It's no Topsy Turvy, D'Oyly Carte Prompt Books Digitised

D'OYLY CARTE PROMPT BOOKS -

GILBERT AND SULLIVAN OPERAS
VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM

THEATRE & PERFORMANCE COLLECTIONS

From Act I Prompt Book of the Pirates of Penzance available from the V&A Theatre Collection

The Victoria and Albert Museum's Theatre & Performance Department has digitised several of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company's original prompt books, which were used in the end of the 19th century at the Savoy Theatre in the productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

Some of the prompt books digitised include The Mikado, Princess Ida and the Pirates of Penzance which all date from the 1880s. It will undoubtedly serve as a useful tool for those researching musical theatre of London in the late 19th century.

One could speculate that Mike Leigh, the director of the movie Topsy Turvy or a member of his production staff, might have consulted these very prompt books to give an air of authenticity to their movie.

"Three Little Maids" Trio from The Mikado available from the V&A Theatre Collection

To see the full range and download a copy visit the V&A site: http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/theatre_performance/objects_theatre_performance/doyly_carte/index.html

Digitised Mendlessohn (Breitkopf & Härtel Edition) works on line!

Opening bars of Felix Mendelssohn's Overture to the Hebrides (op. 26) © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0002/bsb00026504/images/index.html?seite=3

The Munich Digitisation Centre in cooperation with the music department of the Bavarian State Library has added the first edition of the works of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy to its digital collections on the occasion of Mendelssohn’s 200th birthday on February 03, 2009. Our collection of historical editions of the work of famous composers is being continued after a Händel- and a Liszt-edition with Mendelssohn’s work as edited by Breitkopf & Härtel in 157 volumes.

This edition is divided into 19 series (work groups) and was compiled by the musician and friend of Mendelssohn Julius Rietz (1812-1877) during 1874-1877. It includes around 5900 pages and contains all known works of Mendelssohn at that time. Some early works and alternative versions have only been discovered decades later and are not contained in Rietz’ edition. Nevertheless, the work of this great German composer is represented here in its vast spectrum, including the symphonic work, the chamber music, oratories, operas, music for spectacles, sacred music, and Lieder.

The digitised Mendelssohn-edition can also be found on the ViFaMusik web pages (www.vifamusik.de) where a lot of sheet music and books on music from the music department of the Bavarian State Library are presented.

Link to the Mendelssohn-edition:
http://www.muenchener-digitalisierungszentrum.de/index.html?c=kurzauswahl&adr=mdz1.bib-bvb.de/~db/ausgaben/uni_ausgabe.html?projekt=1216809160

Link to the digitisations within the ViFaMusik:
http://mdzx.bib-bvb.de/vifamusik_e/index.php?pcontent=digitalisierungen

Jürgen Diet
Bavarian State Library
Digital Library Department
Ludwigstr. 16
D-80539 München
Germany
Tel. ++49-89-28638-2768
Fax ++49-89-28638-2672
email: juergen.diet [at] bsb-muenchen.de

Elliott Carter at 100

The iconoclast of American music, Elliott Carter recently turned 100. The celebration of his centenary has been marked with various interviews, performances and other online exhibitions.

One interview was conducted on the NPR radio programme "All Things Considered:" http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98081089 (8:20)

Elliott Carter discussing his new piece, Caténaires, for pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the Ensemble Contemporaine (26 October interview from New York): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp95zFUPEj0&feature=related (9:58)



He was also interviewed on NPR (National Public Radio, US) on the Charlie Rose Show (PBS) alongside pianist/conductors James Levine and Daniel Barenboim. The Youtube clip is an excerpt from the interview and contains Barenboim's recollections of his late friend, Edward Said, and his reminiscenses on the 'late style.'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiDd4JVN9Vo  Alternatively, one can watch the entire interview at http://www.charlierose.com/

Other recent interviews include one with Frank Oteri (American Music Center - New Music Box) from mid-2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzs8Ov2p-Rc (5:08)



Also in celebration of Carter's 100th birthday, the Library of Congress has digitised the manuscript sketches of his Sonata for Cello and Piano and the String Quartet no. 1. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.200155900/default.html Lastly, they have put up a digitised version of The Musical Languages of Elliott Carter (1984) by Charles Rosen which operates in a manner similar to the British Library 'Turning the Page'.

A detail from p. 68 of the manuscript sketches of Carter's Cello Sonata from the Library of Congress.

Thanks to the Library of Congress for digitising these invaluable sketches and Happy Birthday to Mr Carter, may your next century be as prolific as your first!

Wrapping up IAML with a German portal

Only a half-intended pun to the post title. No, this is not a new Christo installation, but one of several sculptures in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli which were temporarily wrapped whilst enabling works are being undertaken.

A detail of one of the many frescoes of Pompeii which survived the fires of Vesuvius and now reside in the Museo. One funny anecdote to share was that the museum guards did not want any flash photography (which I can understand) due to conservation reasons. Ironically, there were several museum pieces which had Pulisci mi (clean me) scrawled in the layers of dust which musn't be too good for the longevity and upkeep.

Before leaving for Naples, I actually stumbled across a new musicology portal called
ViFaMusik. Little did I know that there would be a poster session by Jürgen Diet on this important resource at the conference. ViFaMusik stands for Virtuellen Fachbibliothek Musikwissenschaft (Virtual Library of Musicology.)

Front page of http://www.vifamusik.de/

The main portal has an English and German interface but links to other portals and referential databases may be in German only. Some of the highlights include a useful aggregate of music e-journals. Many institutions have brought journals freely available across the web and imported the relevant metadata from places like the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) http://www.doaj.org) into their catalogues. Other approaches have opted to include the information in lists such as the Golden Pages of Royal Holloway(http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Music/Golden-pages/journals.html).

The Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek (EZB) follows this latter approach but with a slightly more refined interface. They have an easily identifiable visual icon (a red/green light traffic) to indicate which are freely available across the web or if it is a licensed resource requiring a subscription. The Golden Pages' list of journals do contain access information but one has to sift through an exorbitant amount of text line by line and would benefit from this type of approach.

Example of the EZB on display.

Another key feature of ViFa Musik is the Bibliographie des Musikschrifttums (BMS) which is a German RILM that provides bibliographic data covering music publications from 1986 to present on everything from journal articles and festschrifts to conference proceedings and monographs. They are now working backwards into the earlier half of the 20th century. To complement research in the early 20th and 19th century there is always the Hofmeister XIX (http://www.hofmeister.rhul.ac.uk/cocoon/hofmeister/index.html) which is a searchable interface of the Hofmeister Monatsberichte for the period between 1829-1900. Down the road, I will blog on about this particular resource.

Example of the BMS interface

Another key feature of the website is the portal of databases. The Online-Datenbanken im Datenbank-Infosystem which is similar to the Golden Pages in that it organises resources according to music disciplines but doesn't have the visual stoplight like the EZB. However, it does have a pretty clean look where one distinguishes between frei im Web (freely available) and lizenzpflichtig (requires license).

An example of the DBIS interface

There are almost 140 musicological databases in the interface which is maintained by the 'musicological section of the DBIS (Databases Information System), a cooperative service for the use of scholar databases offered by the University Library of Regensburg.'

Lastly, but with just as much significance, what portal would be complete without a section for digitisation projects being undertaken. (http://www.vifamusik.de/index.php?pcontent=digitalisierungen) Initiatives are underway to digitise the critical editions of Franz Liszt (Carl Alexander) and Georg Friedrich Händel (Chrysander's 1858-1902 edition) and the periodical, Zeitschrift für Instrumentenbau. Below you can see an example of the score of the opening bars of Liszt's symphonic poem Prometheus:

As you can see the portal is filled with lots of interesting features. If you want to follow future contributions to the database, there is an RSS feed available. Once you subscribe you will be able to see what new sheet music digitisations are being converted by the Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek. If RSS subscription is still a little mysterious, I will be blogging quite shortly about its features and how to get the most out of it!

Back from IAML08

(Panoramic view of Naples in the shadow of Mt Vesuvius taken from the Castello Sant'Elmo high above the city.)

After spending some weeks in Italy, I'm finally back at work. It wasn't all r&r having attended the IAML08 Conference which was held in Naples, Italy this year. (IAML stands for the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres.) Kudos to the conference's organising committee and the host Italian branch (Complimenti e mille grazie!) who pulled off one terrific conference full of interesting presentations!

The keynote speaker, Dr Luciano Scala (Regional Director for Cultural and Landscape Heritage of Campania) delivered (in Italian with Powerpoint slides in English) an amazing speech on Italian efforts to document their cultural heritage. Their efforts resulted in the digitisation of over 9.2 million music manuscripts, scores and other ephemeral objects. (http://www.internetculturale.it/)

The interface operates in trilingual versions (English, French and Spanish). Here one can access (some for the very first time) manuscripts of Paisiello, Puccini and Verdi to name a few. Many can be downloaded albeit with reduced dpi. If needed for publication one can pay for high resolution. I can only imagine that researchers who did not want to have to travel all the way to tiny monasteries and dusty archives will be as struck as many of the conference delegates at what the Italians have truly achieved here!

One of the 9.2 million digital objects from the database. Here you can read in his own hand writing, Puccini sending a telegram the day after the premiere of the second revision of Madama Butterfly in Brescia describing what a 'complete triumph, 7 encores and being called up [to the stage] 30 times' (Biblioteca Statale di Lucca - ms. 3699/59)

The interface also serves as a union catalogue (SBN) amongst the institutions but I think there are some other e-resources (which I'll blog about later) that can do that and then some! There are digital cultural exhibitions (not just music) following on from physical exhibitions from various libraries and museums.

Certainly the Library of Congress, British Library and other national institutions have documented 'cultural memory' but this seems to stand out on its own. This is not to downplay the accomplishments of other institutions but their focus is towards an English-speaking world. It is refreshing to see an endeavour such as the one the Italians have built here operating in a pluralistic world. Certainly the musicological canon with its developments across the world at least begs us to think about it and take note.