Notes for NOTES

The Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music (Kyle Smith, curator) in the Free Library of Philadelphia has acquired the performance library of The Women's Philharmonic. Founded in San Francisco in 1981, the Women's Philharmonic has been pivotal in the growing prominence of women composers and conductors in the U.S. Their concerts and recordings, prior to the disbanding of the orchestra in 2004, are counted as turning points in the careers of many women musicians. Included in the gift are scores and parts to works by Esther Williamson Ballou, Lili Boulanger, Teresa Carreño, Emma Lou Diemer, Jacqueline Fontyn, Fanny Mendelssohn, Maria Theresia von Paradis, Florence Price, Camilla de Rossi, and Ruth Crawford Seeger.

The Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in the Free Library of Philadelphia is the world's largest lending library of orchestral performance materials, with over 21,000 titles. It is a unique source for many rare and otherwise out-of-print works, with large holdings of American, Latin-American, Swedish, Russian, and Moravian titles, and has a long-standing commitment to promoting new, noteworthy, and little-known orchestral music. The collection is open Monday through Friday 9:00 am–5:00 pm, and can be reached by phone at (215) 686-5313, or by e-mail at fleisher@library.phila.gov.

The University of Pennsylvania Library (Richard Griscom, head, Otto E. Albrecht Music Library) is pleased to announce the completion of a project to preserve 532 tape recordings of Philadelphia Orchestra concerts broadcast on Philadelphia radio station WFLN-FM between February 1960 and April 1977. The original broadcast recordings were donated to the University Library by the Philadelphia Orchestra and WFLN in 1987, and the preservation project was funded in part by a $40,000 grant awarded in 2004 by the GRAMMY Foundation.

The collection documents eighteen seasons of the orchestra's programming, featuring standard repertory as well as less frequently performed works. Included in the recordings are a number of world-premiere performances of works by American composers Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, Samuel Barber, David Diamond, and Roy Harris.

As music director during this period, Eugene Ormandy appears most frequently as conductor, but the recordings also include programs conducted by Ormandy's predecessor, Leopold Stokowski, his successors, Riccardo Muti and Wolfgang Sawallisch, as well as Otto Klemperer, Georg Solti, Seiji Ozawa, Claudio Abbado, James Levine, and other noted guest conductors. Featured soloists include the foremost performers of the day and a number of Philadelphia Orchestra first-chair players. Many of the recordings include interviews with conductors and soloists that were originally broadcast as intermission features.

The original tape recordings have been transferred to archival compact discs, and the master copies are preserved in the library's off-site storage facility. Copies for use by researchers augment other primary sources, such as the personal papers of Eugene Ormandy, donated to the University of Pennsylvania Library by Ormandy's widow in 1987. Together with the marked scores in the Ormandy Collection, the recordings provide a body of primary source material of interest to researchers studying twentieth-century orchestral performance practice.

The collection is currently being cataloged on RLIN, the union catalog of the Research Libraries Group (RLG), and will be accessible as well through the Penn Library catalog. Upon completion of the cataloging in fall 2005, the recordings will be available for listening in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library in the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center at the University of Pennsylvania. For more information on the Rare Book and Manuscript Library and its holdings, visit the library's Web site at http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/, or contact Nancy Shawcross, curator of manuscripts.

The Mildred P. Allen Memorial Library, University of Hartford (Linda Solow Blotner, head), announces a gift of $75,000 from a gift annuity agreement established by Margaret Z. Larsen in 1995 in celebration of the 75th anniversary of The Hartt School. This gift creates the Larsen Fund at Hartt and will be used to increase holdings of Hartt's internal libraries as well as the Allen Memorial Library. Hartt's libraries include the Performance Library of orchestral and choral music...