Welcome to a new installment of the NLS Music Section’s journey through the alphabet to learn about musicians and composers who were blind or visually impaired. In part 2 of the letter G, we'll meet Edwin Grasse and introduce our new violin scores catalog.
This week, we will take a look at American composer George Gershwin. George Gershwin was one of the first American composers to use both popular and classical idioms. Years before his most famous compositions were penned, he worked on Tin Pan Alley as a song plugger—that is, someone who was hired to play and promote …
British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born on August 15th in 1875. One of the more popular composers in England and the United States during the turn of the 20th century, he composed many works for choir, piano, and larger instrumental ensembles; however, his works are seldom performed today. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in London to …
Read this blog and discover new materials, recorded and braille, now available from the NLS Music Section. Audio Materials All of the following are productions of Bill Brown. Banjo American Pie. Teaches this Don McLean song without the use of music notation. (DBM03915) Piano Bless the Broken Road. Teaches how to play “Bless the Broken …
Hard Times Come Again No More! American Composers, Stephen Collins Foster (1826-1864) I am happy that we are focusing on American composers as a blog cycle; there are always new discoveries and new things to learn about our unique country’s history. And sometimes, if you want to understand an atmosphere of a specific era, look …
This week we’ll break with our series a bit to discuss the life of a blind musician from outside of the United States. Had someone mentioned a composer named van Eyck to me when I was a child, I might have guessed that he was born before or during World War II. When I heard …
Continuing our series of American composers from A to Z, we come to the letter E. Personally, I can think of no better example than Duke Ellington. I consider him to be one of the first great quintessential “American” composers of his time, who wrote music in a true American idiom, rather than copying Western …