Brandon University Music Library
270 18th St. R7A 6A9 Brandon, MB, Canada

Happy New Year everyone! E-book of the Week is back! Every week we will showcase a book that BU students and faculty can access through the Brandon University online! This week is inspired by @lamontmusiclibrary’s Native American Heritage Month showcase on Instagram. Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America is an anthology of diverse approaches to Inuit and Native North American ethnomusicology. Edited by Tara Browner, this collection incl...udes Native and non-Native scholars and contributes to the literature in this growing area of study. . . . #ebookoftheweek #brandonuniversitymusiclibrary #musiclibrary #library #brandonuniversity #ebook #firstnations #indigenousmusic #ethnomusicology

If you have been on-campus in the past week, you may have noticed our new holiday display in the School of Music display case! We wish everyone a wonderful Holiday break! . . . #musiclibrary #music #christmas #holidays #displays #books #scores #carols #organmusic #christmasdecor

Five Fun Facts about Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus 1. Messiaen composed this suite of 20 pieces for solo piano for his second wife, Yvonne Loriod, who was one of his students at the Paris Conservatoire. 2. The piece contains three recurring themes that repeat in various ways throughout. The Theme of God appears at the very beginning as five chords in the piano’s low register, the Theme of the Star and the Cross is a melody played in the outer registe...rs of the piano in the second movement, and the Theme of Chords is a series of four 4-note chords that appears in the sixth movement. 3. Messiaen was fascinated by birdsong, and a number of the movements feature bird-like evocations, such as the chirping of birds (V. Regard du Fils sur le Fils), the songs of the lark, nightingale, and the blackbird (VIII. Regard des hauteurs), and the connection of birds to angels (XIV. Regard des Anges). 4. Messiaen was synaesthetic, and used a compositional style that involved subdivided melodic cells that he associated with colours. Although he did not include specific remarks about colour in the score for Vingt Regards, he considered sound-color to occupy the highest position in the hierarchy of musical practices, and many scholars have associated his theories about colour with this piece. 5. Vingt Regards’ debut performance in 1945 received a negative review that sparked a more than yearlong debate about Messiaen’s merits among journalists and fellow composers, known as le ‘Cas’ Messiaen. Facts 1 & 5: Burger, Cole P. Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards Sur l'Enfant-Jésus: Analytical, Religious, and Literary Considerations. The University of Texas at Austin, 2009. Fact 2: Payne, Jeffrey. Program notes to Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jésus. Kaul Auditorium, Reed College, Portland, ON. 2 Nov 2008. Fact 3: Bowlby, Christopher S. Vingt Regards Sur l'Enfant-Jésus: Messiaen's Means of Conveying Extra-Musical Subtext. University of Washington, 2005. Fact 4: Lee, Hyeweon. Olivier Messiaen's "Vingt Regards Sur l'Enfant-Jesus": A Study of Sonority, Color, and Symbol. University of Cincinnati, 1992. See more

Five Fun Facts about J. S. Bach’s Six Brandenburg Concertos, BWV 1046-1051 1. Bach most likely composed these six concertos while he was Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen in 1717, and he scored them for the number and expertise of musicians he had available. 2. He did not think of them as a set of pieces originally, but revised and compiled them to present to Christian Ludwig, the Margrave of the territory of Brandenburg-Schweidt, a noted arts supporter, in 172...1. 3. The fifth Concerto was possibly composed to inaugurate a new harpsichord that Bach purchased for the Cöthen court, and this composition elevated the instrument for the first time to a more soloistic function, complete with its own cadenza. 4. It was common at this time for horn players to travel around in pairs, and the first Concerto’s two horn parts may have been written for a couple of these musicians who visited Cöthen from Berlin in 1722. 5. Bach reused a lot of compositional material from these Concertos. The 1st movement of Concerto 1 reappears as the introduction to Cantata 52, and the 3rd movement and 2nd trio are found in Cantata 207. The Sinfonia in F is another version of this first Concerto. Facts 1 & 3: Boyd, Malcolm. Bach, the Brandenburg Concertos. Cambridge Music Handbooks. New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 1993. ML410.B13B6 Fact 2: Butt, John. The Cambridge Companion to Bach. Cambridge, N.Y.: Cambridge U.P., 1997. ML410.B13C36 Facts 4 & 5: Carrell, Norman. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1963. MT130.B14C37 See more

Five Fun Facts about Mozart’s Don Giovanni: 1. The plot is based on the story of the libertine Don Juan’s condemnation to Hell, a common folk tale of the 18th century that was possibly based on the real life of a member of the Tenorio family. Don Juan Tenorio was rumored to have been a perpetrator of plots against the entire female population of Seville in the 14th century. 2. The ballroom scene at the end of the first act features three different dances in three different ...time signatures (a minuet in 3/4, a contradanse in 2/4, and a Deutscher or country dance in 3/8), played simultaneously by two onstage ensembles and the pit orchestra. 3. The opera’s premiere in Prague was postponed because Mozart discovered that this local theatrical troupe [was] not as clever as that in Vienna. When the premiere did finally occur, the overture still had not been either finished or rehearsed. 4. Don Giovanni’s dinner scene in the Act II Finale features incidental music from three other operas of the time, including a portion of Non piu andrai from Mozart’s own Marriage of Figaro. 5. The opera’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, felt he didn’t get enough credit for his contribution (after a performance in London failed to mention him), and in an extract from his memoirs in 1891, declared forcefully that Mozart knew very well that the success of an opera depends, FIRST OF ALL, ON THE POET. Fact 1: Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, et al. Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Opera Journeys Publishing, 2002. Fact 2: Landon, H. C. Robbins. Mozart, the Golden Years, 1781-1791. 1st American ed. New York: Schirmer, 1989. Facts 3 & 5: Heartz, Daniel and Thomas Bauman. Mozart's Operas. Berkeley: U of California, 1990. Fact 4: Rushton, Julian. W. A. Mozart: Don Giovanni. New York: Cambridge UP, 1981. See more

Five Fun Theories about why Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in b minor (D. 759) was unfinished: 1. He received an honorary degree from the Graz Music Society, and felt an obligation to dedicate a symphony to the members in return. He sent two symphonic movements to his friend, Anselm Hüttenbrenner, a leading member of the society, to show his appreciation and intentions. (Huttenbrenner, however, did not tell anyone he had this manuscript until 1865, three years before his death a...nd 37 years after Schubert’s.) 2. He discovered that some thematic material in the piece was similar to melodies in Beethoven’s Second Symphony, and he was worried about plagiarism. 3. He was suffering the increasing effects of syphilis, which caused him to withdraw from public life and put all his compositions on hold. 4. As a queer composer, he was reacting to the patriarchal nature of the sonata form, and ending the piece with the second movement was a gentle yet firm refusal to submit to narrative conventions that would have achieved closure only at the expense of his integrity. 5. He actually considered it to be finished just the way it was. Ending with the Andante movement created a deep impression of closure that define[d] the sense of an endingthat calls for nothing beyond silence and inner reflection. Fact 1: Gingerich, John. Unfinished Considerations: Schubert's ‘Unfinished’ Symphony in the Context of His Beethoven Project. 19th-Century Music, vol. 31, no. 2, 2007, pp. 099112. Fact 2: Schubert, Franz, and Martin Chusid. Symphony in B Minor ("Unfinished"): an Authoritative Score, Schubert's Sketches, Commentary, Essays in History, and Analysis. 1st. ed., W. W. Norton, 1968. Fact 3: Griffel, L. Michael. Schubert’s orchestral music: ‘strivings after the highest in art. The Cambridge Companion to Schubert. Gibbs, Christopher H. ed. London: Cambridge University Press, 1997 Fact 4: McClary, Susan. Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music. Brett, Philip. et al. Queering the Pitch: the New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. Routledge, 1994. Fact 5: Solomon, Maynard. Schubert's ‘Unfinished’ Symphony. 19th-Century Music, vol. 21, no. 2, 1997, pp. 111-133. See more

The Return of Five Fun Facts! Five Fun Facts about the album Dave Brubeck Quartet: Time Out 1. The album explores unusual time signatures, and was inspired by the music Brubeck heard on a 1958 tour to India, Pakistan, Turkey, and Iraq. He was specifically inspired by the aksak rhythm found in Anatolian dance music, which he adapted for Blue Rondo a la Turk.... 2. Brubeck credits drummer Joe Morello with actual composition of the tune Take Five. Morello began exploring different time signatures because he was bored with 4/4 during his solos, and the tune was written just to close a show with a drum solo. 3. Brubeck studied composition with Darius Milhaud, and Milhaud’s interest in polytonality is reflected in the track Strange Meadowlark, which contains a consistent polychord of a dominant seventh chord with a major triad superimposed above it. 4. Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca from Piano Sonata in A major, K. 331 was the inspiration for the name Blue Rondo a la Turk, but, while that piece does have a rondo form, Brubeck said there was no meaningful connection between his composition and its classical predecessor. 5. When the album was first released, it suffered mixed reviews, including one from Downbeat magazine that dismissed the Quartet’s music as Chinese Water Torture. Facts 1 and 4: Crist, Stephen A. Dave Brubeck's Time Out. Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz, 2019. Print. Fact 2: Fred Hall. It’s About Time: The Dave Brubeck Story. University of Arkansas Press, 1996. Fact 3: McFarland, Mark. Dave Brubeck and Polytonal Jazz. Jazz Perspectives, 3:2, 153-176, 2009. Fact 5: Farrington, Jim. "Dave Brubeck Quartet: Time Out." ARSC Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, 2010, pp. 338- 340.

A selection of vintage art from scores in the Watson Memorial Dance Band Collection in our Large Ensemble Library. Kinda nice