Notes for Notes

Sibley Music Library of the Eastman School of Music has received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Preservation and Access Award of $300,000 in support of the library's continuing efforts to digitize music scores in the public domain (i.e., no longer protected by copyright). This award supports a second phase of scores digitization that will extend from May 2011 through September 2012, and builds on a similar NEH grant-funded project that concluded in April 2011. The 2009-11 NEH award resulted in the digitization of 9,600 public-domain scores, a total of 303,000 pages of digitized music. Like that first grant, this second NEH award supports the efforts of Sibley Music Library to provide free online access to public-domain scores from the library's general collections, with an emphasis on those scores not widely held by other libraries and not digitized elsewhere. The library's scores digitization program, which complements other large-scale book-centric digitization programs, has become an important source of music for scholars and musicians in this country and around the world. To date, Sibley Music Library has digitized over 11,000 public domain scores and books, which have accounted for more than three million downloads from the University of Rochester's digital repository UR Research (https://urresearch.rochester.edu). Over the course of the 2011-12 NEH-funded project, Sibley Music Library will digitize 9,500 additional scores and make them freely available at UR Research. The NEH award supports the hiring of two staff members, thus permitting the library to continue the current pace of its digitization program. Co-investigators for the project are Sibley Music Library staff members Alice Carli, conservator; and Jim Farrington, head of public services. Linda Blair, head of cataloging, provides bibliographic assistance to the project.

New England Conservatory Archives recently received the Lorna Cooke deVaron Collection of papers, artifacts, and music collected by deVaron during the course of her distinguished career as choral conductor, from 1945 to the present. DeVaron served as chair of the Choral Department at New England Conservatory (NEC) from 1947 until her retirement in 1988, and conducted at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, the Israel Summer Festival in Zimriya, the Radio Chorus in Beijing, and other choral organizations in the U.S. and abroad. Her personal papers include an extraordinary volume of correspondence, concert programs, news articles, photographs, and scrapbooks that document the vast range of activities in her professional life. Over 50 percent of her music collection of 500 manuscripts and published full scores represents unique items; many of these are choral works composed for and dedicated to deVaron, and others were premiered by the NEC Chorus under her direction. DeVaron's collection of choral octavo scores comprises over 7,000 titles, and represents her wide ranging interest in music of all styles and from all regions of the world, including numerous Spanish, South American, and Russian works. Further information and a description of the collection holdings are available at http://necmusic.edu/archives/lorna-cooke-devaron. Item level cataloging for manuscripts and published scores can be found in the library's online catalog at http://endeavor.flo.org.

The Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University has recently added an exceptional collection on southern music to its holdings. The Doug Seroff African American Gospel Quartet Collection contains materials gathered and developed by Mr. Seroff over thirty years of research on the history of this important and influential musical style. It includes audio and video recordings, over 300 photographs (many unique), research notes, files of newspaper articles, and manuscripts dating from the 1870s through the 2000s documenting the rich history of quartet singing in Tennessee and Alabama.

The collection primarily chronicles the golden era of gospel quartet singing as practiced by groups like The Spirit of Memphis, The Swan Silvertones, and the Sunset Travelers. Additionally, this archive includes the personal manuscripts of John Battle, a founding member of the Grammy-winning Fairfield Four quartet of Nashville, Tennessee, detailing the early history of that influential group. The Seroff Collection also contains many important documents relating to the long history...