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Category: NLS Music Section

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Digitizing Braille Music Summer 2018

Posted by: Katie Rodda

The digitization project at the NLS marches on and currently it is in the hands of a summer intern! This is a guest post from Hannah Noel, a West Coast native currently living in North Carolina. She is a recent graduate of UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science, where she earned her …

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New BARD Additions: July 2018

Posted by: Gilbert Busch

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 …

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A Blast of Brass!

Posted by: Katie Rodda

Last year we discussed method books available from the NLS Music collection for most band and orchestra instruments. We’ve even done some posts on specific instruments, like saxophone and violin. Today, though, I decided to focus a post specifically on brass instruments. “Why brass?” you ask. Well for one, brass instruments are near and dear …

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American Composers and Musicians from A to Z: E (Part 2 – Eyck, Jacob van)

Posted by: Gilbert Busch

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 …

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Carnegie Hall of the South: Nashville’s Musical Legacy, Part 2

Posted by: Lindsay Conway

This is the second half of a two-part post on Nashville’s musical history and related books in the NLS Music Collection. Read the first part here: Athens of the South: Nashville’s Musical Legacy, Part 1. Nashville’s most famous music venue, the Ryman Auditorium, was completed in 1892 and was originally a church called the Union …

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Athens of the South: Nashville’s Musical Legacy, Part 1

Posted by: Lindsay Conway

Here in the Music Section of the National Library Service we are counting down the days until the National Conference of Librarians Serving Blind and Physically Handicapped Individuals begins next month in Music City, Nashville, Tennessee! As I mentioned in my last article, I’ve been taking the opportunity to learn about the musical history of …

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Digitizing Braille Music 2018

Posted by: Donna Koh

This is our fourth blog on the digitization of braille music. So, what is new with this project? First, we are boosting our production by outsourcing the proofreading of scores scanned using Optical Braille Recognition (OBR). Our braille music specialist Gilbert Busch continues to review all the scans completed on DotScan so we can provide …

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Bernstein at 100

Posted by: Gilbert Busch

When I was in grade school, our chorus teacher let us hear a record called What Is Jazz (DBM00704), where tone color, blue notes, syncopation, and other aspects of jazz were described by a man named Leonard Bernstein (I assumed that he was a jazz piano player). By sixth grade I was listening to classical music …