This coming Saturday evening, May 17, the SFSU Handbell Choir will present a joint concert with the Temple Hill Choral Singers.
The SFSU Handbell Choir rings on five octaves of handbells and 4 octaves of handchimes. They will be performing arrangements of well known songs such as Moon River and Finlandia, in addition to original compositions written specifically for handbells.
The Temple Hill Choral Singers are a community chorus based in Oakland. They will be performing a number of Americana pieces such as Shenandoah, The Water is Wide, and Simple Gifts.
Caroline Harnly, who is a librarian here at the J. Paul Leonard Library, is the SFSU Handbell Choir director and founder. I am also a member of this musical group.
WHEN: Saturday May 17, 2008 7:30 PM
WHERE: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
3865 Middlefield Road (cross street West Charleston)
Palo Alto, CA
ADMISSION: FREE
Here is a video that may help in understanding what a handbell choir actually is:
St. Olaf Handbell Choir doing Pirates of the Caribbean (St. Olaf is in Minnesota)
Here at the J. Paul Leonard Library, we subscribe to NetLibrary.
NetLibrary provides access to the J. Paul Leonard Library eContent collection. eContent is the digital version of books, journals, and database content. You can access your library’s eContent 24 hours a days, seven days a week. The first step in using the materials available within NetLibrary is to go to the Netlibrary homepage and set up a free account. After your account has been set up, you can then access the material anywhere you have an internet connection.
Do a music subject search and see what you might find!
We also have electronic books in our Investigator catalog, separate from what is available in NetLIbrary. You can limit your search in the Investigator catalog to INTERNET and get electronic books that way also.
Here are just a few of the books available through the Internet
Sonnyboy Williamson II was one of the best blues harmonica players. This video is great because it is in closeup so you can see the different styles he uses to play the different notes. This is also one of my favorite songs.
Here is Sonnyboy Williamson II performing “Your Funeral My Trial”
Nick Cave is influenced by the blues a great deal. In fact, he has his own version of a song called “Your Funeral My Trial”.
Of all the different kinds of music that I enjoy, I always seem to come back to the Delta and Country Styles of Blues when I need a good dose of reality, or when my own life seems to be getting me down. Of all the bluesmen that came out of the Mississippi Delta, Robert Johnson is probably the most renowned. Today is Robert Johnson’s birthday. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. Robert Johnson wrote a lot of really good songs and played his guitar in a style no one had ever heard before. Hence, they thought he had sold his soul to the devil. I’ve been to the Delta region of Mississippi quite a few times and the history there still reverberates in the present. I highly recommend travelling the blues highway.
If the blues has a truly mythic figure, one whose story hangs over the music the way a Charlie Parker does over jazz or a Hank Williams does over country, it’s Robert Johnson, certainly the most celebrated figure in the history of the blues. Of course, his legend is immensely fortified by the fact that Johnson also left behind a small legacy of recordings that are considered the emotional apex of the music itself. As a singer, a composer, and as a guitarist of considerable skills, he produced some of the genre’s best music and the ultimate blues legend to deal with. Doomed, haunted, driven by demons, a tormented genius dead at an early age, all of these add up to making him a character of mythology who — if he hadn’t actually existed — would have to be created by some biographer’s overactive romantic imagination.
There are a few different ways you can discover the history and music of the Mississippi Delta region here at the J. Paul Leonard Library. The lyrics in the music are oral histories in and of themselves. Here are some suggestions:
Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries, produced in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, is a virtual encyclopedia of the world’s musical and aural traditions. You must be affiliated with SFSU in order to use this library database. Log in with your SFSU ID number and Library PIN.
This database offers a variety of ways to search for traditional music. For example, you can search by genre, country, artist and cultural group. Try going to the blues genre and exploring there.
The library also has a collection of circulating CDs that you might want to check out:
Muddy Waters came up from the Delta to work in Chicago and throughout his career he worked with many other great bluesmen. Here is a video from YouTube from 1963: Muddy Waters - Got My Mojo Working (1963)Sonny Boy Williamson II (Harmonica), Otis Spann (Piano), Matt Guitar Murphy (Guitar), Willie Dixon (Upright Bass), Bill Stepney (Drums)
(bWinchcombe, Glos., 7 May 1936; dLondon, 13 Dec 1981). Englishcomposer and performer. He received his musical education as a boy chorister at Canterbury Cathedral (1943–50) and at the RAM (1953–7), where his teachers included Howard Ferguson (composition) and Percy Waller (piano). In 1957 he went to Cologne to study with Stockhausen, who employed Cardew as his assistant (1958–60) specifically to collaborate with him in the composition of Carré. Cardew returned to London in 1961, where he took a course in graphic design; he worked intermittently in this field until his death. In 1964 he received an Italian government scholarship to study with Petrassi in Rome. He was elected FRAM in 1966, and in 1967 was appointed professor of composition at the RAM. He was killed in suspicious circumstances near his home in Leyton, East London, by a hit-and-run driver.
One of my favorite free internet sites, UBUWEB, offers music and information about Cornelius Cardew.
Cornelius Cardew: Making Marx in the Music by Kyle Gann (from New Music Box)
No other 20th-century composer so vividly inhabited the overlap of music and politics as England’s Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981). Though killed 22 years ago, he had a tremendous impact on many colleagues in contemporary music, and his influence still determines much of how new music is seen in the context of the world political situation.
From 1958-60, the young Cardew worked as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen in preparation of the latter’s score Carre, and in so doing met and fell under the spell of John Cage. Cardew’s magna opera to this day are two large, Cage-influenced indeterminate scores from the 1960s, Treatise (inspired by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus) and The Great Learning, based on the teachings of Confucius. Another claim to fame is that Cardew was a founding member of both the Scratch Orchestra — a wrangling, obstreperous collective of the 1970s that gave concerts devoted to conceptual art, improvisation, and scores of experimental and even bizarre notation — and also the smaller, tighter improvisation group AMM, formed with Eddie Prevost, Lou Gare, and Keith Rowe.
Here at the J. Paul Leonard Library you can also find materials that will help you learn more about Cornelius Cardew. Some suggestions, below:
Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist, invented LSD. He accidentally discovered its recreational use. He lived to be 102 years of age. Here is a link to his obit and a short video from the BBC.
LSD inspired many young people to TUNE IN TURN ON and DROP OUT, following the advice of Timothy Leary. The use of LSD also seemed to inspire a genre of music now commonly referred to as psychedelia.
San Francisco spawned the Summer of Love, where LSD (acid) was reportedly used heavily. This era also generated the San Francisco Sound and introduced local bands such as the Grateful Dead and The Jefferson Airplane to a wider audience.
Here at the J. Paul Leonard Library, you can find materials to help you learn more about psychedelia. Some suggestions, below.
Faculty Concert Series– Trio in B Major, Op. 8, by Johannes Brahms.
Proceeds benefit the William Corbett-Jones Piano Fund, which provides scholarships and other support to the piano program in honor of Corbett-Jones, pianist and SF State faculty since 1967.
William Corbett-Jones, piano; Margaret Tait, cello; and Luis Baez, clarinet; will perform B Major, Op. 8, by Johannes Brahms, variations on a Theme from Mozart’s Magic Flute. Sonata in A Major by Cesar Franck and Trio in A Minor, Op.114 by Brahms.
Luis Baez is associate clarinetist of the San Francisco Symphony. Baez graduated from the Peabody Conservatory, began his professional career as principal of the Annapolis Opera Company Orchestra and has been a member of the Florida Orchestra, Santa Fe Opera and New Mexico Symphony, where he served as principal clarinet for four years.
Margaret Tait is a cellist of the San Francisco Symphony. She completed her undergraduate education at North Carolina School of Art and finished her Master’s degree at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Tait was also a founding member of the renowned Aurora String Quartet that performed in London, New York and throughout the Bay Area.
The WPA California Folk Music Project is a multi-format ethnographic field collection that includes sound recordings, still photographs, drawings, and written documents from a variety of European ethnic and English- and Spanish-speaking communities in Northern California. The collection comprises 35 hours of folk music recorded in twelve languages representing numerous ethnic groups and 185 musicians.
This elaborate New Deal project was organized and directed by folk music collector Sidney Robertson Cowell for the Northern California Work Projects Administration. Sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley, and cosponsored by the Archive of American Folk Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center), this undertaking was one of the earliest ethnographic field projects to document European, Slavic, Middle Eastern, and English- and Spanish-language folk music in one region of the United States.
I really love The Ramones, and lots of other folks do too. Like these guys (Gus and Fin) from Finland who like to play Ramones songs on their ukeleles:
And here are The Ramones doing it the original way:
