Monday, October 17, 2011

Music Publishers Association Exhibit

The Music Library is proud to announce the arrival of prizewinning music from the Music Publishers Association. Each year, the MPA's Paul Revere Awards for Graphic Excellence honor the year's best published sheet music and books about music. This exhibit travels around the country, and has already been featured at Old Dominion University. For two weeks only, October 10 to October 31, 2011, select first prize recipients will be on display in the upstairs exhibit case.


The Paul Revere Awards honor outstanding achievement in cover design, book design, publications for electronic distribution, and notesetting. There are further subdivisions of these categories, with awards for specific types of cover design (e.g. featuring graphic elements or featuring photography) and notesetting, featuring different instruments or orchestrations. So check out our exhibit upstairs to see diverse prizewinning music from John Corigliano, Richard Danielpour, Pablo Casals, and Children of Bodom. You can check out the complete list of winners here: http://www.mpa.org/paul_revere_awards/index.php?Year=2011

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Franz Liszt Bicentennial

October 22, 2011 will be the 200th anniversary of the birth of Hungarian pianist, composer, arranger, and conductor Franz Liszt (1811-1886). To celebrate his birthday, the Music Library has mounted an exhibit featuring materials from our special collections. On the second floor of the Music Library, you can see early editions of Liszt's compositions and arrangements, as well as a 19th-Century biography and an "artistic portrait" that imagines his daily life.

Additionally, there is a mini-exhibit of a recently-published graphic novel, Late Romantics, that features Lizst in historical fiction, along with vignettes about Saint-Saƫns, Wagner, Berlioz, and Mussorgsky. Late Romantics was written and illustrated by Jack Phinney, Latham Luepke, and Ryan Duderstadt, who comprise Bearskunk Productions in Minneapolis. You can read the whole graphic novel here: http://bearskunk.com/comics/late-romantics/cover/.

Finally, the Library of Congress is celebrating Liszt's 200th birthday in a big way. Check out their Liszt site to look at some of his music manuscripts and listen to performances of his works in the National Jukebox: http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.200187413/default.html.