Loeb Music Library

Page from Pelléas (click to enlarge)

Just in time for the anniversary of the first performance of Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande (premiered April 30, 1902), here’s a look at the 1907 revised edition of the vocal score. Debussy made numerous changes to the score over his lifetime: the interludes in the 1907 version are longer, to accomodate scene changes; and the alternate tenor line for Pelléas, notated in red ink overtop of the original baritone line, was taken from one of Debussy’s manuscript revisions of the opera.

Correspondence from Durand
& fils (click to enlarge)

This copy belonged to the singer Antonin Trantoul (1887-1966); the annotations in red and blue pencil throughout the score may be his. Tipped-in correspondence from the publisher, A. Durand & fils, reveals a bit more of the performance history of the tenor version, and hints at Trantoul’s search for that edition of the opera.

The complete vocal score, as well as many other works by Debussy, are part of our collection of Digital Scores and Libretti.

- Kerry Masteller

Loeb Music Library is fortunate enough to possess two excellent versions of La Vie Parisienne, which would be Offenbach’s masterpiece if it weren’t for Les Contes D’Hoffmann. Both are taped performances from the Opera-National de Lyon, yet they could not be more different. The first (DVD 1058), a 1991 production, presents the 1866 five-act version in a full period setting, complete with a miniature steam train and an antiquated loudspeaker, which crackles out the opening chorus of railway employees. The sets are elegantly minimal, all the better to focus on the music, the performers (standouts include Hélène Delavault’s luscious Métella and Claire Wauthion as an enchantingly goofy Baronne de Gondremarck) and Patrice Cauchetier’s sumptuous costumes (the array of outfits on the “Italiens, Brèsiliens, Japonais, Hollandais, Espagnols, Romagnols, Egyptiens et Prussiens” visiting Paris is a particular highlight.) This staging never quite lets you forget the sadness that lies just under the decadence and frivolity, the need to keep the bubble of joy in the air with just a little more dancing and champagne. If you really want someone to go into this thoroughly, Sacheverell Sitwell’s impressions of the piece in his La Vie Parisienne: a Tribute to Offenbach (Mus 4320.15.81) will give you a good deal of background, both on the operetta and on Mr. Sitwell.

The effervescent 2007 production (DVD 1457), by contrast, is updated to modern times and free from all care. From the ingenious credit sequence (an animated Metro map) to the curtain calls, something is always happening. The story fits smoothly into a present-day setting: Bobinet and Gardefeu must now contend not only with infidelity, impecuniosity and invading tourists but also with flashing signs, a gym, a catwalk and working automobiles. While one elaborate set changes for another, you’re treated to witty mini-ballets in front of the curtain. The performers are splendidly energetic. At one point Marie Devellereau, as Gabrielle the amorous glover, scales a series of bar stools until she’s four feet above the ground, garbed in a miniskirt and stilettos and trilling away all the while. (I don’t want to give away what happens in the tipsy finale of Act III.) Jesus Garcia, as the Brazilian tourist, proves himself a fine match for her. Be warned: the modern interpolations to the dialogue include some strong language, and you are left in no doubt about any double-entendre, particularly when Laurent Naouri, as the Baron, is the one delivering it.

Both of these are excellent candidates for the first opera DVD to show a friend you wish to corrupt initiate into the world of opera buffs: make up a party and use one of the Loeb’s two listening rooms to share the DVD experience. You may also wish to follow along in Jean-Christophe Keck’s critical editions of the unabridged full or vocal scores (Mus 759.1.688 and Mus 759.1.687), which encompass not only the 1866 five-act version and the 1873 four-act version, but also material Offenbach wrote for the 1867 Brussels and Vienna versions and a trio for Prosper, Bobinet and Urbain that never made it into the performance. Though as Keck himself points out in the introduction, “for this composer, a score is far from… a fixed document, laid down once and for all.” In either of these fine productions, the score lives.

-Sarah Barton

A new finding aid from the Archive of World Music provides the opportunity to explore and listen to the music of the Yakut people. It features freely available online audio content with the download of RealPlayer.

Bruce Gordon and Eduard Alekseyev at work in the Audio Preservation studio, 2009

The Eduard Alekseyev Fieldwork Collection of the Musical Culture of Yakutia, 1969 – 1990 contains audio and video that documents traditional religious and ritual cultural expressions. Sakha (Yakutia) is the largest sub-national entity in the world. It is a circumpolar region, half of which lies above the Arctic Circle. From the 1960s through the 1980s, publication of materials about the rituals of indigenous cultures was suppressed, due to the Soviet policy of the times. The Yakut language is part of the northern Turkic linguistic family, and is considered a “vulnerable” language, according to the UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.

Eduard Yefimovich Alekseyev (b. 1937, Yakutia) resides in Boston and is a well-known ethnomusicologist and researcher of traditional Yakut music. He is the author of more than 100 publications in Russian, including such books as A Study of the Origins of Modality with Regard to Yakut Folk Songs (1976) and The Pitch Nature of Primitive Singing (1986).  Alekseyev worked very closely with Ghilyana Dorjieva (another scholar of indigenous musical culture in Russia, in particular, of the Kalmyk people) to identify and describe the materials in the collection.

Khomus by
Nathan Hamm

The collection includes original field recordings made by Alekseyev between 1969 and 1990; most were created in a fieldwork setting, but some were made during concerts, or at festival events of Ukrainian people in Kiev and Crimean Tatars in Simferopol. The main genres found in the collection are the olonkho (epic song and recitative), ohuokai (round dance), shamanic ritual and mystery performances. Frequently heard musical instruments are the khomus (jaw or jew’s harp), the diungiur (shaman’s drum), and the bayan (button accordion).

In this video, Eduard Alekseyev speaks about the olonkho genre and its transformative purpose as well as its change as a genre over time.

Audio Preservation Studio engineer Bruce Gordon has worked closely with Alekseyev to digitally preserve the polyester and acetate audio reel tapes in the collection — the end result of their work is the streaming content available in the finding aid, such as this recording of Vasiliy Osipovich Karataev performing the “Song of the Horse” from the olonkho “Erbekhtei Bergen.”

- Donna Guerra

The Music Library receives boxes of new CDs and DVDs every week; Peter Laurence, the library’s Acquisitions Assistant for Recordings, shares a few of the latest offerings to catch his eye:

Stockhausen Text-CDs

Loeb Music: CD 36779.

A new group of Stockhausen Text-CDs (vols. 16 – 22) that feature the composer lecturing on his own works, including Momente (1963), Telemusik (1966) and Hymnen (1967). Also included here are interviews from 1970-72 and a private recording of Kurzwellen from Osaka, Japan.

Find them here: Loeb Music Library CD 36773 – CD 36779.

Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings By Alan Lomax

Loeb Music: AC 36768.

An 8-CD box set of stories and songs by Jelly Roll Morton recorded at the Library of Congress in 1938. In addition to solo piano versions of his songs, this collection also provides Jelly Roll’s lively and earthy recollections of the early years of jazz… earthy enough to earn the set a Parental Advisory “Explicit Lyrics” sticker.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library AC 36768

Medieval Jazz Quartet plus three

Loeb Music: CD 36513.

Early Music meets jazz! Composer, pianist and vocalist Bob Dorough conceived and arranged this unique and surprisingly swinging collaboration (originally released in 1961) that features recorders, crumhorns and a jazz rhythm section. Dorough sings and plays tenor recorder, accompanied by LaNoue Davenport and other members of the Manhattan Recorder Consort, and by guitarist Al Schackman, bassist George Duvivier and Paul Motian on drums. Dorough went on to work with Miles Davis and to compose most of the music for the educational animated TV series Schoolhouse Rock.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library CD 36513

Riccardo Chailly: Live, The Radio Recordings from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Loeb Music: CD 36092.

Sparked by Chailly’s amazing performance with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra at Symphony Hall on February 25th, I’m including this recently acquired 13-CD set of live recordings made in Amsterdam between 1985 and 2003. Included are works from Beethoven to Berg to Berio, as well as music by Dutch composers such as Peter Schat, Alphons Diepenbrock and Tristan Keuris. Rounding out the set is a bonus DVD of Chailly and the orchestra performing the Rite of Spring, The Firebird and Pulcinella.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library CD 36092

by  dontmindme

For the iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad users among you: the (free) streaming Naxos Music Library app.* Browse the entire Naxos database – 41,000 recordings and counting – or stream your own playlists to get you through the day. You’d rather listen to jazz? Then the Naxos Jazz Library app is for you.

To create playlists, you’ll need to register on the main Naxos site; just click “Playlists,” then “Sign Up,” and fill out a short form. Don’t worry: it’s still free, and you won’t start getting advertising email. The Naxos YouTube Channel has more tips about making and organizing playlists.

Check out the Naxos Music Library blog for a detailed tour of the app, and happy listening!

UPDATE: Using an Android phone? Search the Android Market for “Naxos Music Library” to download your version of the app, or use this QR code:

* Disclaimer: you do need to be a Harvard affiliate to use our subscription to Naxos. If you’re not, may I suggest Pandora Mobile as an alternative?

-Kerry Masteller

Beginning with, as one staff member described them, “every opera which Verdi ever conceived any part of in French,” the Music Library’s goal is to make its entire collection of Verdi first editions available online by 2013, the bicentennial of the composer’s birth. Since the Library owns numerous Verdi first editions and variants, this project will make its Digital Scores and Libretti site a comprehensive resource for Verdi scholars seeking such materials. As of February, 2010, twenty-four scores are already part of the collection, and newly-digitized operas will be added monthly until the completion of the project.

Three versions of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Don Carlos, from the library’s collection of Digital Scores and Libretti. From left to right: the final four-act French revision from 1883; the first edition of 1867; and the first edition incorporating revision for a Neapolitan production, 1872.

Several of the operas of Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), Italy’s most renowned composer and creator of some of the greatest masterpieces of operatic literature, exist in multiple versions. While many of Verdi’s operas were subject to some form of revision, select operas underwent drastic recomposition resulting in ostensibly new works. These revisions not only illuminate Verdi’s compositional process and demonstrate his continual growth as a composer, they also serve as important documents in the study of the works’ reception, and provide fascinating evidence of the mutual influence, sociological as well as musical, of Verdi’s operas on cultural life in the capitals of 19th-century Europe.

Verdi’s revisions fall into two categories, those for the Italian stage and those for Paris. Stiffelio (1850, Trieste) was refashioned as Aroldo (1857, Rimini) owing to censorship issues. Three works of Verdi’s full maturity, Simon Boccanegra (Venice, 1857), La Forza del Destino (St. Petersburg, 1862), and Don Carlos (Paris, 1867) underwent major revisions for their premieres at Milan’s La Scala (Forza in 1869, Boccanegra in 1881, Don Carlos in 1884). Don Carlos is an exceptional example of a composer reworking a 5-act Parisian grand opera into a four act work for Italian theaters.

Verdi’s other revisions were prepared for Paris, then the reigning operatic capital of Europe, beginning with Jérusalem, his first composition for the Paris Opera in 1847, a reworking of I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata from 1843. The composer subsequently adapted Il Trovatore (as Le Trouvère) in 1857, Macbeth in 1865, and Otello in 1894, for which Verdi composed his last music for the operatic stage.

The Sema Vakf Collection of Turkish Classical Music is one of the most extensive collections of its kind in the United States. This vakf, or trust, is named for the art of engaged listening (sema), and is dedicated to the preservation of classical Turkish music, particularly repertories of court music composed before 1850. Turkish businessman and connoisseur Mr. Altan Ender Güzey (1932-2009) began to send his enormous collection to the Archive of World Music (AWM) in the 1990s, and the cataloging of over one thousand 10-inch audio tape reels, an endeavor started 15 years ago and just recently completed, was a dedicated effort of Rhona Freeman, Cataloging Assistant in the AWM.

Türk mûzikı̂si nazariyatı ve usûlleri: kudüm velveleleri, by İsmail Hakkı Özkan. One of the music theory books from the collection. Loeb Music: Seeger Room ML345.T8 O94 1984

The collection includes the archive of Ismâil Baha Sürelsan, a Turkish composer and ethnomusicologist, recordings of lessons taught by the singer Allâeddin Yavaşça, musical transcriptions, and performances by numerous accomplished artists. A recent Harvard College Library news story tells more about the history and contents of the Collection.

I wished for the first post highlighting the Archive of World Music to be about the Sema Vakf Collection, so that it could be a place to commemorate the passing of Mr. Altan Ender Güzey this past year, and to express enormous gratitude for his gift of the collection as well as for his discriminating collecting.

Ottoman-Turkish court music=Osmanlı-Türk enderûn mûsıkîsi / Merâl Uğurlu Ensemble, one of the CDs from the collection. Loeb Music: AWM CD 9160.

Recordings by the group Lalezar constitute part of the Sema Vakf Collection. This video features B. Rehâ Sağbâş and Selmâ Sağbaş of Lalezar playing and improvising Ottoman and Turkish classical music in a concert presented on October 17, 2002 by the Center for the Study of World Religions, the Music Study Group, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Also featured is the Director of the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Dr. Virginia Danielson, who provides engaging description of the aesthetic aspects of Turkish classical music.

The collection is available in the Music Library; find more items by browsing the HOLLIS Catalog.

– Donna Guerra