We began the business meeting with a discussion of the IAML 2002 conference, which will be held in Berkeley. The group felt it would be helpful to have an action plan with timelines as preparation for the conference. Questions were raised concerning the completion of the new Music Library at UC Berkeley in time for the conference. Anyone who would like to help with conference planning should email the conference organizer John Roberts at UC Berkeley. Nominations for the MLA Board of Directors and the MLA Citation were due by May 15. It was agreed to nominate Ann Basart for the Citation.
[Note: after the meeting, someone discovered that Ann has been given this award in the past, so is ineligible].
The group discussed the chapter's fees and membership structure. According to our by-laws, there are currently three membership categories: regular, student and retired. The group recommended that the latter two categories be eliminated, leaving only a regular membership. The idea will be posted on the MLA/NCC discussion list, then voted on at the fall 2000 meeting. Nancy Lorimer will create a draft of the new by-laws wording.
Standing Committees were discussed. At present there are three: the Program Committee, the Nominating Committee, and the Membership Committee (which is inactive). It was proposed that we roll the Membership Committee into the Executive Committee. This proposal will also be described on the discussion list and voted on in the fall. Nancy asked for suggestions for future meetings. We discussed asking Jason to give a presentation on Vietnamese music, or Judy to present her library instruction sessions on Opera and Women Composers (chapters in an upcoming book). We were reminded that MLA/NCC holds joint meetings with the Southern California chapter in odd numbered years--the next joint meeting will be held in 2001. The Business Meeting concluded with the election of Ray Heigemeir, Music Cataloger at Stanford University, as our new Chapter Vice-Chair / Chair- Elect.
Following the business meeting we enjoyed lunch at Il Fornaio, then were
treated to an excellent presentation on sound design by Dr. Maribeth
Back, who has done extensive research in music and interactive systems
(for Xerox Parc and elsewhere). She described her work on the Brain
Opera installation at MIT and Lincoln Center. Ms. Back is currently
working as a sound designer at the Tech Museum in San Jose and has
provided the sound elements of the "Listen Reader!", "Walk-In Comics",
and "Reading Eye Dog" portions of its current interactive exhibit
Experiments in the Future of Reading. After hearing about her work, we
and Ms. Back visited the Tech Museum and experienced this multimedia
exhibit ourselves. (Note: the exhibit is still on -- I visited it a
couple of weeks ago with my grandson; it was even more exciting with an
eleven-year-old companion! Highly recommended.)
9:30 - Coffee and pastries, Lefort Recital Hall, Fine Arts Center (FA
72)
10:00-11:30 - Planning meeting for the 2002 IAML meeting in Berkeley
11:30-noon - Tour of the College of Marin Music Library (FA 179)
noon-1:30 - Lunch at Willy's Cafe (a short walk from campus)
1:30-2:30 - Halloween Music Recital (FA 72) "Halloween Songs" by Kevin
Schuepbach (COM instructor); "Lucifer's Dream" (from the opera cycle
Light) by Karlheinz Stockhausen
2:30-3:00 - The Sound of 19th Century California Sheet Music, Corinne
Swall, founder, Mother Lode Musical Theater and Seminars.
3:00-4:00 - Business meeting / Round robin
In July, the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San José State University received a grant of $77,340 from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The grant will fund continuation of the Beethoven Bibliography Database (BBD) project through June 2002. Readily available on the worldwide web, the Database now includes more than 12,000 fully indexed records for books, articles, and scores. Also available since August is the revised 7th edition of the BBD User's Guide and Thesaurus, which provides guidelines for using the web version and a complete list of the 8,400 subject and genre terms used for searching the database. For more information, visit the Beethoven Center's web page.
In October, the Center will open a special exhibit on the 'Guevara Lock' of Beethoven Hair which was purchased at a Sotheby's auction in 1994.
The exhibit will coincide with the release of the book Beethoven's Hair,
by Russell Martin published by Broadway Books. Martin's book recounts
the fascinating tale of the relic's journey from Beethoven's deathbed to
the Ferdinand Hiller family in Germany, then on to Denmark by way of a
German Jew escaping from the Nazis during the Second World War, and
finally to California. The Center is open to visitors from 1:00-5:00
p.m., Monday through Friday and is now located in Room 100 of Modular
Building A (on the Ninth Street Mall, 1 block south of San Fernando).
We had a robbery at the College of Marin Music Library this last spring.
All of our audio CDs were stolen. We printed an article about it in our Music Department newsletter asking the community to help us replace our CDs with donations of money or CDs. Immediately students, present and former, along with other members of the community started donating CDs and money. Then the local paper read the article in our newsletter and ran two articles about the donation drive. KDFC read about that and ran an "adopt a CD" drive and last week Hoyt Smith presented us with 256 CDs from the list of stolen CDs. We have also received donations of over 600 CDs and $800 from the community along with wonderful letters saying how much the music department means to them and how important their time spent here was or is. What a positive note in this world of cutbacks and non-existent budgets!
Donations of CDs or money to the College of Marin Music Library could be
sent to:
College of Marin
Music Department/CDs
835 College Ave.
Kentfield, CA 94904
I retired from Fallen Leaf Press at the end of 1999, and am now a volunteer at the Berkeley Free Clinic.
Greetings to all,
Ann Basart
Jason Gibbs was interviewed about Vietnamese song as part of the April 28, 2000 NPR All Things Considered program in a "Lost and Found Sound" segment entitled "French Manicure - Tales from Vietnamese Nail shops in America."
His article "Spoken Theater, La Scène Tonkinois, and the First Modern Vietnamese Songs" was recently published in Asian Music volume 31/2 (Spring/Summer 2000), 1-33.
Jason's band, the Apes of God, has a website -
http://www.oracularlab.com. On that site he has a personal page
http://www.oracularlab.com/oracularlab/jason/jason.html
and another page with Real Audio files of some of his music:
http://www.oracularlab.com/oracularlab/jason/audio.html.
The annual meeting of the Music Library Association will be held
February 21-25, 2001 at the Grand Hyatt Regency Hotel. Park Avenue at
Grand Central (42nd Street) next to the Grand Central Terminal in New
York City.
Future meetings will he held in Las Vegas, Nevada (2002), Austin, Texas
(2003) and Washington, D.C. / Crystal City, Virginia (2004).