MSPAL Power @mspal-power - Tumblr Blog

Congratulations to John Davis on the successful completion of his Public Collectors Joong Boo Residency at Staropolska!

The Joong Boo Residency at Staropolska is a new variant on the popular and delicious Joong Boo Residency, whereby residents may now opt for a meal at Staropolska - a Polish restaurant on 3030 N Milwaukee Ave, not far from Joong Boo. Staropolska is a good choice for people who do not like Korean Food, or for myself when I manage to approve four residencies in the same month and don’t want to die from eating too much salt and red chili paste. Staropolska is quiet, delicious, and a place where it’s usually possible to talk for a couple hours with minimal disruption. Unlike Joong Boo, I’ve never had to jockey for a table at Staropolska. They seat you, you settle in, and you eat a LOT of Polish food. The workers are lovely.

John Davis is the Performing Arts Metadata Archivist at the University of Maryland. He is also a musician whose bands have included Q And Not U, Georgie James, Paint Branch and Title Tracks. He also recently produced two issues of a ‘zine called Confab, where he and two friends present an interview with a different D.C. band in each edition. John was visiting Chicago from Maryland and I was excited to learn more about his work.

In his job at University of Maryland, John has been archiving and curating the D.C. Punk and Indie Fanzine Collection, the Sharon Cheslow Punk Flyers Collection, 1979-1991, and the Jason Farrell Flyers & Posters Collection, 1987-2012. For the past two years he has also been working to archive and digitize Ian MacKaye’s collection of around 1,700 fanzines.

John wanted to discuss strategies for making publications about these collections and how to activate this work through exhibits and events. We talked a lot about the efforts others have made to deal with historical fanzines in various books, and where these publications sometimes fall short or don’t feel entirely satisfying. And we chatted a bit about various intersections of punk rock and library work, as more than a few music luminaries are now employed in archivist roles.

Oh, and as for the food, John had the Pork Cutlet with mashed potatoes and sauerkraut. I had the Zucchini Pancakes stuffed with chicken, peppers, herbs, and goat cheese, along with a side of beet salad. It was, as usual, a ton of food.

Residencies are closed for the rest of March and April but I’m taking applications for May and beyond. Future residents are invited to apply for either a Joong Boo Residency, or a Joong Boo Residency at Staropolska. As always, lunch is on me. More details and history here.

mspal-power

MSPAL’s own John Davis was featured on the “Public Collectors” Tumblr talking about some our punk collections, plus Polish food.

#scpa #punk #fanzines #PorkCutlet #BeetSalad

2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the International Piano Archives at Maryland (IPAM) and in honor of this celebration, we’ll be posting piano related questions on the chalkboard in the MSPAL Gallery space throughout this academic year. We invite you to respond to these questions, and we’ll post regular replies from IPAM’s curator, Donald Manildi.

Question #2: "What is your favorite concerto for piano and orchestra?"

Thanks to all who responded. Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky: perennial favorites, especially for competitions. No surprise here. Available for listening in IPAM and MSPAL: Rachmaninoff himself playing all his concertos: request MCD 5345 and MCD 5367. Other famous Rachmaninoff interpreters: Vladimir Horowitz: request MCD 14657 Benno Moiseiwitsch: request MCD 13874. Van Cliburn: request MCD 13672 and MCD 15800 (with Tchaikovsky). Vladimir Ashkenazy: request IPAM / MDECCA 289 466 375-2. Also: Tchaikovsky No.1 recorded by Vassily Sapellnikoff, who played the work in the 1880s with Tchaikovsky conducting. IPAM / MAPR APR 6016. Surprises: no mention of any concerto by Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Grieg, Liszt, or Prokofiev (!?). Also Sprach Zarathustra: for some strange reason Richard Strauss failed to include a piano part in this heavily-scored, purely orchestral work. How remiss of him! Perhaps the respondent could provide us with the urgently-needed piano solo.

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Are you new to the UMD Libraries? Need a refresher on how to access library resources? Check out our Library Skills Guides and get started with listening and borrowing today!

#ipam50 #piano #concertos #orchestra #rachmaninoff #tchaikovsky #beethoven #chopin #schumann #grieg #liszt

Question #1: “Of All Pianists, Living and Dead, Who Is the Greatest Interpreter of the Music of Frederic Chopin?”

Various answers: Martha Argerich, Arthur Rubinstein, Alfred Cortot, Vladimir de Pachmann, Murray Perahia, and Brian Ganz have all been justly acclaimed as superb Chopin players, and have numerous outstanding performances to their credit.

Note: IPAM’s collection includes the complete recordings of the above pianists, readily available for listening.

Also recommended: the Chopin recordings by Ignaz Friedman, Dinu Lipatti, Josef Hofmann, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Benno Moiseiwitsch, William Kapell, and Ivan Moravec.

Chopin himself: To whoever posted this response: we need more details. (“Vass you dere, Sharlie?”) Please give us a complete description of how he played. The same goes for the eyewitness to Liszt playing Chopin.

Hugh Grant: the British actor who played the role of Chopin in the film “Impromptu.” Grant, whose acting runs the gamut from puzzled to perplexed, couldn’t act his way out of a wet paper bag if his life depended on it. Therefore, he has little credibility playing either the persona or the music of Chopin.

Ling-Ling: would require a trip to the National Zoo to evaluate his Chopin interpretations; however, some might prefer the antics of this panda’s distant cousin, Lang-Lang.

Alexandre Tharaud and Valentina Igoshina: the jury is still out.

Victor Borge: a first-class pianist who left too few examples of his serious playing.

#piano #chopin #ipam #piano performance #piano recordings

The Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library Rummage Sale is happening on 9/10 and 9/11 from 6-10pm as part of the NextNOW Fest at the Clarice! Check out thousands of performing-arts related LPs, CDs, books, scores, sheet music, and DVDs, on sale for $5 or less. This sale is jam packed with gems like these, unearthed and modeled by the MSPAL staff. See http://theclarice.umd.edu/events/2015/library-sale for more info!

#theClarice #nextNOWfest #UMD #sleeveface

Approval Plan Madness Part 3

Sorry for the inconsistent updates, the weather messed around with schedules.

The approval plan is in it’s final stages, the next steps being to finalize everything with the vendor!

In the last few weeks, I went through the catalog to make sure that we had the scores and recordings of all the pieces that have won the Pulitzer Prize and the Grawemeyer Award. We have or have already ordered many of the Grammy Award winners.

Here’s just a few of the exciting pieces that are coming soon to MSPAL:

Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award winning Become Ocean by John Luther Adams

Until it’s in the collection, the Seattle Symphony uploaded a recording of it to their YouTube page.

Grawemeyer Award Winning La Commedia by Louis Andriessen

Grawemeyer Award Winning Static by Sebastian Currier

(We’ll be getting the score and the parts for this piece in the library so that you’ll be able to study the piece as well as perform it with your chamber group.)

Coming soon... more world music!

We’re ordering about 100 CDs of world music to add to our collection at the Performing Arts Library.

Where are these recordings coming from? Everywhere! There's desert blues from Mali, Celtic fiddle music from Ireland, soca beats from the Caribbean, kodo drumming from Japan, and Buddhist chants from Tibet.

Many interesting crossover recordings are also on their way, like jazz fusion from India or this collaboration between Vietnamese artist Van-Anh Vo and the Kronos Quartet.

We identified some gaps in our existing collection and added some classic recordings as well, like music from reggae singer Marcia Griffiths, the Afro-Cuban jazz collective Buena Vista Social Club, and Afrobeat star Fela Kuti.

New and adventurous recordings are on their way too. Tanya Tagaq's Animism, winner of Canada's 2014 Polaris Prize, blends traditional Inuit throat singing with avant-garde electronic music.

These recordings will complement our existing collection of CDs and our access to the Contemporary World Music streaming audio database, which contains 1.8 million tracks of music from around the world.

Keep an ear out for new world music in the library in the coming weeks and months!

Approval Plan Madness Part 2

Just a quick update on my progress to create a new approval plan.

This morning I went through and complied a list of the past several years of Grammy Award Winners. If there was a composer that wasn't already on our approval plan profile list then they were added.

With the updated list of composers now including the recent winners of the Grawemeyer, Pulitzer, and Grammy Awards I started to look up recent recordings to make sure that they were in our collection. The next step will be to order any recordings we don't have and finalize the approval plan profile!

In the coming weeks, look for a list of recent Grammy winners and links to where you can find them in our catalog (http://umaryland.worldcat.org)

#libraries #music #Grammys #Pulitzer Prize #Grawemeyer #tumblarians #music libraries

Approval Plan Madness Part 1

Hello, I'm Melissa, a new intern here at MSPAL. I'm going to be working on improving the collection here at the library!

Specifically, I'm going to be setting up an approval plan for CDs and DVDs. An approval plan is an agreement with a vendor in which a library creates a profile describing what sorts of materials it collects. The vendor then evaluates new releases to see if they match the library's profile and if they do, the items are sent automatically to the library. For music, a approval plan profile typically includes a list of composers, publishers, and subjects of interest to the library's users (faculty and students in the case of an academic library).

MSPAL currently has an approval plan in place for scores, which I'm using as a basis to create an approval plan for CDs and DVDs. I've started updating the profile by looking at the list of composers we want included in our collection. I spent today comparing the already existing list of composers to lists of Pulitzer Prize and Grawemeyer Award winners (I'll be looking at the Grammy Award winners next week after the awards show this weekend) as well as recent requests from faculty and students. I found about 20 composers that fit this criteria that weren't already on the approval plan profile list.

The next step is to see which recordings from these composers aren't already in our collection, but should be.

I'm hoping to keep you updated on my process weekly. And if you have any suggestions please let me know!

#libraries #music #music libraries #collection development #CDs #DVDs #tumblarians #UMD #MSPAL #pulitzer prize #grawemeyer #grammys

Grammy nominees on Naxos

Want to hear the classical music nominees for this year's Grammy awards? Naxos Music Library has prepared playlists in every classical category featuring selections from most of the nominees.

To access these playlists, go to http://umd.naxosmusiclibrary.com/. (If you're off campus, you'll have to enter your University ID and password to access the site.) Once you've logged in to Naxos, click on Playlists from the top menu bar, then Naxos Music Library Playlists, then the folder for the 57th Annual Grammy Award Nominees.

Highlights include Bach's St. Matthew Passion (Best Choral Performance, Part 1), Anne Sofie von Otter's chanson collection Douce France (Best Classical Solo Vocal Album, Part 2), and John Luther Adams' Pulitzer-winning orchestral composition, Become Ocean (Best Contemporary Classical Composition).

The Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library is also purchasing CDs of nominated recordings that aren't available on Naxos. Keep an eye out in the coming weeks for Daniil Trifonov's Carnegie Recital, the Berlin Philharmonic's complete Schumann symphonies, Hilary Hahn's In 27 Pieces, and John Adams' City Noir.

We're also purchasing CDs of this year's Grammy-nominated jazz recordings, including albums by Jason Moran, Chick Corea, and Gretchen Parlato.

For more information about accessing our CDs and streaming audio resources, check out our subject guide: http://lib.guides.umd.edu/soundrecordings

#Grammys2015

Critics' favorite music books of 2014

Which books about music landed on critics' year-end lists? Here are a few standouts that you can find at the Performing Arts Library.

Bob Stanley, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! : the story of pop music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé (New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 2014). ML3470 .S73 2014

"Stanley’s writing amuses and appeals; it’s like pop music on the page. . . . [He] makes well-known bands seem new again and tells stories we haven’t heard." --Sarah Larson, The New Yorker

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Jan Swafford, Beethoven : anguish and triumph : a biography (Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) ML410.B4 S94 2014

"The biography . . . is a clear-eyed view of the famed composer's improbable life, the social and political context that framed it, and, of course, his amazing music. In the end, the book transcends the dark-skinned kid from Bonn, Germany, and sings of the resilient human spirit." --Tom Huizenga, NPR

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Amanda Petrusich, Do not sell at any price : the wild, obsessive hunt for the world's rarest 78rpm records (New York : Scribner, 2014)

"Petrusich’s fantastic book about old 78rpm records and the oddball heroes who rescue them isn't a history tale so much as a travelogue into the most beautiful corners of obsession. Do Not Sell At Any Price is as idiosyncratic, alluring and totally alive as the scratchy sides that consume it, and anyone who'd accuse Petrusich or her protagonists of caring too much about these recordings has probably never heard them." --Jack Hamilton, Slate

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Greil Marcus, The history of rock 'n' roll in ten songs (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2014) ML3534 .M356 2014

"[Marcus] kicks off this ferociously cerebral and warmly empathetic super-listicle with a monster sentence that reels off lots of critically acclaimed musicians — it takes, like, five pages — and by the time you've gotten from the beginning (Chuck Berry) to the end (Jay Z), his intent is clear: Forget all of this. Rest assured the 10 songs he picks from there will surprise, and/or amuse, and/or enrage and undoubtedly challenge you." --Rob Harvilla, Rolling Stone ---

Virgil Thomson and Tim Page, Virgil Thomson : music chronicles, 1940-1954 (New York : The Library of America, 2014) ML60 .T515 2014 [on order]

"Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) was in a select category of composers . . . who wrote as well with words as with notes. There's more quantity than quality in music criticism now, so it's bracing to read someone authoritative, curious, unbound by genre and able to tell general readers what old and new music sounded like and why they should care." --Mark Mobley, NPR

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Greg Kot, I'll take you there : Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers, and the march up freedom's highway (New York : Scribner, 2014) ML400 .K873 2014

"Greg Kot’s biography of Mavis Staples of the Staple Singers focuses on the R&B legend’s roots in the Southern gospel scene of the 1950s, and her influential position in the civil rights movement of the ’60s. Kot’s book goes deep into Staples’ remarkable life, with stories about everything from her early life to her romance with Bob Dylan and her later collaborations with Prince and Jeff Tweedy." --Matthew Perpetua, Buzzfeed

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Viv Albertine, Clothes, clothes, clothes : music, music, music : boys, boys, boys : a memoir (New York, N.Y. : Thomas Dunne Books, 2014) ML420.A514 A3 2014 [on order]

"If Viv Albertine's memoir had only focused on the broadest outlines of her life — her six years as the guitarist in influential post-punk band the Slits, her return after a decades-long absence — this would have been fascinating enough. But Albertine's approach is far closer, pushing past candor into the uncomfortably honest. . . . A fully realized portrait of its author." --Tobias Carroll, Rolling Stone

By default, a search in WorldCat UMD will return items held in libraries worldwide, with items available at UMD College Park usually displayed at the top of the list. But what if you want to limit your search results to only things that are held at the Performing Arts Library?

It's easy: just select the Performing Arts Library from the drop-down menu of libraries to search, and your results will contain only items held at our branch. This is great when you're already in the library and want to get your hands on some sources quickly.

But wait! Did you know there's a way to limit your search to just the PAL Reference section?

By entering the right location code with your search, you can narrow your results to particular areas of the library, such as reference, stacks, or special collections.

Just enter your search terms followed by the label b8: and a four-character code for the exact location. The list of codes can be found on this page of the Subject Guide about WorldCat UMD.

For example, let's say that you remember seeing some cool dictionary about percussion but you can't recall the title and don't want to wander aimlessly around the reference section. Just search for percussion and add b8:umaq (the code for PAL Reference), and you'll see only items in our reference section downstairs.

So that's where I found that drumming encyclopedia...

Banned Books Week and "Degenerate" Music

To mark this year's Banned Books Week (Sept. 21-27), the Performing Arts Library is displaying examples of music that was censored by Nazi Germany for supposedly "manifest[ing] symptoms of national decline." At a 1938 exhibit called Entartete Musik ("degenerate music"), Nazi cultural politicians publicly condemned atonal music, jazz, and works by Jewish composers.

The display case near the Performing Arts Library's circulation desk highlights some major works of music that were censored in Nazi Germany, including Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, Berg's opera Wozzeck, and Kurt Weill's satirical ballet Seven Deadly Sins. All of the recordings and scores on display are part of the library's collection.

The Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library is proud to support the freedom to read and listen.

Coming to The Clarice on 9/20: La Santa Cecilia - check out their NPR Tiny Desk Concert!

La Santa Cecilia photo by Humberto Howard

Are you a fan of Latin culture, rock, world music, and NPR? Check out La Santa Cecilia's Tiny Desk Concert and don't miss them at The Clarice on Saturday, September 20th at 8pm. (For more information and tickets, visit The Clarice online.)

shellved

*(and could be yours if you visit the MSPAL rummage sale)

To prepare for the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library’s upcoming rummage sale at the NextNOW Fest, we sifted through a few thousand LPs that had been gathering dust and found a little bit of everything: harmonica bands, yacht...

For those about to research rock...

Whether you're looking for an obituary of Jimi Hendrix, a 1977 feature on Blondie, a 1988 recording of an interview with the Pixies, or a Rolling Stone review of Hanson's debut album, Rock's Backpages is a great place to begin your search.

The database contains more than 25,000 articles published since 1960, including over 400 audio recordings of interviews with artists and others involved in popular music. Articles are categorized by subject, making it easy to browse material on many subgenres of pop, rock, soul, hip-hop, and more.

The content comes from major publications such as Rolling Stone, New Musical Express, and Melody Maker, as well as from smaller, specialized music magazines. In addition to feature articles about artists and styles, you'll find album and concert reviews, interviews, and commentaries.

Try Rock's Backpages for your research or just to find some interesting writing on your favorite band.

MSPAL Power is back!

Welcome to the revived, resurrected, reestablished MSPAL Power, back for the start of the 2014-2015 academic year. We're working hard to bring you a new-and-improved way to keep up with us and we have lots of exciting events and helpful info to share, so check back regularly for updates from the University of Maryland's Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library!

(Our archives are still available if you're looking for something in a past MSPAL Power post. Happy searching!)

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