Notes for Notes

Abstract

Notes for Notes Honora Raphael and Ray Heigemier The Walter W. Gerboth Music Library of Brooklyn College is the recipient of a significant gift of 1,026 scores and books from the collection of Professor Emeritus Douglas F. Hedwig, recently retired from Brooklyn College, having taught in its Conservatory of Music since 1985. Professor Hedwig established the Conservatory Brass Ensemble in 1985, serving as its director and leading it in concert and educational tours of England, Switzerland, and Germany. He was also a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra for twenty-seven years and has over forty commercially-released recordings to his credit. The donation is a collection of brass ensemble and trumpet music scores as well as books about brass instruments, collected during Professor Hedwig's forty-year career as a musical performer and educator in New York City. The collection includes works, many of them autographed, composed for and dedicated to Doug Hedwig. There are also several unpublished works for trumpet and brass ensemble by composers of note. Honora Raphael Brooklyn College Stanford University's Archive of Recorded Sound has completed the processing of four significant collections under the sponsorship of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Ambassador Auditorium Collection, and the Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999), Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987), and Lawrence Tibbett (1896-1960) collections all have California connections, but their work and influence extended far beyond state borders to distant regions of the world. The finding aids for these collections may be viewed on OAC: Online Archive of California: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/institutions/Stanford+University::Stanford+Archive+of+Recorded+Sound. The processing archivist was Frank Ferko, with assistance of Anna Graves. Located in the city of Pasadena, the Ambassador Auditorium hosted many of the most highly regarded concert musicians and popular entertainers in the world. From its opening night on 7 April 1974 to its closing in May 1995, the Ambassador, often called "the Carnegie Hall of the West," presented a veritable who's who of luminaries in the world of music, dance, and popular entertainment. Among those who performed there were Artur Rubinstein, Leontyne Price, Victor Borge, Andrés [End Page 268] Segovia, Barbara Cook, the Juilliard String Quartet, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Yo-Yo Ma, Bob Hope, Marcel Marceau, Claire Bloom, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Ravi Shankar, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and many others. The Ambassador Auditorium Collection consists of thousands of documents related to the business, marketing, publicity, and promotion operations of the hall, as well as photographs (many of which are autographed), posters, concert programs, commissioned original artwork, and perhaps most important of all, hundreds of audio and video recordings of live performances. Spanning seventy-five years, the career of Yehudi Menuhin included work as a virtuoso violinist as well as a highly respected conductor. The Yehudi Menuhin Collection, assembled by his family, consists of fifty-four 78 rpm recordings from 1938 through 1950 of Menuhin performing violin works, often accompanied by his sister, Hephzibah. The Jascha Heifetz Collection, donated by the violinist's longtime friend and record producer at RCA Victor, Jack Pfeiffer, includes not only Heifetz's own performances but also his personal collection of recordings made by other artists. The Heifetz Collection, consisting of over a thousand discs and reels produced from 1911 to 1972, includes the rare, privately made recording from 1920 of Heifetz's teacher, Leopold Auer, among other treasures. The Lawrence Tibbett Collection consists of ninety-eight recordings documenting the middle years of the career of the baritone, who sang for twenty-seven seasons at the Metropolitan Opera (1923-1950). The collection contains an outstanding performance of a pre-premiere recording of Howard Hanson's Merry Mount from January 1934, and also contains Tibbett's well-known renditions of popular songs, such as Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' " and Harold Arlen's "Accentuate the Positive," performed on live radio programs in the 1940s. Ray Heigemier Stanford University From the editor: Notes readers may or may not have noticed the quiet disappearance of the "MLA Administrative Structure" from its former regular place in the September issue of the...