Notes for Notes

The Marta and Austin Weeks Music Library, Frost School of Music, University of Miami, is pleased to announce the acquisition of a major collection of books and other secondary literature relating to opera and opera singers. The collection was the personal library of Roger Gross, a major New York dealer in musical autographs who had a special love of opera. The collection, which runs to several thousand volumes, relates to opera and opera singers from the late eighteenth century to the present. It includes some rare eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century volumes; studies on a variety of geographical areas and in a variety of languages (including opera in North and South America, and studies written in Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian); and books that range from biographies and autobiographies, through studies of operatic and theatrical institutions, to operatic and theatrical chronologies. The collection also includes volumes on dance and operetta, and is particularly strong on the twentieth-century Greek American soprano Maria Callas. The collection is in the process of being cataloged; the volumes currently available can be found by searching under keywords “Roger Gross” in the Weeks Music Library catalog: library.miami.edu/musiclib.

karen henson and nancy zavac
University of Miami

The Donald Pippin Collection at Stanford University Music Library. Since 1952 Donald Pippin has been a part of the musical life of San Francisco. He is best known as the founder of Pocket Opera, which started in 1977 with the purpose of making opera more accessible to the average concertgoer by presenting opera in unique English language translations with a small chamber ensemble. The Donald Pippin Collection consists primarily of Pippin’s English translations of opera librettos available as PDF files. Additional materials include facsimiles of over 300 print media reviews of Pocket Opera productions; copies of two anthologies published by Pippin: A Pocketful of Lyrics, and As the Lights Go Up: Tales from the Opera; a speech on Offenbach given by Pippin in San Francisco in 1996; a tribute ode by Anne Dudley on the occasion of Pippin’s sixtieth birthday; and finally an interview with Pippin published in Journal français d’Amérique in 1996. The finding aid is available at: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c89p3311/.

Ray Heigemeir
Stanford University Music Library

Meredith Willson Music Collection available at The Juilliard School. Composer of world-famous musical, The Music Man, as well as innumerable hit songs such as “It’s Beginning to Look at Lot Like Christmas,” and “Till There Was You,” Meredith Willson (1902–1984) began his musical studies at the Institute of Musical Art, Juilliard’s predecessor institution, as a flute student of Georges Barrère in 1919. He was a flutist in the John Philip Sousa band from 1921 to 1923, and also played with the New York Philharmonic.

Willson’s widow, Rosemary Willson, enhanced her husband’s connection to his alma mater through her extraordinary generosity. In 1990, Juilliard’s first-ever residence hall was named the Meredith Willson Residence Hall in his honor. And in 2009, the school’s new black-box theater was named the Rosemary and Meredith Willson Theater. Mrs. Willson passed away on 25 January 2010. Continuing this legacy, the Meredith and Rosemary Willson Charitable Foundation has entrusted Juilliard with the care and preservation of all of Meredith Willson’s music manuscripts. Digital images of the collection have been added to a password-protected page of the Juilliard Manuscript Collection Web site: www.juilliardmanuscriptcollection.org, with links to bibliographic information in JUILCAT, the library online catalog. Other repositories with materials relating to Meredith Willson and his legacy are The Michael Feinstein Great American Songbook Archives & Gallery in Carmel, Indiana, and the Meredith Willson Museum in Mason City, Iowa.

Jane Gottlieb
The Juilliard School

And, anniversary essay alert! We continue our series of composer anniversary essays in this issue with Christoph Wolff ’s article “C. P. E. Bach and the History of Music,” just in time for the conclusion of the composer’s 2014 birthday year. We have also marked his 300^th birthday in the June 2014 issue, with Daniel Boomhower’s article on...