Closure For Listening Center and Downstairs Music Library

The Listening Center is getting air conditioning! Installation begins Monday, August 31st. During this time the Listening Center and downstairs Music Library will be closed. If you need books or recordings from downstairs or from the Listening Center please stop by the upstairs Music Library (room 113) to request them. A staff member will be happy to retrieve these items for you. We apologize for the inconvenience and look forward to reopening an improved and cool Listening Center once construction is completed!

Laula, Eestimaa! Sing, Estonia!

The University of Washington Libraries is pleased to announce the exhibit of Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian choral music in the Allen Library from August 20 through September 8, 2009. Please stop by the Allen Library to view this exciting exhibit. For more information about the exhibit, please see the exhibit website.

An Opera Can Take Its Time, or Yours

"John Adams’s opera “A Flowering Tree” has lingered with me since the Mostly Mozart Festival presented its New York premiere this month. Based on a 2,000-year-old South Indian folk tale about a girl on the brink of womanhood who rescues her impoverished family by transforming herself into a tree, the opera, over all, is mystical and enchanting, with a stylistically eclectic and often intense score."

For the full story, please see the New York Times.

Physicists investigate the grand artistic vision of one of the most influential artists of the last two centuries.

"When physicist John Smith spent the night in his garden with the score to Götterdämmerung, the final opera in Richard Wagner’s four-part, 15-hour epic, Der Ring des Nibelungen, he wasn’t interested in its account of the apocalyptic struggle of Norse gods for control of the world. Smith was concerned with a struggle of a different sort—one between the opera’s words and music that might elucidate the controversial German composer’s peculiar vision for the future of art."

For the full story, please the Seed.

Library book returned 70 years on

"Iris Chadwick, 83, borrowed the score of the musical Rose Marie from Cubitt Town Library, Tower Hamlets, in 1939.

The library's 10p per day penalty for overdue books would equate to a fine of more than £2,500."

For the full story, please see the BBC News.

Unpublished Villa-Lobos scores found in Brazil

"Unpublished scores by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) were found at the Rio de Janeiro School of Music library, according to the school's director."

For the full story, please see Yahoo News.

What Really Killed Mozart? Maybe Strep

"Scandalous rumors about popular musicians were just as lurid in the 18th century as they are today, but they moved at a more deliberate pace. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died on Dec. 5, 1791, and it took a whole week for a Berlin newspaper to announce that he had been poisoned. The actual cause of death, a new study suggests, may have been more pedestrian: a strep infection."

For the full story, please see the New York Times.

Crocodile Café Collection

Come check out the Media Center's newest recording collection! The Crocodile Café Collection contains over 2,800 hours of live music recordings. Recorded at the Café between May 2002 and December 2007 by audio engineer Jim Anderson, these recordings document performances by dozens of artists, both notable and obscure.

For more information, please see the collection FAQ.

Les Paul, Guitar Innovator, Dies at 94

"Les Paul, the virtuoso guitarist and inventor whose solid-body electric guitar and recording studio innovations changed the course of 20th-century popular music, died Thursday in White Plains, N.Y. . He was 94."

For the full story, please see the New York Times.

The Twitter Opera and a Baseball Bat With Strings

"Is there anything Twitter can’t do (when it isn’t shut down by the cyberattacks of malicious hackers)? The popular online network connects you to your friends, feeds you the latest news — and now it’s about to help create a new opera. The Independent reported that the Royal Opera House of London is about to produce a work called “The Twitter Opera,” in which the libretto will be composed of short messages sent by the public to the opera house’s @youropera Twitter feed."

For the full story, please see the New York Times.

Files Detail Years of Spying on Bernstein

"For more than three decades starting in the 1940's, the Federal Bureau of Investigation obsessively documented the activities of Leonard Bernstein, especially his associations with groups listed as subversive or communist, and, in the 1960's, his support for the civil rights and antiwar movements, newly released files show."

For the full story, please see the New York Times.

Turn on, tune in: John Cage's symphony for 12 radios

"One evening in May 1951, at the McMillin theatre at Columbia University, New York, a conductor, wearing tails and a stiff bib and tucker, walked out on stage to conduct an ensemble of 24 players. The musicians were snuggled in pairs around 12 portable radios, and the conductor was John Cage. He was also the composer of the piece that was about to be premiered, Imaginary Landscape No 4."

For the full story, please see the Guardian.

Musicophilia: Six Questions for Oliver Sacks

"New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, Sacks is best known for Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars. His latest book, Musicophilia, has just appeared as a Vintage paperback. I put six questions to Dr. Sacks about his remarkable study of music and the human brain."

For the full story, please see Harpers.

'Mozart Effect' Real — For Some

"Researchers from the University of London have tested a thesis that may explain why studies of this phenomenon have produced such inconsistent results. In a study just published in the journal Psychology of Music, they conclude that listening to Mozart can indeed spark a certain type of intelligence, but the effect is limited to non-musicians. The reason, it appears, has to do with the different ways musicians and non-musicians process music in the brain."

For the full story, please see Miller-McCune.

NSO to Try Beethoven's Tweet Suite

"The National Symphony Orchestra is trying an experiment. It's tweeting Beethoven's "Pastoral" Symphony, Thursday night at Wolf Trap... Here's what will happen: The orchestra will use the micro-blogging site Twitter to send text messages of 140 characters or fewer from conductor Emil de Cou during the performance. (Example: "In my score Beethoven has printed Nightingale = flute Quail = oboe Cuckoo = clarinet -- a mini concerto for woodwind/birds.")"

For the full story, please see the Washington Post.