This past week, the Library of Congress recognized Smokey Robinson as the winner of this year’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Smokey Robinson is probably most remembered as being the leader of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Hits for The Miracles included “Shop Around,” “Going to a Go-Go,” and “Tracks of My Tears.” Robinson also …
In a recent NLS Music Notes blog post, “The Festival That Changed American Music,” I read about rock stars such as Jimi Hendrix who performed at the first Monterey festival in 1967. Because of the recordings listed there, and my own experience of the NLS collections, I assumed that anything we have on Hendrix would be in audio format. So …
My attention recently was called to a very historic event; on June 2, 1896, Guglielmo Marconi applied to patent the radio. When we think of Marconi as the inventor of the radio, it is easily overshadowed by contemporary inventors of computers, 3-D printing, and copy machines. Don’t get me wrong, I am thrilled to have …
A new job brings an equal amount of excitement and anxiety. When I joined the Music Section last year, I felt mildly anxious about what kind of patrons I would be working with and what their expectations would be. I am happy to report that it’s been a great year. Over the past year, I’ve …
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 …
Do you want to learn how to play piano? We have a book for you! Do you want the libretto for your favorite opera? We have that as well! Do you want to learn about folk music from around the world? Well, we also have books about that. Many patrons get to know us through …
One would think the act of writing music would be enough of a task for most people, but with some composers, creativity is not enough. They enjoy a challenge, and some have an interest in letters and numbers and what they can do to arrange them into cryptograms. It’s a way to bury a message, …
A couple of weeks ago, one of my colleagues here at NLS, David Fernandez-Barrial, asked me if I had seen the Grammy award ceremony (which took place Monday, February 15, 2016). I had to admit I hadn’t; I was, uh, practicing my Hindemith songs. Well, it turns out that Stevie Wonder, one of the presenters at …
As we are exiting the period that can still be referred to as “the new year” and are approaching the season of renewal known as spring, we’d like to highlight some of our recent publications, namely our new catalogs. Although we’ve had blog posts about magazines produced by the Music Section (Musical Mainstream and Contemporary …
