The Library of Congress > Blogs > Music > Archive by category 'Research'

How to Find Your Snooky Ookums: A Guide to the Irving Berlin Collection

June 27, 2012 by Pat Padua

The Music Division regularly offers new and updated online finding aids to help guide the intrepid researcher through its vast collections. You can see an index of all the Music Division’s finding aids here. This month’s new additions include a guide to the papers of Edward Jablonski, author of Irving Berlin: American Troubadour and other composer biographies, as well as a guide to the music and papers of one of the iconic American songwriters.

“God bless America” and “White Christmas” alone would make any songwriter’s career, but those are just two of the most popular of Irving Berlin’s more than 800 compositions. The Irving Berlin Collection amounts to a staggering three-quarters of a million items, with nearly a thousand containers that span 400 linear shelf feet. View the finding aid for the Irving Berlin Collection here. Read more about the great composer on a previous In the Muse post, and listen to one of the dozens of recordings of Berlin’s songs in the National Jukebox.

Cataloger’s Corner: Telemaque Update!

May 22, 2012 by Cait Miller

The following is a guest post from Senior Music Cataloger Sharon McKinley. You may have read last week’s post about identifying the elusive Telemaque. This little story had a happy ending: music library colleagues at Harvard were able to identify the piece and its composer for me. What joy! Better yet, their library staff was …

Sister Gregory Duffy: An Asset to the Abbey and the Theater

April 16, 2012 by Cait Miller

Within our nearly 600 archival collections in the Music Division lie not only scores, sketches, correspondence and iconography, but countless untold stories. Being able to piece together these stories and uncover a stranger’s personality and contribution to our cultural history is one of the greatest joys I get to experience working here. A few weeks …

Music from the Tsars: a Bibliography

September 8, 2011 by Pat Padua

The following is a guest post from Senior Music Reference Specialist Kevin LaVine. Throughout the 1930s, as the developing Soviet state was liquidating Tsarist property in order to generate funding for its ambitious projects, Herbert Putnam, the Librarian of Congress at that time, seized the opportunity to purchase approximately 2800 volumes which were formerly held …

Johanna Beyer: A Composer Forgotten

February 16, 2011 by Cait Miller

The following is a guest post by Music Cataloger Laura Yust, who recently researched composer Johanna Beyer in a seminar about American Modernist composers. Laura is pursuing her M.A. in Musicology at The Catholic University of America. Many people know of the composer Henry Cowell and his innovative compositions, but the name Johanna Magdalena Beyer …

Shepherding Students from Rice University

December 27, 2010 by Cait Miller

Earlier this month, the Music Division welcomed five graduate students from The Shepherd School of Music at Rice University for a week-long research experience as they scoured through our collections in hopes of developing a new concert program based on materials only available at the Library of Congress. Tracy Wu (violin), Clara Yang (cello), Makiko …

In the Reading Room: Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus

September 28, 2010 by Pat Padua

Reference Specialist Larry Appelbaum was at his station in the Performing Arts Reading Room a few weeks ago when he recognized a researcher who walked in the door. “Hi Ethan!” It was pianist Ethan Iverson of the unconventional jazz trio The Bad Plus. Iverson blogged about the experience in a post he calls “The Secrets of …

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

September 2, 2010 by Pat Padua

The following is the last in a series of posts by our 2010 class of Junior Fellows. It was written by Carrie Smith, a recent graduate of New York University. For four years while a student at New York University, I went to class in a building on Washington Place, just to the east …

The Return of How I Spent My Summer Fellowship: Walter Damrosch

August 31, 2010 by Pat Padua

This is the last of a series of blog posts by this year’s Pruett Fellows. The following post is by Catherine Hughes, Graduate Student in Musicology, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For my independent research as one of the 2010 Pruett Fellows from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I …

Sherman’s March to the Sea

August 26, 2010 by Pat Padua

The following blog post is by Mark Zelesky, recent graduate of the School of Library and Information Science, Louisiana State University. During our internship, my colleagues and I in the Junior Fellows internship discovered several items that highlight the diversity of materials collected by the Library of Congress. For ten weeks, we processed materials from …