Loeb Music Library

The grass is growing along the edges of the paths in Harvard Yard; the banners are hung in Tercentenary Theatre; seniors are making last rounds of their favorite haunts in Cambridge: it’s time for Commencement and class reunions.

Anyone who works in a college or university music library or archives is used to requests from alumni for copies of their favorite college songs; while for years we faxed blurry copies of “Fair Harvard” all over the world, we’re very glad to say copies of both the 1922 edition of the Glee Club’s Harvard Song Book and the 1909 edition of A Book of Radcliffe College Songs are now available online.

The 1922 Harvard Song Book, like many other university anthologies, is a combination of songs specific to the University, and especially to sporting events (“Soldiers Field,” “Poor Old Yale,” and others), with songs from Glee Club concerts and revues (“The Skye Boat Song,” “Good Night, Ladies,” “Jingle Bells”). Certainly, there are many other places to get a copy of “Gaudeamus Igitur,” but with this volume and a cadre of willing singers, all you really need are two football teams and an arena to recreate your own Harvard-Yale game.

The 1909 A Book of Radcliffe College Songs is a new addition to our digital library; its editors collected not only songs about the college, but some of the standard choral repertoire being performed by the students’ music clubs and songs composed for Radcliffe’s vibrant tradition of amateur theatricals. Later editions of the college song book – not yet digitized – reveal intriguing changes in the music that was most associated with the school by its own students: in the 1916 songbook, for example, most of the choral works were replaced by Radcliffe songs, and a new section of rally lyrics provides evidence for the popularity of basketball at women’s colleges.

Whether you’re graduating and leaving Cambridge, or returning to Harvard after a long time away, we hope that these collections will remind you of your own college experiences.

For further exploration:

• While it’s impossible to fully recreate online the print (and image, and object) collections of the Harvard University Archives and the Radcliffe College Archives at the Schlesinger Library, The Harvard Radcliffe Online Historical Reference Shelf is a fantastic starting point for research about the University.
• For those of you searching for more music, HOLLIS includes a selection of digital facsimiles of other 19th- and early 20th-century student songbooks…even Yale’s.

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* The opening lines of Radcliffe’s 1911 Class Song, written by Alice Hunnewell.

- Kerry Masteller

As May washes over Cambridge, no fan of Jeeves-era British popular music can pass a garden without thinking of Ivor Novello, who gave us several ravishing songs about lilacs and Spring. Novello ranked with Noel Coward as England’s top triple threat of the light spectacular. When not writing, scoring and starring in a procession of backstage comedies and Ruritanian extravaganzas which reigned over Britain’s stages for twenty years, Novello launched careers, fed out-of-work show people, fostered every kind of talent, threw thrilling parties and displayed his faultless profile to best advantage in a range of films.  His death in 1951 gave rise to public grief as intense as that for Princess Diana half a century later.

Loeb Music Library recently acquired Novello’s personal rehearsal libretto (ML50.N934 D3 1939, typed on carbon paper in a clip binder) for his  1939 smash hit The Dancing Years. The pages explode with notes, eliminations, elaborations, mapping Novello’s legendary theatrical insight at work. If you can read his writing, he inserts a fairly important plot point – a scene in which Maria, the heroine, tells Rudi, the hero, that she has had his child – in longhand on the back of the previous scene.

It’s much easier to follow the final dialogue for the 1951 film version (PN1997.D362 1950.) Daringly for a show produced in Neville Chamberlain’s England, the stage version of The Dancing Years had concluded with Rudi and Maria’s last meeting in an Austrian prison, where Rudi is under arrest for aiding refugees.   By 1951, political defiance was slightly passe, and the film ends poignantly rather than tragically, with Maria introducing Rudi to his long-lost son.

For Novello, the “joy of giving” Maria sings about was not just a figure of speech: his time, his talent, his influence, his money, his company, he gave them all freely and gave great joy in the process.

For Further Reading, Viewing and Listening: Read the rest of this entry »

A few recent acquisitions in the recordings collection:

Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer

We recently received this deluxe bound edition of Anita O’Day’s complete scrapbooks that includes a documentary film about the singer and a bonus DVD of outtake interviews and musical performances. The set also includes tributes by jazz writers James Gavin and Will Friedwald, as well as excerpts from Anita O’Day’s autobiography High Times, Hard Times. Many will know of her performance from Jazz on a Summer’s Day, a documentary about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, but this edition provides a wealth of new material about her fascinating life.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library AC 36770.

Eddy Brown (Symposium)

Recently the Marston label featured early recordings (Dec. 1914) by violinist Eddy Brown in its set The Dawn of Recording: The Julius Block Cylinders. Born in Chicago in 1895, Brown studied violin with Jenö Hubay in Budapest and Leopold Auer in St. Petersburg and he made his debut in Germany in 1910. On this new Symposium disc, he can be heard playing Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky from Berlin in the mid-1920s and the Sonata Virginianesque by American composer John Powell around 1940 (with Powell himself accompanying). In the 1930s Brown became active in radio, and he served as director of WQXR for almost twenty years.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library CD 37296.

Karl Amadeus Hartmann and the String Quartet (Cybele)

This 3-CD set inaugurates a new series (Künstler im Gespräch) on the Cybele label that will combine a featured composer’s music with spoken word recordings that help to illuminate that composer’s work. Here the focus is on Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s complete works with string quartet – two quartets, the Little Concerto for String Quartet and Percussion, and the Chamber Concerto for Clarinet, String Quartet and String Orchestra. The spoken word material includes Hartmann himself from 1962, an interview with his wife in 1994, and a conversation with his son from 2009. Notes in German and English are also rich with biographical detail and illustrations.

Find it here: Loeb Music CD 37004.

- Peter Laurence