and create these Magazines. Musical Mainstream is a magazine containing current articles and audio music reviews reprinted from popular music magazines and journals. Its subject matter is classical music, and it includes information about …
Someone once said that you can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish. While we do not dispute the wisdom of that remark, we also have a further interest in and resources for piano tuning. The topic, the practice, the history, etc., of piano tuning has a solid place in circles like ours. When we …
By now I’m sure most of the readers of this blog have become familiar with the types of materials the music section offers: large print, braille, and audio. And although we have gone into detail about how we acquire and preserve braille and large print, we have yet to talk about what actually goes into …
The work of digitizing the Music Section‘s braille music scores continues unabated. Details of the Section’s scanners and software were discussed in a previous post. Since then, the German scanner has served as the driving resource for digitizing braille music items. The digital copies of scores and parts are backed up and archived, serving as …
Abigail Adams, in a letter dated March 31st, 1776 to her husband John Adams, advised him to “remember the ladies” in the creation of the new government, independent from Great Britain. This post will be published after March 31st and while Women’s History Month is past, I beg your patience as I also ask you …
Although St. Patrick’s Day may remind you of tin whistles, bodhráns, bagpipes (even though bagpipes are, strictly speaking, Scottish–the Irish musical tradition uses Uilleann pipes), or some other such traditional Irish instrument, one may neglect to think of the Celtic harp. The Celtic Harp and O’Carolan The harp is ubiquitous to most musical cultures, but …
This post was co-written with John Hanson. This post addresses what we have heard are occasional problems or misunderstandings of our online resources, what they are, and how to access and/or download wanted scores and books. Catalogs The Text-only version of our catalog (accessible as the second link at http://nlscatalog.loc.gov), is the only complete and …
February 26th was the birthday of the late legendary country music artist Johnny Cash known as the Man in Black. Cash was a legend long before Joaquin Phoenix portrayed him in the 2005 film “Walk the Line.” Initially getting into the business with Sun Records in the mid-50s, Cash settled in to a career filled …
Over the past 10 years, technology has grown in unimaginable ways. We can download nearly anything at the click of a mouse, we can instantaneously talk to our friends overseas through our computers, and we can carry around a whole world’s wealth of knowledge in a device the size of a deck of cards. Fortunately, …