Notes for Notes

The Music Library Association has announced its publication awards for 2008.

The Vincent H. Duckles Award for the best book-length bibliography or other research tool in music published in 2008 was presented to Laurie J. Sampsel for Music Research: A Handbook (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009 [appeared in 2008]). The MLA Publications Awards Committee noted that "students will appreciate the book as a concise and approachable introduction to an unfamiliar (if not daunting) field; instructors will be grateful for its evaluative checklists, recommended readings, and other features that can be used to enhance classroom teaching. This carefully prepared, well-edited handbook will be essential reading for music librarians, graduate students, and music faculty for years to come." The Eva Judd O'Meara Award for the best review published in Notes in 2008 was given to Daniel F. Boomhower for his review of recent critical editions of Bach's Mass in B Minor which appeared in vol. 65, no. 2 (December 2008): 385-89. The committee stated that the review "is a balanced and insightful assessment of where textual scholarship has arrived with this perennially-challenging work. Boomhower's calm and steady scholarly hand masterfully contrasts the two approaches [of Christoph Wolff and Joshua Rifkin] and in the end creates a convincing argument for considering the different incarnations of the Mass side by side, rather than attempting to unify them or force the 'one true version' of this complex piece." The Richard S. Hill Award for the best article on music librarianship or article of a music-bibliographic nature was awarded to Rupert Ridgewell for his article "Artaria Plate Numbers and the Publication Process, 1778-87," which appeared in Music and the Book Trade: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. by Robin Myers et al., 145-78 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2008). The committee commented that "Rupert Ridgewell examines archival, documentary, and bibliographical evidence to address fundamental questions about the operation and administration of Viennese publisher Artaria's business practices in the 1780s. Ridgewell's handling of extant documents, his well-founded arguments, and his clear explication of complicated issues serve as a model to researchers, and his work in this previously unexplored area illuminates our understanding of publisher operations and engraving practices of the late eighteenth century."

Other MLA Awards.

The 2010 Dena Epstein Award for Library and Archival Research in American Music was given to Ursula Crosslin for her dissertation entitled "The Institutionalization of Sacred Vocal Music in Cincinnati, 1810-1860." A Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the Ohio State University, Ms. Crosslin's work examines how sacred music was developed as a musical and cultural institution during the first part of the nineteenth century, using Cincinnati as a case study. Her research will reveal how the publication and performance of religious music of different cultures interacted and shaped Cincinnati as a representative "western" city, as well as its musical ties to Lowell Mason and the shape-note tradition of Boston. She will use the funding for travel to study and research at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, the Warrington Collection at the Hartford Seminary Library, the Warrington Hymnology Collection at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary's Barbour Memorial Library, the music division of the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Lowell Mason Hymnal Collection at the Yale Divinity Library.

The Kevin Freeman Award supports aspiring music librarians in offsetting the cost to attend the annual meeting of the association. This year, awards were granted to Dyann S. Bishop, Matthew Ertz, Bracken Klar, Yi Hong Sim, and Jennifer Ward. Dyann S. Bishop completed her M.L.S. degree at the University of Pittsburgh in August 2009. She is currently employed as a library associate at the Shirlington Library, Arlington County, Virginia, and in October 2009 was promoted to Librarian I. A professional flutist for thirty years, Ms. Bishop had initially thought that orchestra librarianship was her niche, but has since decided on public service in music libraries as her true calling. Matthew Ertz is in his second year of the M.L.S. program at Indiana University in the music librarianship...