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Agenda
9:30 Welcome
9:45 Difficulties in Jewish Music Sound Recordings Collections / Judy Pinnolis, Associate Director, Instruction and Engagement at Berklee
10:30 am Reviving the Romantic Era through Historical Sound Recordings / Mark Bailey, Head of Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University
11:30 Discussion of by-law changes
Video
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Committee meetings via break-out rooms
– no recordings
1:30 Sonia Archer, UNC Greensboro, Chair of MLA Committee Management Team
A New Process for Getting Involved in MLA’s Committees and Subcommittees
2:00 AI Can Change Your Life (Can’t It?): Creating Rudimentary Sheet Music Finding Aids with ChatGPT / Andrea Cawelti, Ward Music Cataloger, Houghton Library, Harvard University
3:00 Listening Party: Come with ideas for spooky and scary music!
Video
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Presentations
Difficulties in Jewish Music Sound Recordings Collections
Judy Pinnolis, Associate Director, Instruction and Engagement, Berklee
Many libraries are looking for more diversity in their collections. Yet one cultural group’s music that remains difficult to identify and collect sound recordings for, is Jewish music. The music of this cultural group is not taught often in music schools– is most often not included in Western music history courses and is frequently omitted in ethnomusicology studies. Yet it consists of a large and varied repertoire within the context of co-territorial histories that date back centuries. Jewish music and its music theory is largely unknown as it does not fit neatly into Western canon, Ethnomusicology, or general curriculum whether for secular or sacred music. Many terms that could be used to describe the music are not part of LC. Additionally, it is often hard for librarians to identify or determine what exactly is Jewish music and know which are the important performances to collect. This talk will present some of the difficulties surrounding Jewish music as part of cultural inclusion by focusing on some of the larger collections in the United States.
Video | Slides
Judith S. Pinnolis is Associate Director, Instruction and Engagement at Berklee. Previously she was a Humanities Librarian at Brandeis for 22 years. In addition to NEMLA, Judy was Chapter President of ACRL/NEC, Chapters Chair of ACRL, served as web editor of MLA and headed the MLA Jewish Music Roundtable for 13 years. She currently serves as reviews editor of Western States Jewish History, and serves on the Klezmer Institute Archive Advisory Board. She recently spearheaded the founding, with Cantor Matt Austerklein and Cantor Joe Gole, the Cantorial and Synagogue Music Archive, and previously taught Jewish musicology at Hebrew College for 11 years. Recent publications include a chapter on “Jewish Music Sound Recording Collections in the US” in the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies and the forthcoming historical introductory essay for the 50th anniversary edition of the music of Kol B’Seder Anthology (Forthcoming Nov 2024). She is working with the Milken Archive of Jewish Music in CA on an exhibit celebrating 50 years of official ordination of women in the cantorate (sacred singers). Her newest project will be an invited presentation at the European Cantors Association Convention in Budapest in December 2024 on the topic of women as cantors.
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Reviving the Romantic-Era Through Historical Sound Recordings
Mark Bailey, Head of Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University
Performers, scholars, and students within the field of music are increasingly drawing their attention to the styles of performance that prevailed during the romantic era but have largely fallen out of practice. This concern and focus stems from the realization that romantic music in the modernist era is taught and performed slightly or even significantly differently than it was in its time, which has impact on musical understanding and interpretation. While some of the differences have to do with the instruments that were in use in the 19th century and their evolution into their modern counterparts, the majority of considerations spotlight the now unique – but then commonplace – stylistic manner in which all varieties of romantic-era music were performed by artists who trained, taught, and concertized during that age.
Written materials of the time, including method books, letters, and newspaper reviews, shed light on important areas of romantic-era performance practice, but actually hearing the sounds generated from that era on early sound recordings is of obvious crucial relevance. Thousands of recordings, cylinders and flat discs alike, from the acoustical and electrical periods reveal a fascinating array of stylistic realities. Through rediscovery, these recordings open the ears and minds of musicians today to such possibilities that, after all, were inherent to the world in which the music was created and performed. Early recordings, for instance, reveal the many ways in which tempo flexibility or rubato served a particular work; how portamento – or slides between notes – added to the expressive imperative of the music; the frequency of right and left hand un-alignment in piano playing; and much more that is de-emphasized or generally in disuse today.
This talk, therefore, will describe the profound impact early recordings are having on romantic-era performance practice rediscovery in music scholarship and training and will feature several audio selections from the Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings to serve as examples.
Video | Slides
Mark Bailey is the head of the Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings at Yale University. The archive consists of over 280,000 recordings in a variety of historical and modern formats that focus on the early to mid-20th century, especially romantic-era performance practice. Mr. Bailey, a professional conductor as well, is also the artistic director of The American Baroque Orchestra and is professor of choral conducting at the Mahanaim school. He conducts prominent ensembles regularly and gives numerous presentations on historical performance style and expression, especially as heard on early recordings, both in the United States and abroad.. He also co-administers the Facebook group, “Celebrating Romantic-Era Performance Practice,” which serves not only as a scholarly resource, but a chance for musicians from around the world to connect, discuss, and share resources related to 19th and early 20th century performance practice. Mr. Bailey is a graduate of the Eastman and Yale schools of music.
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MLA Committee Management Team
Sonia Archer Capuzzo, Clinical Associate Professor of Library and Information Science, University of North Carolina Greensboro, Chair of MLA Committee Management Team
The MLA Committee Management Team has been revamping the process for showing interest in joining and chairing MLA’s committees and subcommittees. The goal is to make the process easier, more transparent, and more equitable. The new process will kick off this fall. This presentation by Sonia Archer-Capuzzo, Chair of the CMT, will introduce you to that process and provide a chance for you to ask questions.
Video | Slides | FAQs
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AI Can Change Your Life (Can’t It?): Creating Rudimentary Sheet Music Finding Aids with ChatGPT
Andrea Cawelti, Ward Music Cataloger, Houghton Library, Harvard University
ChatGPT4 can now optically read scans, and assess metadata for cataloging in a rudimentary way in order to create 505 contents notes and simple finding aids for sheet music. Andrea will give a brief overview of Houghton’s progress in this area, and lead a discussion of the larger question: can we live with incomplete data, if the alternative is no data at all? Where do we say, the line must be drawn here?
Video | Slides
Ward Music Cataloger at Houghton Library, Harvard University, Andrea Cawelti is a graduate of Oberlin College and Conservatory (Greenwood Conservatory Prize), The Juilliard School, and Drexel University (MSLIS). She began her career as an operatic mezzo-soprano, she is a Metropolitan Opera Council Award winner, and has sung with the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Opera, and the Columbus Symphony, among others.
An abiding interest in the history of musicians led her to the New York Public Library Music Division in 1985. During her ten-year tenure there, she processed copious music-related archival collections and managed their work-study program.
Cawelti moved to Chicago in 1995, retiring from the operatic stage to become an archivist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where she processed and cataloged the Theodore Thomas Music Library. When the Symphony Archives were reduced in 2002, she became the Ward cataloger for the Loeb Music Library at Harvard University. This position moved to the Houghton Library in 2006, where she remains at this time.
She has presented at MLA on bound volumes of sheet music, at MOUG on the same, and on using Ancestry to research 19th-century African-American performers and composers, at NEMLA on various sheet music topics, and on Rudolph Ackermann’s music reviews in The Repository of the Arts.