The Winter Quarter exhibit in the Music Library features six string quartet scores. Two are fairly traditional examples (Boccherini and Mozart), and four are contemporary scores, notable for the imaginative treatments they provide (Crumb, Ferneyhough, Brown, and Stockhausen). QR codes link to audio files for each work.
The Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound has recently finished processing the William C. Lynch Dennis Brain Collection. This collection is believed to be the largest of its kind in North America, if not the most comprehensive and organized collection of recorded music relating to the British horn player Dennis Brain (1921-1957), anywhere in the world. A full itemized finding aid for the collection is now available online.
Stanford students, faculty and staff may enjoy free audio streams of a wide variety of holiday music, provided by our streaming media databases. Sample our recommendations, below. If you are off campus, you'll want to set up your browser for Stanford access. Happy holidays!
The Tom Law San Francisco Bay Area Punk and Rock Handbill and Poster Collection was recently acquired and is housed in Special Collections, Green Library. It contains approximately 1400 original posters of Punk Rock Band performances in the San Francisco Bay area.
The Archive of Recorded Sound recently held its first ever listening party on October 17th. We were thrilled to welcome over 40 attendees to the event here at the Archive, who were invited to flick through multiple boxes of duplicate 78rpm records, dating from approximately 1900-1940, to select those they would like to hear played on our 1925 Victrola Credenza, just one example from our magnificent phonograph collection here at the Archive which dates from 1904-1930. More details about this collection, including images and demonstration videos, are now available on our website.
Ahead of their 50th anniversary show this Saturday (October 26th) at the Bing Concert Hall, I am very pleased to announce the successful recent completion of a 6 month project aimed at archiving and digitally preserving the Stanford Mendicants' complete recorded output between 1964-2012.
The Stanford Media Preservation Lab (SMPL) has many partnerships on campus and the recent move provided a great opportunity to spend some time working in the audio room of one of those partners, the Archive of Recorded Sound (ARS). Several recordings were digitized and documented while there. Two projects completed of interest are the digitization of several recordings made by the a cappella group the Stanford Mendicants and the transfer of cassette tapes from the book and audio set: Photochemistry of Organic Molecules (POM) held by the Media & Microtext Center.
Wagner in his century
2013 marks the 200th birthday of musical giant Richard Wagner. In commemoration, the Music Library offers on display a selection of 19th century items related to Wagner, including an 1860 edition of the overture to Rienzi, his first successful opera; the sheet music for “Les deux grenadiers” (1843), an early song Wagner published in the hope of making a name for himself in Paris (he failed); the dedication page for the score of the Ring cycle (1875), which salutes Wagner’s champion King Ludwig II of Bavaria; and Richard Wagner's Lohengrin und Tannhäuser (1852), by Franz Liszt, commentaries on Wagner’s “système dramatique”, his approach to composition in which the interplay of words and music supports a deeper quality of expression in service to the drama. Through December .
