Loeb Music Library

Though the weather report promises but little joy, though due dates for theses and applications loom menacingly over us like steadily advancing diplodoci, though the ice and snowdrifts cling to the pavement as clings the tritone to Vitellio Scarpia, though we are, if not actually disgruntled, far from being gruntled, yet be of good cheer, gentle library patrons, for a brief escape to the enchanted land of Bolton, Wodehouse and Kern is but a mouseclick or two away.

Sheet music, recordings, and a couple of other pleasant, nostalgic things.

Between 1915 and 1924 Jerome Kern, often in cahoots with P. G. Wodehouse (brilliant lyricist as well as brilliant novelist; life is not fair) and Guy Bolton (the wizard of plot and pun) wrote several musicals for the small, stylish Princess Theater in New York.    Their intricate, tuneful scores  and believably nonsensical books distinguished the Princess shows from Ziegfeld’s extravaganzas and Cohan’s revues.  Kern and Wodehouse created songs which advanced the plot and illuminated the characters, rather than a series of interchangeable numbers for interchangeable soubrettes and juveniles.  The world of these shows is long, long gone, but the songs are as fresh as ever.

If you are stuck in your room with the cold that’s going around,  Music Online streams an utterly beguiling album of Wodehouse lyrics (mostly set to Kern’s music) called “The Land Where the Good Songs Go.” Sylvia McNair (she of the voice like silver honey), joins forces with pianist Steven Blier and tenor/Wodehouse buff Hal Cazalet for songs like “You Can’t Make Love By Wireless” and “Non-Stop Dancing” (“Father pluckily continues, though he’s sprained eleven sinews, since we got the non-stop dancing craze.”)  Those interested in the evolution of singing styles might want to listen to the vintage recordings of many of the same songs on “The Theatre Lyrics of P. G. Wodehouse”.  Some of these tracks date back to 1905, and there’s an interview with Wodehouse about working with Kern.

For the full Bertie Wooster experience, try visiting the UCLA Archive of Popular American Music, printing out a .pdf of the original sheet music for “The Sirens’ Song” or “Sir Galahad” and playing through it on the nearest keyboard.  You never know what might summon up Jeeves, tray in hand and mammoth brain at the ready to solve all your problems.

Read the rest of this entry �

Some of you know that the Music Library has a state-of-the-art audio preservation studio but you may not know much about it or even where it is. It’s located on the third floor at 8 Story Street; David Ackerman is the lead engineer. Recently he produced this 3-minute video about Audio Preservation Services (APS). Take a look, you’ll like it:

In addition to the conducting the day-to-day preservation work of the studio, APS staff contribute to international standards for audio collections and, as part of the joint Harvard and Indiana University Sound Directions project, developed the Sound Directions Toolkit, an open-source software suite to allow audio engineers to automate some of the routine,  repetitive tasks of digitization

Explore the library’s archival collections to hear some of the recordings preserved by APS (some sound files are available only to the Harvard community):

• The Eduard Alekseyev Fieldwork Collection of the Musical Culture of Yakutia, 1969-1990
• The Stephen Blum Collection of Music from Iranian Khorāsān at Harvard University
• The Laura Boulton Collection of Byzantine and Orthodox Musics
• The James Rubin Collection of Indian classical music, 1957-1989
• The Marie-Thérèse, Baroness Ullens de Schooten Collections at Harvard University

Coincidentally, today is UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, a day to celebrate the cultural significance of recorded sound and video and to raise awareness of the urgent need for its preservation. Visit the Coordinating Council of Audio-Visual Archives Associations for a list of events planned by archives and heritage collections around the world.

- Virginia Danielson and Kerry Masteller

A new finding aid from the Archive of World Music provides the opportunity to explore and listen to music and sung poetry from northeastern Iran.

The Stephen Blum Collection of Music from Iranian Khorāsān at Harvard University: original ethnographic sound recordings, 1968-2006 contains audio from ethnomusicological fieldwork conducted in the northern part of Iranian Khorāsān. Included are about 50 hours of field recordings made in 1968-1969 and 1972, with an emphasis on sung poetry in three languages: Persian (Farsi), Khorasani Turkish (Torki), and Kurmanji Kurdish. Musical genres in the collection include both lyric songs (chārbeiti, ghazal, and gharibi) and narrative pieces (naqqāli, dāstān, and others), performed as solos or accompanied on instruments such as the ney, a kind of flute, the kamānche, and the dotār, both types of lutes. The performers are the subjects of Blum’s Ph.D. dissertation, Musics in Contact: The Cultivation of Oral Repertoires in Meshhed, Iran.

In this representative recording from the collection, made in the city of Mashhad in 1969, the naqqāl Heidari – a solo singer – performs an excerpt from Firdawsī’s 11th century verse epic, Shāhnāmah, the Book of Kings: Haft khwān-e Rustam (Seven exploits of Rostam). The hero Rostam, accompanied by his horse Rakhsh, battles monsters, demons, sorcerers, and temptation, in order to release the king Kai Kavus and his army from captivity.

Dr. Blum has been deeply engaged in the scholarly exploration of Iranian musical culture since the late 1960s, and he completed his doctoral studies under the direction of Bruno Nettl, a leading ethnomusicologist. Blum has also been instrumental in the field, not only with his scholarly work but as the founder of the ethnomusicology concentration at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he has taught since 1987. Among his many publications are chapters on Central Asia and Iran in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music.

Following the Revolution of 1979, Dr. Blum was unable to return to Iran until 1995, when he donated copies of his earlier recordings to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and made additional recordings in Khorāsān as well as in the city of Qazvin, northwest of Tehran. He began to make more frequent visits in 2006, and remains in close contact with Iranian students and colleagues. Recordings from these visits consist largely of conversations, with occasional performances, which are being digitized for future inclusion in the finding aid. The collection also includes notebooks and printed collections of verses intended for singing, along with a street guide to the city of Mashhad.

Earlier this fall, Dr. Blum visited Prof. Richard K. Wolf’s seminar on classical Iranian music and its relationship to poetry and narrative in vernacular traditions, and used performances from the collection to illustrate these relationships.

The finding aid to The Stephen Blum Collection is part of the OASIS catalog, Harvard’s Online Archival Search Information System. The reel-to-reel tapes from the collection have been digitized, and audio files of the recordings are available through the finding aid to anyone, anywhere in the world.

- Donna Guerra and Kerry Masteller

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

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