Blog topic: Music

The Stanford University Libraries received a collection of documents and manuscripts from the conductor, pianist, composer, and music editor, Jacques-Louis Monod. He was born at Asnières-sur-Seine, France on 25 February 1927 and, as a child prodigy, began his education at the Paris Conservatory in 1935. He studied composition principally with René Leibowitz, who was a major influence on his work, and also with composers Olivier Messiaen, Bernard Wagenaar, Boris Blacher, and Josef Rufer.

Some of the significant acquisitions in music acquired last year are highlighted here. A more complete list may be found on the Music Library’s web page. We are grateful to our endowed fund donors whose contributions made most of these purchases possible.

Expositions and world fairs were responsible for creating a lot of popular music, as the collection recently added shows. The sheet music provides a fascinating view of these events, from the colorful cover art, to the stories and descriptions contained in the lyrics. The 1893 Chicago, 1904 St. Louis, and 1915 and 1939 San Francisco fairs are especially well represented. The collection includes more than 20 songs from the 1915 Panama-Pacific Fair held in San Francisco. Some of them are Romanoff Caviar, Meet Me in Frisco and We’ll Go to the Fair, That’s How They Spent Their Honeymoon, 1915 Rag, Frisco You’re a Bear. The earliest example in the collection is The Exhibition Quadrille, its cover shows a lithograph of the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.

Books, in no particular order:

Anton Webern : a research and information guide / Darin Hoskisson.

Popular music theory and analysis : a research and information guide / Thomas Robinson.

Thematisches Verzeichnis der Werke von Johann Joseph Fux (?1660-1741), (FuxWV) vol. 1

Olivier Messiaen : a research and information guide / Vincent P. Benitez (2nd ed.)