CFAL News

The ARTstor Travel Awards are back and they are now open to undergraduate students! This year the theme is cities: their histories and development, their depictions in art and documentation, their architecture, their ruins, their governments, their peoples, their myths.

Create an ARTstor image group or groups and a single essay of 500 words or less that creatively introduces us to a city or cities we did not know or reveals an intriguing aspect of the cities we do know. Five winners— college and graduate students, scholars, curators, educators, and librarians in any field—will receive $1,500 each to help support travel-related educational and scholarly activities. Winning essays and other selected submissions will be published on the ARTstor Blog, ARTstor website, and via our social media channels. Deadline: Friday, May 17.

Several items from the Artist Book Special Collection will be on display in the Crouch Fine Arts Library on a rotating basis during the remainder of the Spring 2013 Semester. Come by to see these interesting creations and have an opportunity to experience them personally on Sundays at 3 pm by appointment.

Libraries Host Book Artists’ Lecture

Book artists, Peter and Donna Thomas, will speak in the Allbritton Foyer of Moody Library on Friday, March 22, 2013 at 2:30 p.m. Their lecture is entitled “The Future of the Physical Book in the Digital Age,” and will discuss the book as a work of art.

Peter and Donna Thomas travel around the country in their very own gypsy wagon, giving lectures and workshops on papermaking, book arts and more. They plan to park their wagon outside of Moody Library during the afternoon of the lecture to allow for questions and individual interaction.

Both Peter and Donna Thomas are natives of California and currently reside in Santa Cruz, California. They established their first private printing press in 1976 with a goal to “create books in the tradition of the great private presses: limited editions, made of the finest materials and produced with the highest standards of quality.”

Today they travel all over the United States and abroad lecturing about the art of book making, including participating in countless renaissance fairs and exhibitions.

The Thomases hope to reach a diverse academic audience while speaking on Baylor’s campus and invite students and faculty to join them for their discussion.

More information on the Thomases can be found at their website. For questions about the event, please contact mktcommitslib@baylor.edu.

 It’s on the shelf today! Yes, Season 3 is underway, but if you need to catch up, check out the enthralling story of the inhabitants of this English country house set in 1912, originally aired in 2010. ( DVD PBS 62)

The Naxos Sheet Music Library has a new and improved interface with “print-in-browser” functionality. This is very cool because the database used to require special software for printing. Note: after some quick testing, we discovered that Chrome and IE are not playing well with the new functionality on PCs (not working), so please use Firefox until this issue is resolved.

If you are on the Baylor network and have bookmarked the URL for Naxos Sheet Music Library, be aware that it has changed and is now www.sheetmusiclib.com. The old URL will forward to the new site and interface until October 31, 2012. Off-campus students, faculty, and staff must access this database through Baylor’s electronic resources database as usual.

The Naxos Sheet Music online catalog is home to over 40,000 works of classical music and jazz from some of the world’s most famous publishers, artists, and composers. Baylor’s subscription allows faculty, staff, and students of Baylor to download and print these works while ensuring that copyright holders get paid for their work. Sweet!

Happy Leap Day!

Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini was born on this day in 1792 – so he would be 220 today, or only 55 if you go by leap years!

The Italian composer is most famous for his operatic works – especially Italian comedies such as Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville) and La Cenerentola (Cinderella). His song-like melodies and popularity led to a special nickname, “The Italian Mozart”. Rossini retired from composing opera in 1829, but continued to compose (in other genres) for a few subsequent years. In the years leading up to his death in 1868 he remained largely silent as a composer.

Read more about Rossini, his works, and his life, online here. Alternatively, swing by your very own Crouch Fine Arts Library to check out these marvelous works of literature:

“Rossini: his life and works” by Richard Osbourne
ML410 .R8 O9 2007

“Rossini: his life and times” by Nicholas Till
ML410 .R8 T54 1983

“Vie de Rossini (Life of Rossini)” by Stendahl
ML410 .R8 S753 1985

1. The only guy in ZZ Top who doesn’t have a beard is Frank Beard.
2. None of Elvis’s films got nominated for Oscar, but he did win three Grammy Awards – for his gospel recordings.
3. John Lennon wrote Good morning, good morning after hearing a Corn Flakes commercial.
4. Marilyn Monroe got a white poodle named Mafia from Frank Sinatra.
5. The airplane that Buddy Holly died in was called American Pie. Don McLean wrote a song with the same name about the accident.
6. Duran Duran was named after a mad scientist from the Jane Fonda movie Barbarella.
7. The first CD that was pressed in the U.S. was Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA.
8. Before composing Beethoven dipped his head in cold water.
9. Like humans, birds can learn music while they are still in the egg stage.
10. Mozart was five years old when he wrote his first piece.
11. The first pop video was released in 1975. It was Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.
12. In 1976 Barry Manilow sang a chart topping song named I write the songs. The song wasn’t written by him.
13. Termites will eat wood two times faster when listening to heavy metal.
14. When Madonna was 15 years old, she got grounded for the whole summer, for sneaking out to see David Bowie in concert.
15. In the year 1988 tenor Luciano Pavarotti received a record 165 curtain calls at a Berlin opera house.
16. Make music not war : Monaco’s national orchestra is bigger that its army.
17. Wham !’s hit single Wake me up before you go go was written by George Michael who was inspired by the note that was left to his hotel room by another band member Andrew Ridgeley. The note was mistakenly written as “Don’t forget to wake me up up before you go go, George”.
18. House of the rising sun by The Animals was recorded with only 15 minutes because the band was on a tight budget. In spite of that the song went all the way to number one in 1964.
19. The longest song title is 305 characters (including spaces) : The Sad But True Story Of Ray Mingus, The Lumberjack Of Bulk Rock City, And His Never Slacking Stribe In Exploiting The So Far Undiscovered Areas Of The Intention To Bodily Intercourse From The Opposite Species Of His Kind, During Intake Of All The Mental Condition That Could Be Derived From Fermentation by Rednex.
20. When Billy Crystal was a child, his babysitter was the legendary Billie Holiday.
21. Suzanne Vega is considered the “mother” of the mp3 format. The creators of the mp3 used her voice from the song Tom’s Diner for analyzing the different sound spectrums when creating the compression algorithm.

Hello fellow Crouchsters! To commemorate the bicentennial of Franz Liszt’s birth, the Music Division of the Library of Congress has released a new web page!

Connect to this commemorative page by either visiting the Performing Arts Encyclopedia home page (http://www.loc.gov/performingarts/) or directly by clicking on Mr. Liszt’s handsome mug to the left!

The site features an introductory article and a biographical sketch, selected Liszt manuscripts, Liszt-related source materials, and descriptions of Liszt resources in the Library’s collections.

One of the CFAL’s student assistants, Aryc Lane shares his love of ISMLP.org in this nifty intro video:

http://bit.ly/9D2PvW