February 1996 Number 63
Note: The online and printed editions of this newsletter may differ in content.
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
Greetings from the Chapter Chair
GREETINGS FROM THE CHAPTER CHAIR
Many thanks to new MLA/SCC newsletter editor Stephen Davison and co-editor Val Mitchell. We all appreciate their efforts and willingness to take on this important task.
It was great to see so many of you at our Fall Meeting in October at the Biltmore Hotel and the Los Angeles Public Library. We all owe particular thanks to Renee McBride for her stellar efforts as program chair for the joint meeting with the Northern California Chapter--it was no small task organizing the two-day event with MLA/SCC, LAPL, SEM, and the delicious meal at Stepp's. Further plaudits go to Louise Spear who, as local arrangements chair of the Society for Ethnomusicology, made it possible for MLA/SCC members to attend the SEM sessions at the Biltmore. I, for one, found the sessions on Friday and Saturday morning thought- provoking and interesting, and a terrific opportunity to supplement some of the things our chapter has been dealing with in recent meetings. The exhibits were terrific as well. Many thanks to Renee and Louise! Watch for an announcement soon for our Spring Meeting to be held in May. Details forthcoming!
It is a new year and time, once again, to renew your membership in MLA/SCC. If you haven't renewed for 1995-96, please send in the enclosed membership form as soon as possible. Also, don't forget that MLA/SCC now has a membership brochure to distribute to prospective members, both individual and institutional. If you can help getting the word out about MLA/SCC, contact membership chair John Thornbury at Cal State Los Angeles for copies of the brochure.
It was great to see so many MLA/SCC members at the MLA National Meeting, February 7-10, in Seattle. The sessions were timely and stimulating - including Steve Fry's expert Ask MLA forum on "Coping with Difficult People and Situations!" Those MLA/SCC members who are not members of the national organization should seriously consider joining and/or attending national meetings. They are a wonderful way to meet colleagues and keep abreast of the latest thoughts, ideas, and projects in music librarianship.
I look forward to a productive year both personally and collectively for the MLA/SCC. Look for news of our spring meeting soon!
--Deborah Smith
MLA/SCC MEMBERSHIP
All persons or institutions that are actively engaged in library work, or who have an interest in the purposes of MLA/SCC are encouraged to join. Annual membership dues are: $10 individual, $8 institutional (available to businesses, associations, or institutions), $8 retired, $6 student, and $6 supporting (available to persons outside of the Southern California and Hawaii region). To join, or renew your membership to MLA/SCC fill out the application form below and return it with your check to the membership chair:
John ThornburyName:
Head, Reference Services
John F. Kennedy Memorial Library
California State University, Los Angeles
5151 State University Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90032-8300
Position:
Home address:
Institution/Institution address:
Home phone:
Business phone:
Fax:
Email:
Please circle your preferred mailing address and interests in chapter activities:Preferred address: home / work.
Chapter activities: office holder / newsletter co-editor.
Committee membership: program / publications / membership / nominations.
Announcement of the Spring Meeting of the Chapter will appear in the next Newsletter issue.
MLA/SCC FALL MEETING
Members of the Southern and Northern California Chapters joined forces for their fall meeting on October 20-21, 1995 in downtown Los Angeles. The meeting was enhanced by the opportunity to attend sessions and exhibits of the annual conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) in the elegant Biltmore Hotel. MLA'ers attended SEM sessions ranging from issues in Balinese music to crisscross and crossover in African American music to a discussion of the Aleksander Kulisiewicz Archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
After a Friday morning of registration and ethnomusicological enlightenment chapter members rendezvoused at the Los Angeles Public Library, located one block from the Biltmore, for a docents' tour of the beautifully restored building, which twice suffered extensive damage in 1986 at the hands of arsonists. Following the tour, members could attend more SEM sessions before dinner at Stepps in the Wells Fargo Center, where excellent food, service and conversation abounded. From dinner some chapter members returned to the Biltmore for a musical tribute to educator, composer and ethnomusicologist Gertrude Rivers Robinson, while others moved across the street from the restaurant to the California Plaza Watercourt for a Festival of World Music.
The festival presented jazz (Gerald Wilson Jazz Orchestra) and music of Native Americans (Cahuilla Birdsingers), African Americans (UCLA African-American Choral Ensemble) and the Middle East (UC Santa Barbara Middle Eastern Ensemble) in a relaxed outdoor setting on a cool fall Los Angeles evening.
Saturday morning offered further opportunity to attend SEM sessions and the afternoon drew MLA'ers once again to LAPL, where the official MLA/SCC-NCC meeting took place. The meeting began with a presentation by Romaine Ahlstrom, manager of LAPL's Art, Music & Rare Books Department, and Virginia Loe, LAPL's Music Specialist. Romaine and Virginia described the content, organization and usage of LAPL's music collection, highlighting the fire damage to the collection and the ongoing process of recovery from that damage. They then asked the chapter membership what we expect of the LAPL music collection, who refers patrons to LAPL and for what reasons, and whether they could refer LAPL patrons to any of our institutions. A lively period of sharing among librarians from several different types of collections and organizations brought Romaine's and Virginia's presentation to a close.
Dr. Albert R. Rice (Curator, Kenneth G. Fiske Museum of Musical Instruments, Claremont, CA) next presented results of research at the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery (San Marino, CA), "Some Performance Practices of American Sheet Music, 1793-1830." Al shared views of amateur musicians of the late 18th-early 19th centuries performing in their homes, as seen through his study of such aspects of that period's sheet music as instrumentation, notation and the presence or absence of metronome markings. MLA/SCC's business meeting wrapped up the afternoon and 1995 fall meeting, which was quite unlike any previous one, thanks to the presence and generosity of SEM. Louise Spear (UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive) deserves especially warm thanks for her help in coordinating MLA/SCC-NCC and SEM activities.
--Renee McBride, University of California, Los Angeles
CHAPTER HANDBOOK IN THE WORKS
The Board is continuing to work on a Handbook for the Chapter. I took this project on last year as Past-Chair and will continue on it this year with current Board members Don Brown and Susan Annett. We requested a copy of the Northwest Chapter's handbook and I have distributed sections to the current Board members whose jobs parallel those of Northwest's Board. Those sections are: Chair, Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect, Past Chair, Secretary/Treasurer, Membership, Newsletter, Program, and Nominating Committee. Renee McBride is going to work on a section on Publications. Some other topics I want to work on are: our schedule of Chapter meetings, meetings with the Northern California Chapter, Board meetings, archiving files, maintaining files locally, how the bank account is handled, when and how the Board offices are transferred each year, ad hoc committees, liaison with National. What would be useful from the membership would be any other suggestions you have for issues that should be covered in such a handbook. This is intended to be procedural or explanatory and to work with our By- Laws to give the Board guidance in managing the Chapter's business. If you have any suggestions please send them to me as below.
ALSO, if you are interested in working on this project this year, Don and Susan and I would be most grateful for any help. Thanks,
Joe Fuchs
1601 W. Mountain St.
Glendale, CA 91201
phone: (818) 548-2026
fax: (818) 548-5079
email: gpljoe@class.org
A QUESTION FROM THE PUBLICATION COMMITTEE
At the MLA/SCC business meeting of the MLA/SCC-NCC joint fall meeting on Saturday, Oct. 21, 1995, an idea was presented and discussed that the Publication Committee would like to bring to the chapter membership for consideration. It was suggested that MLA/SCC provide publication opportunities for members and several ways of achieving this were brought up in the course of discussion. The options mentioned were: 1) Members could submit articles, handbooks, etc. for consideration and, if accepted, such works could be published in limited quantity or on demand for members. 2) Smaller works could be incorporated into the chapter newsletter. 3) The chapter could compile such works into an annual publication.
If you have ideas or opinions about the possibility of MLA/SCC publishing member research, please share them with Renee McBride, Publication Committee Chair, UCLA University Research Library, A1538 URL, Box 951575, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575. Phone: 310/206- 5853 Fax: 310/206-4974 Email: ecz5rmc@mvs.oac.ucla.edu Responses will be brought to the next board meeting and discussed, and results will be presented at the chapter's spring meeting.
--Renee McBride
SOCIETY FOR ETHNOMUSICOLOGY 40th ANNUAL MEETING: A MUSIC LIBRARIAN'S VIEW
Leslie Bennett, Music Librarian at the University of Oregon and MLA's Publicity Officer, had asked for volunteers to staff the Music Library Association's table in the exhibit area when the Society for Ethnomusicology came to Los Angeles October 17-22 for their annual conference. I jumped at the chance to be a part of this important meeting, which would bring ethnomusicologists from around the world to the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A., and to UCLA, the hosting institution. That the Northern and Southern California Chapters of MLA would meet concurrently was a further enticement to take my conference clothes to the cleaners, make arrangements for others at the UCLA Music Library to staff the reference desk, and to gear up for the helter-skelter atmosphere of a major conference with too many things going on in too brief a time.
And so I zipped down to the Biltmore Friday morning (10/20) to mingle with my friends and colleagues from SEM, MLA and our local MLA chapters for the conference, and started hawking MLA services and publications at the MLA exhibit table. What a surprise I had at the number of national MLAers I saw and chatted with at the table. Laurel Sercombe, Librarian and Archivist at the University of Washington, dropped by, and I chatted with Suzanne Flandreau, Archivist at the Center for Black Music Research at Chicago's Columbia College, and Chair of MLA's Black Music Roundtable. Marlena Frackowski, a NACO cataloger at Indiana University, served at the MLA exhibit table with me. An ethnomusicologist as well as a librarian, she read her paper "Ethnomusicology in Poland" in the second conference session on Thursday (10/19). Of course, Louise Spear, Director of UCLA's Ethnomusicology Archive and SEM Treasurer, was prominent at the conference. She was the hard- working and never-rattled member of the local arrangements team which helped bring a smooth and seamless atmosphere and friendly spirit to the conference. Two other friends and colleagues who helped at the MLA table were Marsha Berman, my wonderful recently- retired sidekick at the UCLA Music Library, and Leslie Bennett herself from Eugene.
It was late in the afternoon that I began to see more friends and colleagues, these from the Northern and Southern MLA chapters. They were gathering for our pre-chapter meeting dinner together at one of the elegant restaurants. Renee McBride, one of our friendly UCLA Library catalogers, graciously put the dinner together, as well as the Chapter meeting Saturday afternoon at the Los Angeles Public Library. A description of this meeting appears elsewhere on these pages. Unfortunately for my participation in the Chapter meeting, that Saturday the SEM members crowded onto busses, flew across the freeways, and congregated at UCLA for the day. I spent the entire day on the reference desk in the Music Library helping musicologists who had accumulated questions and research goals for this day. (Well, I did sneak out for a reception or two and to drop in on a couple of concerts).
Here are highlights of this important SEM conference in Los Angeles. The preconference symposium "Bartok in Retrospect" brought together the greatest Bartok scholars in the world in an exciting series of lectures. Benjamin Suchoff (New York Bartok Archives, UCLA), Laszlo Somfai (Budapest Bartok Archives), and Janos Karpati (Budapest Academy of Music) met and exchanged lectures on Bartok in a rare collaborative venture. Saturday at UCLA the distinguished Charles Seeger Memorial Lecture was presented by the distinguished ethnomusicologist Nazir Jairazbhoy, Prof. Emeritus at UCLA. His lecture "From the Inside(r) Out: Reflections on Ethnomusicology" addressed affirmative action, graduate program regimentation, differences in native and "outsider" ethnomusicology research and the meaning of ethnomusicology today. His presentation, which included a video and music, won a standing ovation from the nearly 500 attendees. But the greatest attraction seemed to be the concert series Festival of World Music which brought together prominent musicians from throughout the world performing cultural styles and genres from five continents. Among these on Thursday and Friday were the UCLA Korean Traditional Music Group performing at the hotel, the Pancho Sanchez Latin Jazz Ensemble and the Bobby Bradford Jazz Ensemble at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater, "Classical Crossovers: A Musical Tribute to Gertrude Rivers Robinson" at which Balinese gender were performed at the hotel, and at the California Plaza Watercourt one block North of the hotel the Cahuilla Bird Singers, the UC Santa Barbara Middle Eastern Ensemble, UCLA's Afro-American Choral Group, and Gerald Wilson's Jazz Big Band, then at the hotel again the UCLA Japanese Traditional Music Group performed.
Saturday at UCLA various UCLA student music groups performed traditional music of many cultures at a series of receptions and gathering spots of ethnomusicological interest. On stage in Schoenberg Hall for the Festival of World Music: UCLA Artists of World Music were Ali Jihad Racy's Middle Eastern Music Ensemble, Kobla Ladzepko's Ghanaian Music Ensemble, James Makubuya's Ugandan Music Ensemble, and the Steve Loza jazz sextet. Sunday brought the Festival of World Music: Festival of Persia to the hotel's famous Biltmore Bowl, early venue for the Academy Awards presentations. The Bardic Singers from Khorasan, Dervish Music of Kordestan and Sufi Music of Baluchistan were featured. What an exhilarating and inspiring conference it was. How gratifying for me to participate as much as I could, but especially to hear this great music and see and chat with old friends. It was delightful, also, to see former students of UCLA, who, having earned their Ph.D.'s in the Ethnomusicology/Systematic Musicology program at UCLA, have taken their own places as teachers and scholars across the country. I was glad to see them again, but this time behind the MLA exhibit table and in the hotel hallways, not behind the UCLA Music Library's reference desk.
--Stephen M. Fry, UCLA Music Library
MLA/SCC EXECUTIVE BOARD
Chair: Deborah Smith, Occidental CollegeVice Chair: Don Brown, El Camino College
Secretary/Treasurer: Susan Annett, Santa Monica Public Library
Members-At-Large: Renee McBride, UCLA
John Thornbury, CSULAPast Chair: Leslie Andersen, LACPL, Norwalk
The MLA/SCC Newsletter is published three times a year. Please send via U.S. or electronic mail articles, reviews, conference summaries, communications, and membership news to the newsletter editor: Stephen Davison, UCLA Music Library, 1102 Schoenberg Hall, Box 951490, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1490; phone: (310) 825-3369; fax: (310) 206-7322; E-mail: sdavison@library.ucla.edu
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Music Library Association, Southern California Chapter