Briefs / Feuilletons

Briefs / Feuilletons Liza Vick, Santie de Jongh, Valia Vraka, Stephanie Merakos, and Estelle Lowry, Director New Additions to RILM Music Encyclopedias. On 1 January 2021, RILM Music Encyclopedias will add three seminal works to its collection of historical and current titles: • Richard Carlin. Country Music: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: Routledge, 2013). • Gabriel Pareyón. Diccionario enciclopédico de música en México (Zapopan: Universidad Panamericana, 2006–2007). • Jaimie Vernon. Canadian Pop Music Encyclopedia(Scarborough, ON: Bullseye Canada, 2020). With the addition of these titles, RILM Music Encyclopedias augments its coverage and depth, adding titles centered around North America as subject. Transitions at the RISM Zentralredaktion. Klaus Keil, the longtime director of the RISM Zentralredaktion (Editorial Center) in Frankfurt, retired on 31 August 2020. The new director, as of 1 September 2020, is Dr Balázs Mikusi. Klaus Keil's association with the RISM Central Office began in 1982, when he was hired as a student worker when the office was still in Kassel. He became director of the Central Office, by now in Frankfurt, in 1991. He led RISM through many changes and milestones, especially technological ones, as the work of RISM moved from microfiche to CD-ROMs and finally to the publicly available online catalogue. His kindness and good spirit have been a stable force in RISM and are well known to the hundreds of RISM contributors who have worked with him over the decades. Upon his retirement, Klaus Keil was appointed a Member of the RISM Association by the RISM Board of Directors. His position was handed over to Balázs Mikusi, who holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Cornell University and was head of the Music Collection of the National Széchényi Library in Budapest from 2009 to 2020. He has served on the board of IAML as a vice-president and is a noted scholar of Haydn and Mozart, among others. While the retirement of Klaus Keil marks the end of an era, RISM welcomes this new chapter of leadership and is looking forward to the milestones to come. The University of Pennsylvania Libraries has completed the digitisation of more than 2,500 items from the collection of Marian Anderson, one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century. The body of primary sources in the collection—including letters, diaries, journals, interviews, recital programmes, and private recordings—spans the Philadelphia-born contralto's six-decade career as a concert singer and advocate for social justice. The digitisation project was funded in 2018 by a $110,000 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The newly digitised materials complement a significant collection of four thousand photographs, which are also publicly accessible. 'Marian Anderson achieved worldwide renown as a singer while breaking racial barriers in the United States, and the Penn Libraries is honored to serve as custodian of her archival legacy', says Constantia Constantinou, H. Carton Rogers III Vice Provost and Director of the Penn Libraries. 'Through Anderson's digitized collection, scholars and students worldwide can discover and reflect on her life and career and further illuminate her social, cultural, and historical impact'. [End Page 363] Marian Anderson (1897–1993) was born and raised in Philadelphia, with close ties to the community. Best known as an interpreter of art songs and spirituals, Anderson performed in diverse venues throughout her career, from schools and community centers to formal concert stages. A world-renowned recitalist, Anderson was also a high-profile figure in the fight for Civil Rights. After having been denied permission by the Daughters of the American Revolution to perform for an integrated audience in Constitution Hall, Anderson famously performed an open-air concert for 75,000 people on Easter Sunday, 9 April 1939, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Additionally, in 1955, she was the first Black singer to perform in a lead role on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. Anderson officially retired from the stage in 1965. Her life and career continue to be celebrated and studied by a diverse group of learners from schoolchildren to musicologists and social historians. To facilitate the work of teachers, students, and researchers, the Penn Libraries...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.