Blog Posts by Subject: Recorded Sound and Video

For 80 years, New York Public Library staff shared the best titles for teens in an annual list called Books for the Teen Age.

Last year, Books for the Teen Age became Stuff for the Teen Age, a multimedia, multi-format, targeted, and teen-tested list of the best of the year in teen books, music, graphic novels, movies, games, and more.

This year, Stuff for the Teen Age becomes a blog.

When a teenaged Bob Marley began recording in 1963 with The Wailing Wailers, Reggae did not exist yet. Back then Kingston Town, Jamaica was bubbling over with the jump-up-and-down energy of Ska, slowly maturing into the deliberate beats of Rocksteady.

My favorite function of air, besides perhaps its ability to keep us all alive, is its ability to move beautiful sounds from place to place. For sound to travel, each molecule in the air must internalize the vibrations and pass that energy on to its neighbors in a fraction of second, and no piece of music can remind the air of this sacred purpose more than Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina's Pope Marcellus Mass.

Afrobeat has been called the soundtrack to post-colonial Africa: reviving the indigenous rhythms eminating from the soil and from the blood, internalizing the best aspects of other cultures and molding them into something new, and making people dance with honest smiles on their faces even while addressing the issues of intense poverty and widespread human rights abuses at the hands of corrupt governments.

The Steve Miller Band's lesser known late 60's-era recordings might surprise you. In 1972, blues-rock guitarist Steve Miller broke his neck in a car accident. It put him out of commission for a full year, a time he used to write catchy blues-influenced pop songs. He emerged to become a huge success, with memorable songs like Fly Like an Eagle, and Take the Money and Run.

It is 8th Street, but from Third Avenue to Avenue A it is called St. Marks Place and is named for St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, which is not even on 8th Street, or St. Marks Place, but at the intersection of 10th Street, Second Avenue, and Stuyvesant Street. The land there has been a site of Christian worship since 1660. The history of St. Marks Place doesn’t go back that far, but a surprising amount of history has happened on these four blocks.

January 23, 2010 marks the centennial of the birth of Django Reinhardt. Reinhardt grew up in gypsy camps outside Paris and began playing violin, banjo, and guitar at a young age.

After a number of years in an historic Greenwich Village library I’ve spent the past few weeks in an equally historic East Village library. The Ottendorfer Branch of The New York Public Library is surrounded by literary, political, and musical history. From Leon Trotsky and Abbie Hoffman to Allen Ginsberg and Joey Ramone,

Sound poetry, also known as polypoetry, is a performance art, a live show, which combines many elements, such as the written word, human voice, musical instruments, electronic sounds, movement, mime and projected images.

A major proponent of this art form is Enzo Minarelli, performer and scholar from Bologna, Italy, who developed a Manifesto of Polypoetry, containing his theories of the performance of sound poetry, touching on the rhythms of language, exploitation of sounds and use of electronic media.

This Wednesday evening, November 18, starting at 6:30 pm, Enzo Minarelli, will be performing a one-man show of his polypoetry. The performance will be held 

I've been on the planning committee for this year's student reception at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. It's a great opportunity to meet students who will be exploring the use of the library. Students get to meet each other from diverse schools who would not ordinarily encounter one another.

Throughout these late winter and spring months, work crews have been feverishly drilling, planting, laying, grouting, irrigating, digging and welding outside of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in preparation for summer, when crowds of tourists and city dwellers will be looking for a shaded seat or a grassy knoll on which to perch with a sandwich or a friend.

If you take US Route 20 heading east from Albany, New York, you will eventually drive through the rural village of Nassau. There are three gas stations, a couple of pizza places and a trailer-cum-restaurant on the empty lot where Delson’s department store stood until it burned to the ground in the early 1980s.

Along with Sarah Ziebell and Lisa Lopez, I work on the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Project, whose mission is to program and document live music (mostly jazz), theater, and dance in connection with the 10 year anniversary of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation's grant program.

In addition to the programming aspects, the grant also covers the preservation of a collection of oral history interviews conducted in the early 1970s by the dance critic, Don McDonagh, on people associated with the iconic dancer/choreographer, Martha Graham.

Lucky me, I get to listen to the interviews and am in the proces of cataloging the hours of conversations. After working with Safe Sound 

10. It is hot outside. It is cool inside. Very cool!

9. It’s FREE!

8. I’m thinking about unveiling the world premiere of my new composition 4:34, a tribute of sorts, based on Cage’s own 4:33. So show up early! My composition is one second longer, and therefore, one second better!

7. See number 4.

Many warm greetings and thanks to Sebastian Pryke who, in a reponse to one of my previous posts, revealed himself to be the great-great grandnephew of child prodigy James G. Speaight. Sebastian and his brother Jonathan Pryke are apparently the great-great grandsons of James's brother Joseph Speaight (1868-1947) who was a British pianist, composer, and taught at Trinity College. According to Baker's biographical dictionary of musicians (7th edition), Joseph composed three symphonies, a piano concerto, and other works such as songs.

The British Library catalog lists quite a number of songs and small works by Joseph Speaight. Sebastian mentioned Joseph's unpublished 

Brooklyn Museum and the near-permanent exhibit, American Identities. Tired from the walk, we loitered around the first room and looked at the disparate paintings, furniture & objets d’art. Also in this room was a television monitor showing a loop of Thomas Edison’s films of revelers at Coney Island. These films reminded one of us of another Edison film from Coney Island that hasn’t made it onto the Library of Congress’ American Memory site: “Electrocuting an Elephant” (1903). Two grainy versions of the film are available here & here, but it’s perhaps best to start with the reported account of the execution from the New York Times