Notes for Notes

The University of Maryland’s Special Collections in Performing Arts (SCPA) has recently acquired dozens of scores and recordings of the band compositions that have won the American Bandmasters Association’s (ABA) annual Sousa/Ostwald Award. The collection now includes a full score and at least one recording of every winning composition since the first award was given in 1956, including several standards of the concert band repertoire as well as many unpublished and infrequently performed works. To help users learn more about the Sousa/Ostwald Award collection, SCPA has created an online guide about the history of the award, available at http://lib.guides.umd.edu/ostwald. Visitors to the guide can find a short biography and photo of each winning composer, listen to sound clips, and identify recordings in SCPA’s collection. All scores are located in the ABA Official Records collection at SCPA. For more information, please visit: www.lib.umd.edu/scpa.

Matthew Testa
University of Maryland

The State University of New York at Buffalo (UB) Music Library is now able to provide online access to the lecture presented by John Cage on 5 June 1976 at the first June in Buffalo festival. The lecture followed a performance of Cage’s Song Books the previous night by Julius Eastman and the S.E.M. Ensemble. The entire performance, but in particular Eastman’s choice of materials and actions, caused Cage a great deal of anxiety and anger. He used the lecture as an opportunity to address questions concerning what is permissible in performances of his music. The lecture has been noted in several texts, so we are very pleased to be able to make it available to a wider audience with permission from the John Cage Trust provided by Laura Kuhn. The audio portion of the lecture and a full transcription are available online at http://libweb1.lib.buffalo.edu:8080/xtf/audio/ubmu0030_03.html.

The UB Music Library would also like to announce the availability of a newly expanded description of the Yvar Mikhashoff Collection of Annotated Scores, 1828–1993: http://purl.org/net/findingaids/view?docId=ead/music/ubmu0001_7.xml. The collection contains approximately 1,200 scores, chiefly for solo piano but also including other vocal and instrumental combinations. Although more than half the collection consists of photocopied scores, many of those original works are fairly rare. There are more than 550 manuscripts and holographs (original and photocopy); many scores bear only incidental markings but others include extensive markings. Mikhashoff sometimes renotated passages and entire works—often to make them more legible—or in the case of Lukas Foss’s Solo for Piano and Virgil Thomson’s Nineteen Portraits for Piano, his versions were used for publication.

Materials were grouped by Mikhashoff reflecting his research interests and his thematic programming, including (1) folders of material related to Lukas Foss’s composition of Solo for Piano for Mikhashoff with different states of the composition, (2) his research into and analysis of Charles Ives’s Second Piano Sonata (Concord Sonata), (3) a reproduction of the holograph score for Sylvano Bussotti’s Racine, pianobar pour Phèdre (Mikhashoff performed the role of Monsieur Fred in the premiere) with Mikhashoff’s emendations and portions of his adaptation of the piano solo, (4) a collection of works by Percy Grainger including lesser-known experimental works and pieces for theremin, and (5) Virgil Thomson’s series of musical portraits. Thematic programs include concerts titled The Golden Clavier, Hollywood Elegies, Miss Jane’s Parlor, Opera Matinee, and From Vienna to New York, as well as the series of works collected for the concerts he presented featuring works in the tradition of melodeclamation.

John Bewley
University of Buffalo Music Library, State University of New York

The Music OCLC User Group (MOUG) awarded the 2016 Ralph Papakhian Travel Grants to the following individuals:

Alyssa Hislop is project sound recording cataloger at the Archive of Recorded Sound at Stanford University, working on the player piano project. Prior to moving to California, Alyssa worked as a catalog librarian for audiovisual and overdrive materials at the Dayton Metro Library in Dayton, Ohio. She received her M...