A few weeks ago, I pulled a little book from the Music Section’s reference collection, An Introduction to Music Publishing: A Tour Through the Music Publishing Operations Involved in Transforming the Composer’s Manuscript Into a Printed Publication and Its Dissemination to the Student and the Performer. The front cover of this book features Beethoven as …
When I was an undergraduate student studying music, I became very interested in music from India. Though I did not know how to play a plucked instrument very well, I enjoyed the sound of the sitar. And, whenever I heard someone playing a set of small hand drums called the tabla, I thought about the …
Over the past month, the Music Section has added more than 45 new braille, audio, and large-print music titles by roughly twenty-five different composers to its collection. Together, just three composers, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, and Robert Schumann, wrote compositions that comprise nearly a quarter of the total amount of those additions. I thought it a good …
Early winter has been unusually warm in Washington D.C. But now the temperature has finally come down, and it is in the teens and twenties. Recently, when I stopped to reflect on the idea of this year’s changing season, I thought of Vivaldi’s work of four violin concerti, Le Quattro Stagioni (The Four Seasons). Each …
Ludwig van Beethoven was a prolific and music-history-altering composer. Today we celebrate his life on the anniversary of his baptism, which is the closest date we have to knowing his actual birth day. I can remember, as a young pianist, that Beethoven’s Für Elise was the first “real” piece I learned to play outside of …
The Music Section was on the move this past week, when I flew across the country to manage an exhibit booth at the American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) annual conference in Kansas City, Missouri. I expected the city to be abuzz with baseball themed billboards and memorabilia because, the week before my trip, the Kansas …
Chicago is on my mind. How is it that some places, more than others, capture your heart? Like many who dream of the mesmerizing hum of New York City, I am enamored with Chicago. In Chicago, railcars rumble just feet above your head on open air tracks; their squealing brakes are a reminder of earlier century steam …
Recently, I discovered that September is the birth month of Blind Lemon Jefferson, a tried and true guitar player and singer who is celebrated in the American folk-blues world. It’s been awhile since I’ve celebrated a musician’s birthday on this blog, by writing a post about their career and lasting accomplishments. I can’t resist the …
As part of a continuing series introducing blog readers to facets of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), I recently spoke with NLS Senior Staff Engineer and music enthusiast, Lloyd Rasmussen. By interviewing Lloyd, I hoped to answer two questions: 1) What does an engineer do in a library? 2) …
