Musicals! We all Love Them!

 
This month, the Library is exploring the world of musicals. We're also looking at vocal health and injury prevention - important for any singer!
 

Musical Theatre eResources

DIGITAL THEATRE PLUS has musical productions and interviews. Below is a sample of what you can watch.
 

 

 

 

 
This is by no means everything!  How about Practitioners on Practice, with Tarek Merchant, or A Musical Director's Perspective, with Tom Attwood?
 
Meanwhile, Drama Online has eBooks about Musical Theatre.  Try these:-

• British Musical Theatre since 1950 / Robert Gordon et al
• Broadway Swings: Covering the Ensemble in Musical Theatre / J Austin Eyer and Lyndy Franklin Smith
• The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen : Critical Approaches from 'Snow White' to 'Frozen'by George Rodosthenous
• Musical Theatre, a History / John Kenrick

- you'll find all these by searching Catalogue Plus.  (Click the Catalogue Plus button before doing this search!)

 
Trouble accessing offsite? Try looking at our guides on the portal.
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Vocal Health & Injury Prevention eResources

Articles and book chapters available include these:-

•  Vocal Health and Singing Pedagogy: Considerations from Biology and Motor Learning
• Top 10 Exercises for Vocal Health
• Promoting Vocal Health in the Choral Rehearsal
• Teaching healthy musicianship: the music educator's guide to injury prevention and wellness
• PLAYING Healthy STAYING Healthy: What Every Musician Needs To Know

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Try these e-books, too!

 

 

 

 
 
 

Wheesht* in the Whittaker Library

As the final teaching term starts and final exams, performances and recitals are imminent, we appreciate that this can be a busy and stressful time for all. We hope the Library will offer a space to study and reflect in a peaceful and calm environment.

While space is always at a premium, and the Library can be a busy place, readers can help to maintain the Library as a place of learning and study, by using it quietly, and with respect for others.

There are new collaborative areas along in our Alexander Gibson Opera School for readers needing to work in groups, whilst the Silent Study Space in the Library is the best option for those desirous of complete quiet.

Readers' support in this is so appreciated and we wish all our students the best of luck in this final undergrad teaching term.

Many thanks,

The Library Team

*Wheesht! - Scottish word meaning "hush" or "be quiet"

Safety First! No more trailing desk cables in the Library

It was a worry.  All our electricity sockets were in floor boxes, some underneath tables and some in the aisles. When our library was built, no-one had laptops, phone chargers or tablets.  Something had to change!

Allow Twittaker to plug our new plugs! Well, sockets, to be honest.  Sock it to 'em, Twittaker!

Talking of Plugs - RCS has a new music festival also, coincidentally, called Plug, which runs from 3-10 May 2019. It's much more exciting than our sockets - visit our Box Office to find out more!

Performance Anxiety? Complete a Survey, Contribute to Research on this Important Topic!

We noticed this opportunity in the Royal Musical Association Bulletin, and we are forwarding it on behalf of researchers at the Royal College of Music - please do consider helping, if you fit the description of the kind of respondents they need!

"Performance-Related Coping Behaviours in Musicians Study

"Ugne Peistaraite, in association with the Centre for Performance Science at the Royal College of Music, invites members to participate in a short survey. The aim of the study is to investigate the frequency and nature of music in performance-related managing and coping behaviours in amateur, professional, and student musicians, and to examine the association of these behaviours with levels of music-related perfectionism. You can find the survey here, which takes around 20 minutes to complete."

More Information:-

"PERFORMANCE-RELATED COPING BEHAVIOURS IN MUSICIANS:ASSOCIATIONS WITH MUSIC PERFORMANCE ANXIETY AND PERFECTIONISM
 
PARTICIPANT INFORMATION
 
A research study is being conducted at the Royal College of Music by Dr Kate Gee and Dr Martin Anson Canterbury Christ Church University...

To participate in this research you must:
 

• Have regularly performed music at some point (either recently or in the past)
• Have performed music in front of an audience in the last two years
• Be 18 years of age or above 

Survey link 

 

Drama Online gets new Content uploaded!

We received notification of one of Drama Online's regular content uploads.  Too good to keep to ourselves, so we're sharing it.  (The Whittaker Library subscribes for the benefit of all staff and students here at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.)

Core Collection: Annual Update 2018/19 Part 2

"Drama Online's Core Collection is updated twice a year. The second of the 2018/19 updates is now live. Core Collection subscribers and perpetual access customers who have purchased the 2018/2019 annual update have immediate access to the plays. "Methuen Drama: 30 plays from countries around the world including India, Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Japan, Korea, and many more.  "Faber & Faber: Highlights include: Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van, Enjoy, Habeas Corpus and Forty Years On; 9 Tom Stoppard plays; as well as new plays, Salt and A Very Very Very Dark Matter.

Best New Play 2019 Olivier Awards

Matthew Lopez's 'The Inheritance' premiered in two parts at the Young Vic Theatre, London, in March 2018 and went on to Noël Coward Theatre in 2019. This play has won the 2019 AMERICAN AIRLINES BEST NEW PLAY at the Olivier Awards, this April. Checkout this play for monologues or duologues for showcase!

Click here to find it in the library  

"You have to wonder why there isn't a word in the English language for the fireworks that go off in your brain when you finally kiss someone you've wanted for years. Or for the intimacy and tenderness you feel as you hold the hand of a suffering friend. A generation after the height of the AIDS crisis, what is it like to be a young gay man in New York? How many words are there now for the different kinds of pain, the different kinds of love?"

Focus on Theatre Design : Oliver Messel

Oliver Messel (13 January 1904 – 13 July 1978) was an English artist and one of the foremost stage designers of the 20th century. He started his artistic life as a portrait painter and commissions for theatre work soon followed, beginning with his designing the masks for a London production of Serge Diaghilev's ballet Zephyr et Flore (1925). Subsequently, he created masks, costumes, and sets – many of which have been preserved by the V and A Performing Arts Department.

His work as a set designer was also featured in the USA in such Broadway shows as The Country Wife (1936); The Lady's Not For Burning (1950); Romeo and Juliet (1951); House of Flowers (1954), for which he won the Tony Award; and Rashomon (1959), which was nominated for a Tony Award for his costume as well as his set design. He also designed the costumes for Romeo and Juliet; Rashomon; and Gigi (1973), the latter two receiving Tony Award nominations.
 
For film his costume designs include The Private Life of Don Juan (1934); Scarlet Pimpernel (1934); Romeo and Juliet (1936); The Thief of Bagdad (1940); and Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). For Romeo and Juliet he also served as Set Decorator. He was Art Director on Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), On Such a Night (1956) and Production Designer on Suddenly Last Summer (1959), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award.

The library/ Theatre Collection of the University of Bristol acquired his personal archive in 2015 and through project funding have digitised and made accessible a great deal of his documents, which tell a fascinating tale not simply of an artist but also a passionate man, who was well ahead of his time in terms of social concerns and cultural aesthetics.

Click here to visit the Oliver Messel archive online at the University of Bristol

Click here for Oliver Messel exhibition website at University of Bristol

Click here to visit the Oliver Messel pages of the V and A website