The Music Section at the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) has the largest collection of braille music in the world, with music from numerous national and international braille producers. One of the best represented publishers in the music collection is Howe Press, a braille publisher that was the in-house braille […]
Don Hoffer was a dentist. Bill Irwin was a salesman. He peddled organs. The kind you play. Barbara Kolb is an internationally renowned composer These are just some of the people who are behind the instructional audio recordings in the NLS Music collection. They didn’t merely create and write the narrative, their voices are the […]
Some of the Music Section’s most ardent patrons are operagoers. This comes as no surprise to other opera aficionados, but blind/low vision operagoers are usually not able to pick up a program in braille or large print and read a synopsis when they arrive at the theater; that is, until they (or the opera companies) […]
Recently, on May 4, 2014, musician Happy Traum was inducted into the New York Blues Hall of Fame. Here at the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, we are quite familiar with Happy because of his work in establishing the audio music company, Homespun Tapes. As a local New Yorker and musician during […]
Co-written with Claire L. Rojstaczer Whether it is a music librarian humming a tune, a recording of a trumpet lesson, or the soothing voice of an instructor detailing the intricacies of a Rossini opera, the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped’s Music Section is constantly abuzz with the sounds of music. For […]
While reading through a Billboard magazine article that celebrates Quincy Jones’ 80th birthday, a Music Section staff person stumbled on a name that looked very familiar. In the article, from the March 16th issue of Billboard, she found that longtime NLS music patron Justin Kauflin was named one of the “Six Acts to Watch […]
This post was a collaboration with Mary Dell Jenkins, Amanda Smith, and Katie Rodda. Welcome to the inaugural post of NLS Music Notes! This blog is designed to share information about the services of the Music Section and its special format music collection: in braille, large print, and audio. We are located in Washington, DC, […]