55th Annual Grammy Award Nominees

Every year, we try to screen the Grammy Award Nominees and pick who we think the winners might be.  This year I decided to make Spotify playlists of some of our relevant categories.  Anyone can use Spotify for free, just click on the links below!

Let us know what you think.  We will order the most loved/acclaimed albums for our collection. 

Any category without at least the majority of nominees available in Spotify was not included, and I have indicated which nominees were not included.
 
Best Improvised Jazz Solo (missing J. Mac by Kenny Garrett, from: Seeds From The Underground)
Best Jazz Vocal (missing Soul Shadows by Denise Donatelli & The Book Of Chet by Luciana Souza)
Best Jazz Instrumental (missing Seeds from the Underground)
Best Folk Album
Best World Music Album (missing On a Gentle Island Breeze and The Living Room Sessions Part 1)
Best Musical Theater Album (missing Follies and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess)
Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media (missing Rock of Ages)
Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media (missing Journey)
Best Orchestral Performance
Best Chamber Music/ Small Ensemble Performance (missing Profanes Et Sacrées)
Best Classical Instrumental Solo (missing András Schiff's WTC and Kim Kashkashian)
Best Classical Vocal Solo (missing Homecoming with Joyce DiDonato)
Best Classical Compendium
Best Contemporary Classical Composition (missing the Ugis Praulins and the Steven Stucky)

You can see all nominees at the website for the Grammy Awards.

A Music Education Major's iPad Use

Lately, quite a few music majors have been purchasing iPads.  I asked Sara Glogowski, a fourth-year student worker in the music library, to write about how she uses her iPad as a music education major.

As a student with very little spending money, I'm trying to make the most of my $600 third generation iPad.  Besides using the old standards, such as mail, calendar, facebook, and twitter, I like to store as much information as possible in my relatively light iPad.

As a trombone playing, music education major, many of the apps that have simplified my life are music related.  I have had the "iBone" app since I first got my free second gen iPod Touch with my MacBook way back in 2009.  This app is not only fun, but practical.  All of the slide positions are correct, and it's great for working on memorizing music when my chops are tired from sitting in seven hours of rehearsal that day. What else does a music major need but a way to find even more hours to practice?

I also have the ProTuner app, for those days when it's just too difficult to pull out my white Korg tuner from my trombone case while I'm practicing clarinet or violin.  Of course, I usually use this app more on my iPhone, which is what it was made for.  I also sometimes use Tuner+ for pitch finding purposes when SAI, the professional women's music fraternity which I am president of, needs a start up pitch on the go.  I also used this app a lot when I was taking String Methods and I didn't want to cheat by seeing if I was sharp or flat, but I just wanted to match a pitch given to me. Metronome is another handy app to have in the practice room when I'm practicing other instruments than my trombone, I can't afford having a metronome with each instrument that my degree requires me to practice, but I can carry this around on my iPad and iPhone.

However, these last two apps have been getting a lot less use since I added forScore to my iPad.  This music app only cost me five dollars at the App Store, and has already gotten me out of numerous sticky situations when I've forgotten my music at home.  Not only does forScore have the capability to store all of my solos that I'm working on for my trombone lessons into one small tablet, but it can also store numerous etude books into this one device.  So when I'm teaching my seventh grade trombone player how to slur cleanly, instead of carrying 10 etude books to the nearest classroom where I teach, I can just pull out my iPad, pull up any number of etude books, and scroll to the correct page in the matter of seconds.  While I still prefer the hard copy of music that I can touch with my fingers to this electronic version, it sure is nice to keep my music locker clear of books so that I can fit even more instruments inside.  As well as giving a place to display all of this music, forScore includes features such as a built in metronome, with both audio and visual capabilities, a pitch finder, and annotation devices including different colored pens, highlighters, stamps, and markers, all of which are completely erasable, unlike sharpies on my $50 out of print original score.  As a brass player, one of my favorite utilities is the built in piano.  I can now play out hard to hear intervals while still looking at the score without needing to find a practice room in our over populated music building.  Another aspect that forScore has to offer is the forStore, where you can buy scores and download them directly to your iPad.  However, I already own physical copies of all of my music I will need on my Senior Recital this fall, so I used GeniusScan, an app that convert any bad picture of text into a properly cropped, flattened, with crisp black and white contrast into an easy to read PDF.

I also use GeniusScan for my non-musical needs.  Whenever I have a professor who likes to bury me in a hundred handouts, I just scan the reading into my iPad instead of trying to keep track of a bunch of loose papers or carrying around bulky three ring binders.  I then use the pdf-notes app to store all  of these handouts by class.  I can color code the title page to easily see which ones I haven't read yet, as well as highlight and type on the document.

I learn best by typing up my notes, and the Google Drive app helps me to store all of my documents in an easily accessible place for free.  This way, I can not only type them up on a computer outside of class, but I can add to them inside of class on my iPad, as long as the professor is okay with technology, of course.

Overall, the trip to the practice room has been much lighter and much more fun since I invested in this pocket technology.

-Sara Glogowski, Senior Music Education Major

What apps do you use for the research and study of music?

Grove Opera Indexes Online

This is posted with permission from Lisa Philpott, Music Reference & Collections Librarian at the Music Library of The University of Western Ontario.  This was originally posted to the MLA-L Listserv. Links will work for Furman users only.


Grove Opera Indexes

Editor Stanley Sadie created these indexes for The New Grove Book of
Operas (Macmillan, 1996; revised as The Grove Book of Operas, Oxford
University Press, 2006). As he explained in the book’s preface, the
indexes were designed to help readers find the opera they were looking
for, however limited their points of reference:

"For the reader who wants to look up the Verdi opera whose name she or
he can’t quite remember, there is an index by composer. For the reader
who wants to look up the opera with Violetta in it, there is an index
of character names; and for one who wants to look up the opera with a
song called ʻAh fors’ è lui’ or a cabaletta ʻSempre libera degg’io,’
there is an index of aria titles."

These lists include links to all articles from this book, and will
eventually include all opera articles in Grove Music Online.

These are now available through our subscription by clicking on "Tools & Resources" once you are inside Grove Music Online.

Index of Opera Incipits

The index of opera incipits is a selective list of the first lines of
arias, ensembles, and other pieces from the repertory, each one
hyperlinked to the articles on the opera and composer from which it
came.

Index of Operas under Composers

The index of operas under composers lists all operas covered in The
Grove Book of Operas under the composers who wrote them, alphabetized
by composer.

Index of Opera Roles

The index of opera roles allows users to browse major opera roles from
A to Z with ease, and includes hyperlinks to the operas, composers,
and singers who created the roles.

Additions to Naxos Music Library

Furman is a subscriber to Naxos Music Library.  All Furman users (faculty, staff, and students) have access to this streaming music database, which now includes three more labels - Warner Classics, Teldec, and Erato.

These immense catalogs include many great performances which have become the standard for their repertoire, such as the Barenboim Mozart Operas and Bayreuth Wagner Ring Cycle, the Harnoncourt Beethoven Symphonies and the José Serebrier Glazunov Symphonies and Concertos. On July 2^nd, more than 1,000 albums from these catalogs will be available on the Naxos Music Library with the remaining albums in the catalogs and new releases appearing over the coming months. 

Dozens of legendary artists have called these labels home including Chanticleer, Chloë Hanslip, Nicolai Lugansky, Beaux Arts Trio, José Carreras, Sharon Kam, Kent Nagano, Cecilia Bartoli, Charlie Siem, Boston Camerata, John Eliot Gardiner and Mstislav Rostropovich among many others. Their performances are now available to subscribers of Naxos Music Library.

 

Naxos Music Library sets the industry standard in streaming classical music featuring  over 70,000 albums from 500 record labels, including BIS, Blue Note Records, Chandos, EMI Classics, Nettwerk Music Group, Sun Records, Virgin Classics, and many others. With more than 1,000,000 tracks of music and tools for music education, Naxos Music Library is available for institutional and professional subscriptions and is currently being enjoyed by over 1200 universities, performing arts organizations, and public libraries in the North America.

Since 2001, new recordings have been produced under the Warner Classics label as well as continuing the APEX budget reissue series which includes recordings from both the Teldec & Erato labels.

Teldec Classics was founded in Hamburg, Germany in 1950 as a co-operation between Telefunken and Decca Records. Over its long history the label has been home to many great artists and its catalog includes the pioneering early music label Das Alte Werk.The Erato Disques label was founded in Paris, France in 1953 by Philippe Loury, originally as Éditions Musicales Costallat, when there were very few long-playing Renaissance and Baroque music recordings to be found. This was the area in which Erato first made its mark and which subsequently established its fine and enduring reputation under the guidance of Michel Garcin. Over the years a rich catalogue has emerged across all Classical repertoire areas from many of the finest artists of the day. 

(The majority of this information comes directly from an e-mail from the vendor.)

Studying for Graduate Level Music History Exams

 It is that time of year!  If you are a senior applying to graduate programs in music, you are starting to hear about auditions, interviews, and entrance examinations for those universities.  The Maxwell Music Library has several resources that will help you in your preparation.
If you have more than a week, you should flip back through the texts of your textbook, but also take a look at what if fondly just known as "Grout."  This is the text most music schools traditionally use.  The music librarian just might have a copy of the 8th edition in her office that can also be borrowed.

• Grout, Donald Jay. A history of western music.
  Call #: ML160 .G872 2006

Two additional books are intended for a quicker overview of music history.  Please note that these have not been updated in ten years or more, but they are still a good tool for a review of the majority of the Western music history canon.

• Poultney, David. Studying Music History: Learning, Reasoning, and Writing about Music History and Literature. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.
  Call #: ML161.P8 1995
• Wold, Milo, Gary Martin, James Miller, and Edmund Cykler. An Outline History of Western Music, 9th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998.
  Call #: ML161.O97 1997

If these are checked out (and at the time of this posting, they were), DO NOT PANIC!  All these titles can be requested from PASCAL Delivers and will come in from other schools.

"The President's Own" Marine Band

Furman is preparing for a performance of "The President's Own" Marine Band on Friday, October 28.  I'm sorry to say that if you did not get tickets in the first five hours they were available, you might miss out on seeing them live this time around.

Do not despair!  The Maxwell Music Library has a display up featuring quotations about The United States Marine Band, physical recordings we have, and Furman users can also access a wealth of recordings of "The President's Own" Marine Band in Naxos Music Library.  Thanks to student worker Chase McAbee for putting the display together.

Resources:

• Naxos Music Library collection of The United States Marine Band (requires Furman username and password)
• The United States Marine Band website

Tributes to the Fallen - Music of 9/11

Come by and see our display about music inspired by the events around 9/11/01, expertly prepared by students Will H. and Chase M.

Included among the works are a handful that we have recordings for:

• As All the Heavens Were a Bell by Jay Bocook
• Memorial by René Clausen
• On the Transmigration of Souls by John Adams

This display was created in support of Furman's Interfaith Conversation,  From the Ground Up.