CFAL News

If you haven’t already checked out Google Art Project, drop whatever you’re doing and head there now! > http://www.googleartproject.com. With GAP, you can explore important museums from around the world. Go on a virtual tour and examine hundreds of works of art, many at amazingly zoomed levels (closer than the guards would let you get to the real thing!) You can also create and share your own collection of artwork from the galleries you visit.

Creatively using Google’s well-known “street view technology” from Google Maps, you can virtually walk around the museums, seeing the art just as you would if you were visiting the museum in person.

There’s a great visitor’s guide that explains how the GAP works, gives you a behind the scenes look at how GAP was created.

Here’s a review of GAP by NYTimes critic Roberta Smith.

Museums currently involved in the project are:
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin – Germany
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington DC – USA
The Frick Collection, NYC – USA
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin – Germany
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC – USA
MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC – USA
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid – Spain
Museo Thyssen – Bornemisza, Madrid – Spain
Museum Kampa, Prague – Czech Republic
National Gallery, London – UK
Palace of Versailles – France
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam – The Netherlands
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg – Russia
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow – Russia
Tate Britain, London – UK
Uffizi Gallery, Florence – Italy
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam – The Netherlands

Now get see some art!

02/07/11

The Music Treasures Consortium proudly announces a new Web site giving access to some of the world’s most valued music manuscript and print materials, available athttp://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/treasures/treasures-home.html.
The site is the creation of several renowned music libraries and archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. The consortium members include the British Library, the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library at Harvard University, the Juilliard School Lila Acheson Wallace Library, the Library of Congress, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the New York Public Library. The site is hosted by the Library of Congress on its Performing Arts Encyclopedia (www.loc.gov/performingarts ). The aim of the site is to further music scholarship and research by providing access in one place to digital images of primary sources for performance and study of music.

The items digitized include manuscript scores and first and early editions of a work. Seminal composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, Georges Bizet, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky, among others, are represented on the site through their original handwritten manuscripts and first editions. The online items range from the 16th century to the 20th century in this initial launch. Researchers can search or browse materials, access bibliographic information about each item, and view digital images of the treasure via each custodial archive’s Web site. The site will continue to grow as consortium members add more items.

Initial planning for the consortium was funded by Bruce Kovner. The MTC Advisory Board includes Christoph Wolff, Jeffrey Kallberg, Philip Gossett, and Laurent Pugin.

Music Treasures Consortium Members:

The British Library
http://www.bl.uk/
Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University
http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/loebmusic/
The Juilliard School Lila Acheson Wallace Library
http://www.juilliard.edu/libraryarchives/general.html
The Library of Congress (host)
http://www.loc.gov/
The Morgan Library and Museum
http://www.themorgan.org/
The New York Public Library
http://www.nypl.org/

Karen C. Lund
Digital Project Coordinator
Library of Congress
202-707-0156
klun@loc.gov

New Web Presentation: It’s Showtime! Sheet Music from Stage and Screen
02/07/11

The Music Division of the Library of Congress announces the launch of a new Web presentation entitled It’s Showtime! Sheet Music from Stage and Screen, available at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/songsinshows/songsinshows-home.html on the Library’s Performing Arts Encyclopedia (www.loc.gov/performingarts). The site contains a database of sheet music for over 18,000 shows and productions dating from the 1690s to the present, listing more than 67,000 songs. The entries are drawn from the Library’s vast holdings of sheet music for dramatic music of all kinds, including operas, musicals and musical revues, and film music. Most of the sheet music contained here is for voice and piano; a significant minority is instrumental. These pieces come from all over the world and cover every conceivable topic, portraying the culture and history of their time and place in unique and valuable ways.

Included in this database are hits and flops by famous Tin Pan Alley songwriters, as well as manuscript and published materials from amateur composers. Rare and special items include early operas; music published in newspapers; lead sheets and other unpublished formats of stage and film music; college and civic productions; and shows produced in Europe between the two World Wars. This dynamic form is still popular in the 21st century, and additions will be made to the Web site as relevant sheet music is acquired by the Library.

The Performing Arts Encyclopedia (PAE) is a guide to performing arts resources at the Library of Congress, providing information about the Library’s unsurpassed collections of scores, sheet music, audio recordings, films, photographs, and other materials. Users can find digitized items from the collections; special Web presentations on topics and collections; articles and biographical essays; finding aids to collections; databases for performing arts resources; information on concerts at the Library; and a special Performing Arts Resource Guide which contains entries for hundreds of Library collections, Web sites, databases and exhibits.

Karen C. Lund
Digital Project Coordinator
Library of Congress
202-707-0156
klun@loc.gov

For a quick video tutorial on keeping up with new arrivals and how to customize what you see, check out: researchguides.baylor.edu/CFALnewmaterials

The Baylor Libraries provide many exciting opportunities to bring together students, faculty, and an amazing array of rare and special collections. The Crouch Fine Arts Library is partnering with a number of instructors and courses this Fall to give students a unique hands-on learning experience with treasures from the library. This month features the convergence of art students from five different courses taught by Professors Virginia Green, Susan Dunkerley Maguire, and Susan Mullally.

These professors and their students will meet in the library to explore the library’s collection of artist books. These sessions will be enhanced through guest lecturers Bill and Vicky Stewart, experts and dealers in the field, who will talk about the history of and current trends in book arts.

Art professor Karen Pope enriches the experience of her students as they study the influence of the arts of Japan on the West by examining firsthand, the rich and historical 19th Century journal Le Japon artistique.

Each Fall the library and music professor Jann Cosart bring together students of medieval music to explore the Jennings Collection of Medieval Music Manuscripts. Here the students come face to face with handwritten documents from as early as the 11th Century.

Throughout their college experience, students learn about significant ideas and the documents or methods that have served to convey them. The Libraries of Baylor University are uniquely positioned to provide distinctive encounters between people and ideas — ideas conveyed through rare and amazing treasures.

CFAL’S new tool for listening reserves is called Variations. Visit this excellent guide for information about Variations, how to set it up on your own computer, etc. researchguides.baylor.edu/variations

Variations, an open source digital music library developed by Indiana University, offers many exciting features for teaching and learning. These include the ability for users to access the material on and off campus, create customized bookmark files, playlists, and self quizzing options. CFAL is also beginning to incorporate another powerful feature of Variations providing access to online musical scores to accompany the audio recordings. Users can also create and save their own annotations on these images.

Interested in the history of classical music? Then be sure to check out Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, now available online anytime anywhere through the Baylor Libraries. Taruskin, noted as one of the most “prominent and provocative musicologists of our time” (= musicological rockstar), has received much acclaim and numerous awards for this monumental work. The Washington Post had this to say about OHWM: “Erudite, engaging, and suffused throughout with a mixture of brilliance and delirium…staggering, brilliant, opinionated.”

Appearing first in print as a daunting five-volume monster, the online version includes over a million words, all 1.25 million words, 500 images, and 1,800 musical examples. Setting up a free personal profile allows you to save content.

For a guided powerpoint tour, click here.

OPERA IN VIDEO
Alexander Street Press released completed scene-level indexing for 23 operas, including Das Rheingold, Don Giovanni, Il Trovatore, Il Viaggio a Reims, La Cenerentola, Merlin, Mitridate, Re di Ponto, Stiffelio, Tamerlano, The Love for Three Oranges, and Tosca.

http://opiv.alexanderstreet.com/

CLASSICAL SCORES LIBRARY

431 scores (6,665 pages) from Publications by Wirripang, an Australian score publisher.  New scores released are all by contemporary composers such as: Betty Beath, Diana Blom, Anne Carr-Boyd, Colin Brumby, Nigel Butterley, Bruce Crossman, Hugh Dixon, Houston Dunleavy, Amanda Handel, Miriam Hyde, Brennan Keats, Horace Keats, Jocelyn Kotchie, Brett McKern, Paul Pavoir, Peter Rankine, Sylvia Rice, Andrew Schultz, John Spence, Jennifer Trynes, Phillip Wilcher, and Stephen Yates.  The publication dates for these scores range from 1980-2009. Classical Scores Library now contains 330,852 pages.

http://opiv.alexanderstreet.com/