Monday, September 28, 1998, started out like any other day for most of the Yale community. Sunny and warm, nothing seemed unusual…except for the Music Library, which had closed Sunday evening at nine p.m., as it had for the previous eighty-one years, at 98 Wall Street. Monday, 9/28/98 changed all that forever.
The Irving S. Gilmore Music Library is pleased to announce the completion of an 18-month project, generously funded by a grant from the Grammy Museum, focused on preserving approximately 335 hours of unique non-commercial audio, predominantly from 1937-1956, featuring music by Charles Ives (1874-1954).
The Stanley Dance and Helen Oakley Dance Papers (MSS 62) are now open for research. As the Dances were well-known jazz journalists and producers, their papers are an important resource for the study of jazz in the United States from 1920-1960. The Papers contain a large number of interviews with and photographs of jazz musicians, as well as sound recordings. Both Stanley Dance and Helen Oakley Dance had close relationships with Duke Ellington and Earl Hines, both of whom are well represented in the Papers.
In our new exhibition entitled “They Sang and Took the Sword” – Music of World War I, opening August 6th 2018, the Music Library observes the 100th anniversary of the conclusion of World War I, as marked by the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918. The exhibition brings together selected materials from the Music Library’s Special Collections and Collection of Historical Sound Recordings pertaining to the war. Several of these feature the work of Yale students, alumni, and faculty.
The Irving S. Gilmore Music Library is pleased to announce that it will be taking part in a beta test for a new publisher supported music reading app called nkoda.
For a quick introduction to nkoda, take a look at this short video overview of the app.
According to the app’s developers:
The Black Sound and the Archive Working Group at Yale University is a two-year initiative (supported by Yale’s 320 York Humanities Grant) that focuses on the history and significance of African-American sonic practices in tandem with critical examination of the nature of archives. The group seeks to augment the very notion of what constitutes a black sound archive.
The Special Collections Reading Room at the Gilmore Music Library will be closed from Monday, March 12 through Friday, March 16. The exterior windows in the Music Library office suite are going to be replaced, and we expect the construction work to be noisy and disruptive. If you need to do special collections research that week, let us know, and we’ll try to make alternative arrangements for you.
Grove Music Online (aka Oxford Music Online) migrated to a new platform in December. This migration happened suddenly and there are a number of bugs still being worked out.
New interviews: Since last summer, Oral History of American Music (OHAM) staff have conducted interviews with Robert Carl, Wayne Escoffery, Michael Gordon, Robert Kyr, David Lang, and Morton Subotnick. All interviews will be catalogued and transcribed and will be available to researchers in the near future. Consult OHAM's website on how to access these materials.
Our latest exhibition, Treasures of Guitar and Lute Music from the Gilmore Music Library, opening February 13th 2018, spans more than 400 years. It includes two remarkable lute works from the late 16th and early 17th centuries: a treatise by Vincenzo Galilei (the father of the scientist Galileo Galilei) and a rare print of John Dowland’s Lacrimae. The guitar makes its appearance with a late 17th-century treatise by Gaspar Sanz. From the 19th century, we have a letter by the composer and guitarist Mauro Giuliani.
