Notes for Notes

Kostas Ostrauskas (1926-2012). Few readers of Notes will know the name of Kostas Ostrauskas. Few, I suspect, would have known him during the twenty-five years he served as music librarian at the University of Pennsylvania from 1958 until 1982. He did not attend MLA meetings or participate in professional activities outside the library or write articles about librarianship. Instead he wrote avant-garde plays in his native Lithuanian, plays that could not be published or performed in the Soviet Union and had a very limited readership in this country. Yet he kept on writing. Since Lithuania regained its independence in 1990 he has been widely recognized as one of the major figures in postwar Lithuanian drama.

As a young man Kostas studied to be a singer, but after leaving Lithuania in 1944 to escape the advancing Soviet army, he turned to literature. Emigrating to the United States in 1949, he received a Ph.D. in Slavic and Baltic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1958. As music librarian, he was a dedicated and discerning selector, systematically perusing the reviews and lists of recent publications in every music journal in search of potential purchases, and choosing titles solely on the basis of scholarly importance, regardless of language. It is to him above all that Penn's music collection owes its remarkable consistency and strength. When I arrived as his successor in 1982, I found numerous slips in the card catalog for orders placed up to the previous day, not because Kostas was reluctant to relinquish control but because he wanted to ensure the integrity of the collection. Until just before his death on 9 January at the age of eighty-five, long after retirement, he was still selecting titles in Lithuanian for the Penn libraries. Surely one of the most extraordinary members of our profession, Kostas Ostrauskas was also one of its unsung heroes.

John H. Roberts

The Sibley Music Library (Eastman School of Music) is now receiving the papers of the late Rolande Falcinelli (1920-2006), French organist, composer, and pedagogue. Madame Falcinelli's papers are the gift of her daughter, musicologist Dr. Sylviane Falcinelli, whose generous consideration of the gift followed the Eastman School-hosted premiere performance in March 2011 of Rolande Falcinelli's composition for organ and orchestra, Mausolée "à la gloire de Marcel Dupré," opus 47. Altogether, the Rolande Falcinelli Archive, residing within the library's Ruth T. Watanabe Special Collections Department, will be comprised of manuscripts of original compositions, including works for organ, for vocal and choral forces, and for piano, as well as orchestrations of other composers' works and transcriptions of works by J. S. Bach; professional correspondence; and pedagogical works and other writings. Of special interest are those documents reflecting Mme Falcinelli's tutelage under, and lasting professional association with, organist-composer Marcel Dupré, including several original manuscripts given by Dupré to Mme Falcinelli. As of March 2012 the Library has received three installments of the archive, with one final installment, comprising the bulk of the archive, yet pending. Completion of processing is anticipated in the winter of 2012-13.

David Peter Coppen
Eastman School of Music

The Princeton University Library is presently cataloging a large, recently acquired collection of over 500 rare music items published in Cuba after 1959 that includes around 470 scores (mostly sheet music) and 60 monographs on Cuban and Latin American music. As of late March 2012, individual bibliographic records for approximately half of the publications appear in the library catalog (http://catalog.princeton.edu) with the searchable collection description "Cuban post-revolutionary music imprints." The entire collection should be bibliographically accessible before the end of 2012.

Darwin Scott
Arthur Mendel Music Library Princeton University

From the Editor: More Anniversary Keepers. This issue continues the tradition of publishing bibliographic tributes to composers in their anniversary years with Deborah Campana's essay on John Cage, "Happy New Ears! In Celebration of 100 Years: The State of Research on John Cage," which fittingly appears in time for what would have been his hundredth birthday on 5 September. Please add Campana's Cage essay...