Notes For Notes

The Irving S. Gilmore Music Library (GML) is pleased to announce the completion of a project to describe and provide open access to a collection of 732 Berliner Gramophone discs from its Historical Sound Recordings (HSR) Collection. In the late nineteenth century, Emil Berliner (1851–1929) developed the gramophone, which employed flat disc instead of cylinder based recording technology. Cylinders and discs co-existed for a few years, but eventually Berliner's discs won out and became the dominant technology. The discs in this collection, produced between 1887–1912, represent some of the very first published disc recordings, and offer a unique insight into the earliest years of music and spoken word recording. Access to the collection is available through Archives at Yale http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/music.mss.0142 (click on the images of each disc in the finding aid to access them).

Availability of this important collection was made possible thanks to a grant to Yale University Library from the Arcadia Fund to support open access initiatives. This fund enabled GML to further develop its new audiovisual access platform, Aviary https://yalemusiclib.aviaryplatform.com. GML has now added over two thousand recordings to Aviary, providing streaming access to important collections from HSR and the Oral History of American Music (OHAM). Details of other collections now available to stream, can be found in this news post from September 2019 https://web.library.yale.edu/news/2019/09/av-special-collections-now-available-online. Anyone interested in GML's implementation of Aviary can check out this Twitter thread https://twitter.com/jonmanton/status/1158774441129730048.

GML will also shortly implement the results of some metadata enhancement work done on the Berliner Gramophone Disc Collection, following completion of a recent project to transcribe the labels on these discs using Zooniverse (https://www.zooniverse.org), to provide more accurate and detailed metadata to supplement the existing legacy data currently included in the finding aid.

Jonathan Manton
Yale University

A new collaboration between the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra and the UCLA Music Library, part of the UCLA Library system, will empower living composers by making their work more accessible and reducing barriers for applicants to Kaleidoscope's 2020 Call for Scores. Selected composers will have work performed on Kaleidoscope's 2020–2021 season, including performances at UCLA. "In the past five years Kaleidoscope has performed over 100 new works and seen an incredible interest in our annual Call for Scores, receiving over 2200 new works from composers in 90 countries in 2019 alone," said Benjamin Mitchell, Kaleidoscope's founder and president.

The collaboration allows applicants to elect to have the UCLA Library publish their submitted compositions open access for future performance and study in conjunction with OpenUCLA, a Centennial Celebration initiative created to help remove barriers to research and scholarship. Matthew Vest, UCLA music librarian, said "One of the exciting things about our collaboration is that unlike many traditional publishing agreements, composers will keep full copyright, have better control of performances and royalties, and have their work made accessible in an unprecedented way." Those looking for new works by living composers may view the open access published scores online from anywhere in the world. Composers with already published works or who prefer not to participate in open access publishing will still be eligible to apply and be considered for Kaleidoscope's 2020–2021 season. The Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores (solo, chamber, and orchestral works of any length and instrumentation) opened for applications in February. Composers may submit up to three works written in the past ten years.

Matthew Vest
UCLA

In celebration of Jenny Lind's bicentennial, Stanford Libraries is pleased to make available to the public the manuscript scores and letters contained in the Jenny Lind Collection, one of the largest extant collections of primary source materials once belonging to Lind. Comprising both manuscripts and print publications, the Lind Collection was assembled by her husband, composer and conductor Otto Goldschmidt (1829–1907). Upon his death it passed down through family members to Mrs. Frank Ward, a great granddaughter, and was...