Carol June Bradley - Böcker

American Music Librarianship is a biographical and historical review of the musical situation in American libraries from its roots in the late 19th century to the 1980s. Beginning with the period from 1854-55 when the Boston Public Library began to buy music for its collections, Bradley tracks the development of the Music Division in the Library of Congress under the guidance of chief librarian Oscar Senneck.The opening section examines the professional careers of America's first music librarians and the subsequent development of music libraries, taken from information provided in their papers; documentation in their libraries; and from oral interviews with the librarians, their spouses and their successors. In the second and third sections, Bradley covers the librarians involved in the formulation of classification schemes and rules for cataloguing. The fourth section covers the colleagues of these pioneer librarians who are noteworthy for their own efforts on behalf of music in American libraries. The Music Library Association is reviewed in the final section, from its inception in 1931 through the activities of its professionals, to current goals. The book's appendices include tables and plates illustrative of various aspects discussed in the body of the book. A detailed index comprehends personal names, names of libraries, titles of publications, concepts and subjects. This book is a source book for all music libraries and librarians, school libraries, and music research collections.

Encompassing both the art song and Lieder traditions, the book includes: comprehensive lists of the compositions of 125 major western composers, identities of the poets who wrote the lyrics, titles used by respective composers with cross references from variant titles used by other composers, cross references from the first lines, publishers of the individual songs, location of individual songs within the collected works of individual composers, and date of composition. With this resource, a reader can find the songs written by a particular composer, who published a specific song, and which composers might have set a particular poem to music. Bradley's guide offers a user-friendly, contemporary index of information for which scholars previously had to search extensively.

The literature of American music librarianship has been around since the 19th century when public libraries began to keep records of player-piano concerts, significant donations of books and music, and suggestions for housing music. As the 20th century began, American periodicals printed more and more articles on increasingly specialized topics within music studies. Eventually books were developed to aid the music librarian; their publication has continued over the course of nearly a century. This book reflects the great diversity of the literature of music librarianship. The main resources included are items of historical interest, descriptions of individual collections, catalogues of collections, articles describing specific library functions, record-related subjects, bibliographies designed for music library use, literature from Canada and Britain when relevant to U.S. library practices, key discographies, and information on specialized music research. The material is ordered by topic and indexed by author, subject, and library name.