Amy Beach: Passionate Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) by Adrienne Block has been in the collection for ten years now, but it is still a prime source for information about the remarkable American composer, Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867-1944). What’s more, Block writes with an engaging style and fresh perspective that has kept this reader riveted this summer. Block traces the Marcy and Cheney family histories in New England, explores Amy Beach’s early struggles as an extremely talented child with limited means, explains the effect her marriage to Dr. H. H. A. Beach had on both her social status and artistic freedom, and follows her life long struggle with prejudices against female composers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Don’t miss the “Catalog of Works” in the appendix, which displays the impressive breadth of Amy Beach’s accomplishments, from piano miniatures and songs to orchestral works and a piano concerto, as well as a mass and other choral works (sacred and secular). My personal favorites are her lovely solo keyboard works (many of which reflect her life long fascination with bird calls) and her dark and passionate Piano Quintet in F-sharp Minor, Op. 67.

This item is available in the general collection: ML 410 .B36 B56 1998

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“In no great hurry, the short, simple train rumbles across the flat North German landscape. ‘Today the small train of my childhood is still running,’ writes Lotte Lehman in her autobiography of 1937, from Wittenberge through the thinning pine woods of sandy Wesprignitz County, straight to Perleberg, some twenty miles away.”

With these first lines, the reader of Never Sang for Hitler: The Life and Times of Lotte Lehmann is drawn to board the train that is the story of Lotte Lehmann’s extraordinary life. Michael H. Kater’s new book, hot off of Cambridge University Press (March 2008), details the struggles Lehmann faced as a brilliant singer and actress in Nazi Germany, her subsequent difficulties assimilating to American culture after she fled the Nazis, and her final days as a teacher and mentor to younger musicians.

For those fascinated by the tangled labyrinth of music, culture, and politics that ultimately resulted in “Romanticism,” James H. Donelan’s first book, Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic (Cambridge University Press, 2008), is a must-read. A nicely condensed dissertation, Donelan’s study of Hegel, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, and Beethoven provides a readable exploration of the intimately connected worlds of music and words in the first several decades of the 19th century.

Please stop by the music library to have a look at these books and the rest of our new titles this week!

These items will be available for circulation on June 18, 2008.

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The songwriter/singer/novelist Chico Buarque has a career spanning decades and including collaborations with the top figures in Brazilian music, including Tom Jobim, but although he is part of the pantheon south of the Equator, he is very little known in the United States, for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, the balance between verbal play and musical ingenuity in his songs tilts toward the former, not because the musical content is weak, but because the lyrics are incomparable. This means that listeners who might be able to appreciate the work of Caetano Veloso, a flamboyant performer and a composer whose music draws more on international styles, even without understanding what he is singing about, may find it hard to discover a way into the large and diverse oeuvre of Chico Buarque, whose songs require a deep knowledge of the Portuguese language. In addition, Buarque performs rarely, whether inside Brazil or out. (It is noteworthy that there is one article on Buarque in the NY Times, by the foreign correspondent in Rio, as compared with dozens on Veloso).

The Music Library has just acquired a 21-CD collection of Buarque’s recordings, as well as nine DVDs. There could be almost no better reason for brushing up your Portuguese.

DVD 691, DVD 901, DVD 902 and CD 16101-16122

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MESTRE AMBROSIO – CD 7527

Music-lovers from outside Brazil usually identify the country musically with the samba, the highlight of Carnaval each year, a cultural product imported to Rio de Janeiro from Salvador in the early twentieth century, and adopted as a national symbol by the government of Getulio Vargas in the 30’s and 40s. But Brazil, a large country with a heritage of more than 500 years since its colonization, has musical roots that are deep and various, and nowhere more so than in the Northeast, where the Portuguese arrived first. If a composer wants to evoke Brazil, he draws upon the folk music of the Northeast -particularly Paraiba and Pernambuco.

            The musical group known as Mestre Ambrosio (“Mestre”, or master, is the honorific given to a skilled musician) is based in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco. The group was formed in 1992, and recorded its first CD in 1995, which was produced by pop star Lenine. Unlike Lenine’s music, where more mainstream musical sounds are flavored with Northeastern idioms, Mestre Ambrosio is much closer to back-country Northeastern roots, with a stripped-sound style based on the rabeca (a folk-violin which dates to Portuguese borrowings from Muslim invaders in the middle ages), with percussion. Lots of percussion – the photo on the CD shows the lone rabeca (played by Siba) with no fewer than five percussion instruments. On occasion you may hear an electric guitar or bass – but the music rocks without these. The groove is infectious, and the lyrics amusing or hilarious, with a deadpan delivery by lead singer Siba. Once this disc hits your CD player, it will stay there.

Official site (Portuguese only): http://www2.uol.com.br/mestreambrosio/

-Tom Moore

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