The Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library at Harvard University is pleased to announce the launch of The Music in The Music of Black Americans, a digital appendix to The Music of Black Americans, the landmark book by Dr. Eileen Southern. Dr. Southern was the first Black woman to receive a tenured professorship in Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1974, three years after the first edition of The Music of Black Americans was published; the book itself is a monumental work that develops an extensive musical and cultural history of Black Americans, spanning from before the trans-Atlantic slave trade and continuing through to the mid twentieth century. The site bridges the gap between the text and music as it appears in the book, and as it could appear in the hands or on the screen of a composer, conductor, or musicologist today.
This appendix to the book was created with the support of an Advancing Open Knowledge grant from Harvard Library and is included on the website already designed for the Eileen Southern Project, launched in 2022. The Music in The Music of Black Americans offers the first organized, openly accessible inventory of the musical examples in the first edition of The Music of Black Americans. It provides full-text open access to the complete scores of almost all of these examples, from sources in the collections of Harvard Library and nine other institutions. As an open-access project, the appendix furthers Harvard Library's commitment to champion access and share knowledge with users around the world. (The Music of Black Americans was exceedingly popular and was most recently reprinted in 2022). Digital scores available on The Music in The Music of Black Americans include:
• Scott's Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag (digital score provided by Indiana University Library)
• R. Nathaniel Dett's In The Bottoms (digital score provided by University of Rochester Library)
• Bob Cole's Under the Bamboo Tree (digital score provided by Harvard Library)
0 Comments.