Notes for Notes

The Music and Performing Arts Library (MPAL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is pleased to announce that the approximately 800 microfilms that comprise the source corpus for the Hymn Tune Index are at long last being cataloged and added to MPAL's Special Collections due to a grant from the University Library's Robert and Kay Merrick Family Endowment Fund. The Hymn Tune Index, which exists in print and online formats (http://hymntune.library.illinois.edu/), is authored by Nicholas Temperley, professor emeritus at the School of Music. The index contains all hymn tunes with English-language texts printed anywhere in the world up to 1820. The microfilm collection, used by Temperley to create the index, had not been cataloged since its acquisition by the library in the 1980s. This project will increase discover-ability of the microfilms and will allow researchers to access the hymns being described in the catalog, most of which have not been digitized by the original holding libraries.

Kirstin (Dougan) Johnson
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Juilliard has completed work on its Grammy Museum funded project, "Digitizing Juilliard's history." The school received $15,112 from the Grammy Museum Foundation to preserve 483 recordings from its first decade of audio recordings, 1951 to 1959. All of these recordings are available at http://jmedia.juilliard.edu/digital/custom/grammy?_ga=2.65425002.53484, along with digital copies of the programs.

The tapes from Juilliard's first decade of audio recording were made during the tenure of its third and legendary president, the composer William Schuman, who served from 1945 to 1961. Schuman (winner of the first Pulitzer Prize in Music) significantly expanded Juilliard's mission with the establishment of its Dance Division, under the direction of Martha Hill, in 1951. Among the Dance Division's founding faculty members were Martha Graham, Antony Tudor, and José Limón. Schuman also established the Juilliard String Quartet as the school's quartet in residence. He fostered an active commissioning program for new works, many of which were premiered for the school's fiftieth anniversary celebration "Festival of American Music" in February 1956.

Among the notable performances preserved from the above festival are the performance of Schuman's own Violin Concerto with Isaac Stern as soloist, and the premiere of Juilliard's fiftieth anniversary commission of Aaron Copland's Piano Fantasy by William Masselos. Other performances preserved feature the Juilliard String Quartet in performances from its own first decade; performances by distinguished faculty members including pianist Rosina Lhevinne, cellist Leonard Rose, and singer Jennie Tourel; student performances by pianist Van Cliburn, singers Leontyne Price (in a performance of Verdi's Falstaff) and Shirley Verrett Carter; and a chamber music concert with faculty members Julius Baker (flute), Marcel Grandjany (harp), and Walter Trampler (viola) performing Debussy's Sonata for flute, viola, and harp.

Notable for this first decade of audio recordings was the capture of lectures presented at the school, including John Cage's "Unpredictability in Music," and "A Demonstration of the RCA Synthesizer."

Digitization work was done by George Blood LP; Web site development, metadata schema, project management, and cataloging was done by digital media librarian Eric Mortensen, with the assistance of librarians Ethan D'Ver, Alan Klein, and Brien Weiner, and archivists Jeni Dahmus Farah and Lee Anne Tuason.

Jane Gottlieb
The Juilliard School

The University of Maryland Libraries will digitize videos documenting the works of a celebrated Maryland dance company thanks to a $313,753 grant announced by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Founded in 1976, the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in Takoma Park, MD, gained international acclaim by producing more than 100 innovative dance or theater works and touring throughout the United States and abroad. The grant-funded project will digitize and make freely available online 1,329 videotape recordings of rehearsals and performances as well as 211 performance programs of this renowned local institution.

"NEH has been extremely generous to the University Libraries over the years by awarding grants critical to the growth of our digitization program," says Interim Dean of Libraries Babak Hamidzadeh. "We're grateful for their support...