Theatre for Kids - Ben Fletcher Watson reviews "Oily Cart"

Three Decades of Pioneering Practice

A Review of Oily Cart: all sort of theatre for all sorts of kids, edited by Mark Brown.

(Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 2012). 
168 p., £22.99. ISBN: 1858565103

 Royal Conservatoire of Scotland researcher Ben Fletcher Watson has uploaded his review of a book about theatre for children.  Visit his Academia.edu page here to read it.

The Beauty of Belaieff, by Richard Beattie Davis

The historic Russian music publishing house, Belaieff, produced startlingly beautiful covers for their scores.  The Whittaker Library at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland has today been gifted a copy of the late Richard Beattie Davis' book, The Beauty of Belaieff.  

Like the collection, the book itself is beautiful. 

•  More about the book itself HERE.
• Find it in our collection, HERE. 

Richard Beattie Davis (1922-2008) was an English musicologist and collector.  His collection is now in Florida Atlantis University - the Davis Music Collection.

Book Review

A lifetime’s dedicated research has gone into Richard Beattie Davis’s magnificent book, The Beauty of Belaieff.  Describing Mitrofan Petrovich Belaieff as ‘more an enabler than a creator’, Davis documents the impressive music publishing house that this wealthy timber merchant established in middle life.  Belaieff’s publishing output is in itself a record of an epoch in Russian music, and Davis’s book devotes chapters to each of the 18 composers that Belaieff promoted.

The publication in colour of over one hundred and fifty title pages makes this volume handsome enough to merit the epithet, ‘coffee-table book’ as well as being a serious study, for these illustrations both enhance and inform the extensive text.  Music title pages are a rather unique art-form, and although this volume is not a history of Belaieff’s commissioned art-work per se, it goes without saying that Davis does provide commentary on them.

Davis systematically collected Belaieff publications on a grand scale, and his research embraced published histories, reference works, a vast amount of correspondence between Belaieff and his composers, not to mention extensive library visits.  It is gratifying, and humbling, to consider that Davis's initial researches in Westminster Music Library, and then in other libraries, were to bear fruit in such an admirable monograph.  Books of this stature are a welcome endorsement of the importance of specialist music libraries to music-lovers and researchers, and underline not only their important function of retaining old and perhaps forgotten music for posterity, but also the ‘enabling’ role that their staff are able to offer.

Dr Karen E. McAulay   

 

The Lads Like Beer (Book and CD Review)

The Lads Like Beer: the Fiddle Music of James Hill's Tyneside

by Graham Dixon (2nd edition)

There are times in a librarian's day when they take a deep breath, smother a sigh, and try to pretend that they really, really enjoy cataloguing piles of books.  Amidst today's pile, the bright orange cover of Graham Dixon's The Lads Like Beer and its accompanying CD offered a diverting break from the classical and jazz repertoire on the desk in front of me.  And it blew my breath away.

A closer look (purely in the interests of establishing correct name and subject authority headings) revealed a fascinating book, with an extensive preface about fiddle music and fiddling styles in nineteenth century Newcastle upon Tyne, followed by a collection of the fiddle tunes written by James Hill, who originated from Scotland but spent his adult years on Tyneside.  Did you know there was a 'Newcastle Style' of bowing hornpipes?  (If you want to know more, you also need to read an old fiddle tutor by W. C. Honeyman - The Strathspey, Reel and Hornpipe Tutor.  We have it in the Whittaker Library.  Just ask at the desk!)



Storify - have you tried it yet?

Storify - tell your story

Storify is a way of telling a story using social media, pulling together resources and linking them with your own text. 

It's another kind of blog, in a sense.  But it's easy and fun - I can see myself using it again.  Here's a story I made up in my lunchbreak:-

Musings on Creativity: book review of The Fiddletree, by Otis A. Tomas.

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