In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Notes for Notes

University at Buffalo Music Library announces availability of Ferdinand Praeger Collection of Scores. Ferdinand Praeger (1815–1891) is best known today as the author of Wagner as I Knew Him, a book that stirred considerable controversy when it was published in 1892. But Praeger was also a talented pianist, pedagogue, music critic, and composer. The University at Buffalo Music Library acquired a collection of Praeger’s music manuscripts in 1984 and a preliminary inventory was created in 1985, presumably based on information supplied by the vendor. The collection contains close to 500 compositions, making it the largest of three major collections of Praeger’s works, the other two being the British Library and the Moldenhauer Archives at Northwestern University.

The collection has now been fully cataloged at the item level in OCLC. The cataloging has revealed many new details about the musical and extramusical content of the collection, including an inscription by Praeger’s wife, Leonie, on a solo piano piece titled Volkslied: “The last piece written by Ferdinand Praeger after which he took to what proved to be his death bed.” The bibliographic records were harvested to form the basis for the container list in the EAD finding aid available at: http://purl.org/net/findingaids/view?docId=ead/music/ubmu0046.xml. Forty-nine scores have been digitized to date and the digital copies are available through links provided in the container list.

Praeger’s music has been the subject of two dissertations (1969 (1978), and a master’s thesis (2012) by the cataloger of the collection, Jessica Nay. She also created an exhibit about the collection, Rediscovering Pieces of the Past: The Manuscript Scores of Ferdinand Praeger. The summary of the exhibit is available online at: http://libweb1.lib.buffalo.edu:8080/xtf/data/pdf/music/exhibits/ubmu_pdf_praeger2012/ubmu_pdf_praeger2012.pdf.

John Bewley
Music Library, University at Buffalo

Princeton University Library has been awarded a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (commencing September 2012) to inaugurate the Blue Mountain Project (http://diglib.princeton.edu/bluemountain), devoted to creating digital editions of avant-garde, forward-looking journals in the arts produced in Europe and North America between 1848 and 1923. The project draws on the depth of [End Page 525] Princeton’s collections and expertise of its staff to bring curators, librarians, scholars, and digital humanities researchers together to create a freely available, trusted digital repository of important, rare, and fragile texts that both chronicle and embody the emergence of cultural modernity in the West, enhanced by full-text searching, deep indexing of contents, and detailed metadata and descriptive essays. The Blue Mountain Project’s initial digitization of thirty-six journals will include five music titles: La chronique musicale (Paris, 1873–76); Dalibor (Prague, 1858–1927); Le mercure musicale—later, Revue musicale S.I.M. (Paris, 1905–14); Niederrheinsiche Musik-Zeitung (Cologne, 1859–65); and Revue d’historie et de critique musicales/La revue musicale (Paris, 1901–11). Darwin F. Scott, music librarian at Princeton’s Arthur Mendel Music Library, is a member of the project’s board of directors.

Darwin Scott
Princeton University

The Harold S. Orendorff Music Library at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) has received a collection of manuscript compositions by Edmund Louis Najera (1936–2009). Najera studied voice with William Vennard, Seth Williams, and Martial Singher, and composition with Lukas Foss, Halsey Stevens, and Andrew Imbrie. He sang with numerous choral groups, including those directed by Norman Luboff, Roger Wagner, and Robert Shaw, and was a founding member of the Gregg Smith Singers. He served on the voice faculty of the University of Virginia and the Piedmont-Virginia Community College. The collection at IUP contains vocal solos, operas, operettas, musicals, choral works, arrangements, and instrumental works with approximately 175 individual titles. It has been inventoried and is available for study.

Carl Rahkonen
Orendorff Music Library
Indiana University of Pennsylvania

From the editor:Notes staff changes. With this issue we say a fond farewell to David Gilbert as editor of our “Music Reviews” column. Since he took on this role, beginning with the September 2011 issue (vol. 68, no. 1), David has published interesting...

pdf

Share