Mendel Music Library Blog

Music department professor Simon Morrison is organizing a fascinating project focused around ballets that have gone unperformed for decades. Expect to see the Princeton's Cotsen Children's Library and the Mendel Music Library playing key roles in exhibits (particularly online) and publicity for this grand fête, which promises to be quite interdisciplinary in scope. So, stay tuned!
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The highlight of this project is a staging of the French composer Claude Debussy's final masterpiece, the ballet The Toy-Box (La boîte à joujoux). Conceived for his daughter Emma, The Toy-Box offers a poignant look back at the composer's favorite musical things. The work dates from 1913, and it was left partially unorchestrated at the time of Debussy's death in 1919. A manuscript of the score survives in Moscow, where it was used as the basis of a little-known staging of the ballet in 1918 by the Moscow Chamber Theater under the direction of Alexander Tairov. The Moscow archival sources include an unknown jazz-overture to the ballet, which will be performed at Princeton for the first time outside of Russia. The music for the ballet will be conducted by Princeton's Tony Branker and performed by an expanded version of our student jazz ensemble (the score includes many references to ragtime) with new choreography by Rebecca Lazier.

The Toy-Box will appear on the second half of a program featuring another short jazz-age ballet, Krazy Kat, to be staged by Tracey Bersley. This work was performed in Chicago and New York City in the 1920s and 1930s before dropping out of the repertoire. Krazy Kat is based on the famous comic strip by George Herriman and features music by the iconoclastic American composer John Carpenter. The novelty of the comic strip resided in its surrealism, which was as much verbal as visual: the characters speak a combination of James Joyce, fake Yiddish, highborn English, and American slang. This mélange is used to support a pantomime freighted with political, religious, and sexual symbolism. Carpenter's score also parodies one of Debussy's masterworks, the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.

Featuring two forgotten, misconstrued masterworks, the project will provide Princeton students an invaluable education in modernism, specifically the impact of jazz on ballet, and the polemics that distinguished Debussy and Carpenter from their German and Russian contemporaries. The premiere is set for April 10, and performances will run for three days.
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So, don't be surprised when images of Krazy Kat and French toys start appearing on the Princeton Campus this winter!

Cheers,

Darwin

With the help of systems staff, we've finally been able to perform a minor (or perhaps major) Mendel miracle here -- audio reserves are now available in Blackboard by clicking the Audio Reserve link within the course. There will no longer be a need for an extra password. Enrolled students (and, of course, the faculty member) can now access all print, visual, and audio reserve materials in one place for a course -- and have a total picture of what is available on reserve in all formats for the course as well. Students can access fall 2009 course reserves from the new Mendel Music Library home page in the Quick Links box.

A special thanks to Mendel's e-reserves supervisor Dan Gallagher for shepherding this enhancement through a long path of many months to completion this week.

Cheers,

Darwin

Cosponsored by the Spencer Trask Fund, Lewis Center for the Arts, Department of Music, Princeton University Concerts, and the Department of German

Time and Location: 8:00 p.m. in Richardson Auditorium, Alexander Hall

The lecture sets out to show that in musical performances the perception of character and atmosphere is no less important than that of form and structure. The belief that the structure of a work automatically reveals its character is a fallacy. The notion of character appears in 18th-century treatises on interpretation as well as in writing on aesthetics where it is first discussed at the time when Beethoven's sonatas begin to appear. Czerny's comments on Beethoven's piano works are full of references to character. The pianist's task becomes related to that of a character actor identifying with different roles, with an ever-widening awareness of the staggering emotional and psychological variety great music has to offer. Mr. Brendel will play a number of musical examples during the lecture.

Alfred Brendel's place among the greatest musicians of the 20th and 21st centuries is assured. Renowned for his masterly interpretations of the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Liszt, he is one of the indisputable authorities in musical life today and one of the very few living pianists whose name alone guarantees a sell-out anywhere in the world he chooses to play.
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To access Alfred Brendel's recordings owned by Princeton, click here. We need to enhance our holdings of Brendel on CD--stay tuned!

Darwin

Another great icon of the music world has left us--Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha at 86. The obituary in the September 26 New York Times is here.

I remember hearing her playing solo recitals in Los Angeles in the 1970s-early 80s and was awestruck how such a diminutive performer could take total mastery of the piano and create glorious sonic worlds with works by Mompou, Albéniz, and others. To access de Larrocha's recordings owned by Princeton, click here. We need to beef up our holdings with some recent CD reissues and later performances.

Darwin

The first six CDs in the important new release KZ Musik: Encyclopedia of Music Composed in Concentration Camps (1933-1945) are now available under the call no. CD 31800--click these links to see catalog records for each of the CDs (select long view to see full descriptive information such as the contents notes and performers) :

• vol. 1 -- vol. 2 -- vol. 3 -- vol. 4 -- vol. 5 -- vol. 6

This series, released by Musikstrasse in Rome, Italy, and supervised by pianist, organist, and conductor Francesco Lotoro,  will comprise 24 CDs upon completion in three years and represents the most comprehensive recordings of music produced by victims of the Holocaust to date. A brief comment (by Lotoro?) on the case of each CD, with the English much edited, reads:

All the musical works originate from imprisoned composers and musicians in Aushwitz, Birkenau, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, and other concentration camps. They represent one of mankind's most important preserved heritages of the unique history of the tragedy of the deportations and the human catastrophe of the Shoah--the remembrance as a DNA of the history.

The CD notes provide this overview:

KZ Musik is the most up-to-date and complete CD encyclopedia of musical works composed by musicians imprisoned in the camps between 1933 (when Dachau and Börgermoor operned) and 1945. These works range from operas and symphonies to chamber, instrumental and piano music, from Lieder, choral pieces and cabaret songs to jazz, religious, traditional and folk music --as well as fragments and pieces reconstructed after the end of World War II. The composers were imprisoned, deported, murdered--some even survived--but all were of different national, social and religious backgrounds. They suffered their different fates in prison, transit and labour camps, concentration and death camps, POW camps (Oflags specifically for officers, and Stalags for non-commissioned military personnel) and military prisons: during the Third Reich, in Italy, Japan and the Republic of Salò, under the Vichy regime and other Axis powers--and in Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and other Allied countries. KZ Musik is the result of the extensive musicological research carried out by Italian pianist and conductor Francesco Lotoro. Each KZ Musik CD booklet contains information about the different camps the recorded works were written in, interesting facts about the composers and their works as well as brief remarks and original language lyrics in the case of choral and vocal works."

More about this release can be found on the Musikstrasse Web site (click here). Be forewarned, however, that the English is garbled. Those who read Italian may wish to click on the Italian-language option.

Darwin

Since arriving at Princeton University on April 1 (no fooling!) as the new music librarian for the Arthur Mendel Music Library, one of my chief goals has been to set up a blog for the Mendel Music Library--often just called "Mendel." Finally it has arrived! There are a host of reasons to publish this blog, and they will become obvious as the blog's content develops--but its fundamental purpose, of course, is to reach out to the array of Mendel patrons (the students and faculty of the Princeton Music Department, the Princeton community at large, and the wide range of music researchers and music lovers who visit the library and use its collections) with items of interest, updates on new acquisitions, exhibits, new or recently discovered electronic resources and Web sites, research tools, sundry bits of information from hours to policies, and so forth. And, of course, to encourage feedback and comments from Mendel users on what I post here.  The Mendel Music Library staff look forward to keeping you informed and engaging in a lively dialog about issues concerning the music library and its collections!

Many thanks to Michael Muzzie, digital media consultant in the Office of Information Technology for his help in setting up this blog--and no doubt much guidance in the future.

Cheers!

Darwin