Notes for Notes

The Music Library Association announced publication and research awards at its 2015 meeting in Denver, Colorado. The Vincent H. Duckles Award for the best book-length bibliography or other research tool in music was awarded to John Gray for his work, Baila! A Bibliographic Guide to Afro-Latin Dance Musics from Mambo to Salsa (African Diaspora Press). In his introduction to this exhaustive bibliography Gray observes that, unlike “more traditional disciplines … the corpus of materials relevant to black music studies cuts across a wide range of geographic, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, making the task of identifying and locating materials both difficult and time consuming.” Through its methodology, attention to detail, and organization, Gray has created an indispensable reference work for students of Afro-Latin dance music that has attained his goal for this incredible volume, specifically a research tool that facilitates the discovery of available materials for this important emerging field of research.

The Richard S. Hill Award for the best article on music librarianship or article of a music-bibliographic nature was awarded to Linda Fairtile for her article, “Verdi at 200: Recent Scholarship on the Composer and His Works,” Notes 70, no. 1 (September 2013): 9–36. Fairtile takes a selective look at recent trends and popular topics in Verdi scholarship from 2001, the 100th anniversary of Verdi’s death, through 2013, the bicentennial of Verdi’s birth. Her coverage includes conferences, biographies, correspondence, primary source materials, text and libretto studies, analyses, studies of individual operas, reception studies, and works about gender issues, performance issues, and Verdi’s literary sources, compositional process and revision, and dramatic themes. In addition to providing a beautifully written overview of recent Verdi scholarship, Fairtile cites earlier research, allowing the reader to easily access studies published through 2010. She closes with a discussion of future directions in Verdi scholarship. Selective as Fairtile’s overview may be, her article is nevertheless substantial in its coverage, and clearly demonstrates her deep subject knowledge. Fairtile’s contribution to understanding recent scholarship about Verdi and fruitful areas for future research is invaluable. The Eva Judd O’Meara Award for the best review published in Notes was awarded to David Hunter for his March 2013 review of Georg Friederic Händel Samson: Oratorio in Three Acts, HWV 57, ed. Hans Dieter Clausen (Hallische Händel-Ausgabe, Ser. I, Bd. 18 [Kassel; New York: Bärenreiter, 2011]). Hunter’s writing brings to the reader an informative review that offers a thoughtful and well-reasoned assessment of this new “urtext” edition. At the same time, he provides the reader with a look at the musical events that were surrounding Handel during the year 1741 as well as a look at Handel himself, not just the composer but the person and his circle. The review is rich with information and with a liberal helping of references to key resources about Handel. The reader comes away having learned a great deal more than just the assessment of the volumes at hand, thanks to Hunter’s deeply comprehensive subject knowledge and clear writing style.

Research Awards: The Carol June Bradley Award supporting historical research in music librarianship was given to two recipients: Gabriel Alfieri and Daniel Margolies. Gabriel Alfieri will explore how four major composers—Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles, Marc Blitzstein, and Leonard Bernstein—worked with various playwrights and directors to compose incidental music for their spoken theater productions. These musical works, typically unpublished and ignored, contributed to a vital period in the development of American drama, and also represent collaborations between major literary and musical figures (such as Orson Welles and Marc Blitzstein). Ms. Alfieri, who has additional funding from other sources, will be exploring relevant sources at a large number of libraries and archives in New York City, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Bloomington, IN, Madison, WI, Ann Arbor, MI, Stratford, CT, New Haven, CT, Washington, DC, Middletown, CT, and Boston. Daniel Margolies will focus on non-mariachi styles of Mexican American fiddling in south Texas in the twentieth century. His primary focus will be on the unexplored repertoires of fiddlers in and around San Antonio, with some attention also given to the larger traditions of the...