February 2012
21 posts
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The Makers of the Sacred Harp
Those unfamiliar with Sacred Harp may be surprised to learn that it involves no harps whatsoever - it’s a form of group singing, also known as shape note. To quote author David Warren Steel:
Sacred Harp singing is a community musical and social event, emphasizing participation, not performance, where people sing songs from a tunebook called The Sacred Harp, printed in music notation using...
Watchnprmusic:
In honor of Woody Guthrie’s 100th birthday, his daughter invited Jay Farrar (Son Volt and Uncle Tupelo), Will Johnson (Centro-Matic), Anders Parker (Varnaline), and Jim James (My Morning Jacket) to find lyrics from among Guthrie’s archives that spoke to them and put the words to music.
You can feel loneliness and heartache in every note of the Jim James-led “Empty Bed Blues.” The...
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Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music
We have several books by music theorist and CUNY professor Joseph N. Straus at the Music Library, but none are quite like this new one we just received.
Most of Straus’ works focus on music theory (those of you in Pat Muchmore’s Post-Tonal Theory class will be very familiar with Straus), but Straus took a departure from the norm to write about a subject that was both close-to-home and...
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“Opera and rap take work to appreciate — perhaps more effort than many of today’s...”
– Tom Huizenga on why rap and opera hit some kind of nerve with people. (via nprmusic
An interesting read!
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Annual Library Survey
Our annual Library survey is up! For those of you who are current students, you should have received a link in your SLC email. The Library survey is incredibly helpful to all of us who work in the SLC Libraries - every year we review our statistics gathered from the survey and make changes in an attempt to constantly improve our services.
The Music Library has a section in the Annual survey,...
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“Her tone and her power put her in a class nearly by herself. And unlike other...”
– Ann Powers via Whitney Houston: Her Life Played Out Like An Opera (via nprmusic)
RIP Whitney
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Solkattu Manual
One of the new books we recently acquired is Solkattu Manual: An Introduction to the Rhythmic Language of South Indian Music by Wesleyan professor David P. Nelson (Wesleyan University Press, 2008).
For those who don’t know, solkattu is a kind of rhythm language, Nelson says. It’s used as a way to describe and vocalize intricate percussion patterns, most often performed by tabla...
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WatchBritish writer Ken Hollings has interests that range broadly from avant garde art history to weird science. In 2011, he lectured on John Cage (and other things) at the Off the Page music criticism festival in England.
