Notes for Notes

Stanford University Libraries and the Monterey Jazz Festival have announced the completion of a three-year project to digitally preserve the recordings documenting the history of the festival. The culmination of the project is the Web site, The Monterey Jazz Festival Collection at Stanford University ( http://collections.stanford.edu/mjf [accessed 19 August 2009]), offering unprecedented access to detailed information on the archive recordings spanning the full history of the festival many of which have not been heard since their first performance. The centerpiece of the Web site is a database documenting nearly 9,000 jazz pieces, interviews, and other events representing over 1,000 hours of audio and video recordings. For the first time, jazz researchers and enthusiasts alike can easily explore the multiplicity of jazz performers and styles that make up the collection that distinguishes the festival as an important American cultural institution—including Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock, Max Roach, Gerry Mulligan, and Thelonious Monk, and many more jazz legends.

Users can experience highlights of the collection offering a selection of streamed audio and video clips, such as historic performances by Bobby McFerrin and Diane Reeves, interviews with Dave Brubeck and Dizzy Gillespie, works commissioned by the festival, and performances from the Blues in the Afternoon series. To view or hear the complete recordings, visitors are invited to the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound where the collection is housed. Further, a catalog of CDs or digital downloads are available for purchase from Monterey Jazz Festival Records ( http://www.concordmusicgroup.com/labels/Monterey-Jazz-Festival-Records/ [accessed 19 August 2009]). The label was established by the festival in its fiftieth anniversary year to issue recordings preserved in the project with Stanford.

The Monterey Jazz Festival, a nonprofit organization dedicated to perpetuating the performance of jazz, was founded in 1958, and became established as one of the foremost jazz festivals in the United States, and soon received international recognition. The Stanford University Archive of Recorded Sound is one of the largest collections of historical recordings in the United States with holdings of over 275,000 recordings. The Monterey Jazz Festival has donated all of its recordings to the Archive of Recorded Sound since 1984. The collection comprises over 1,200 sound recordings, 370 moving image materials, and paper-based records of the founding organization. The collection is an American treasure of unique and irreplaceable recordings of performances by the greatest jazz musicians.

This project was made possible with funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), Save America’s Treasures, and the GRAMMY Foundation, and was managed by Hannah Frost, media preservation librarian, with Jerry McBride, head librarian of the Music Library and Archive of Recorded Sound, and Tim Jackson, general manager of the Monterey Jazz Festival, as project directors.

The William and Gayle Cook Music Library of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music has received the Schlossberg Manuscript Collection. Donated by Naomi Freistadt, the granddaughter of well known trumpeter and pedagogue, Max Schlossberg, the collection consists of manuscripts and various editions of Schlossberg’s Daily Drills and Technical Studies, still one of the primary trumpet methods used throughout the world today. In the collection are ninety pages of handwritten exercises, mostly in pencil, sixty of which are signed by Schlossberg. In addition to these, there are thirty-seven photo prints of handwritten notation. These photo prints are consistent with the notational style of the other manuscript examples. The collection also includes five editions of printed music ranging from the 1930s to the 1970s. Included among the materials is the manuscript of the “Balay” etude that appears in the pre-1941 editions, but was removed from later editions.

The University of Virginia Library has received a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft–National Endowment for the Humanities program to develop a data model that will evolve the searching of digital representations of musical scores beyond simple metadata searching, and to provide a schema for a standardized, flexible format for representing musical notation which allows for the searching and manipulation of musical notation itself. Particularly exciting is the potential to encode...