Love story – music, women, and Shakespeare

What better way to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday than with some music?

Rather than rely on Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Arne, Verdi, and all the other classical music uses of Shakespeare themes, I’ve gone looking elsewhere. Another blog, Shakespeare in popular music was very useful in this regard. Although many of the links no longer work (for various reasons), the listings are fascinating. In some cases, the link with Shakespeare is clear; with others, it would need more digging.

Pioneers

For this International Women’s Day, let’s focus on female composers. Not all of them – that would take a very long time. Instead, we’re going to take a look at some pioneering women who strove to get their music heard at roughly the time of the suffragist movement.

Derek Jarman: his films and their music

Derek Jarman’s films hold a special place in British queer cinema. Bold, experimental, unapologetic, and always following his own creative vision, they told of diverse lives at a time when those lives were hardly out of the shadows. The partial decriminalisation of homosexuality through The Sexual Offences Act only occurred in 1967. Then, in the 1980s and early 1990s, came the scourge of HIV/Aids and its attendant demonisations, accompanied by Margaret Thatcher’s Section 28 and its partial muzzling of queer expression.

Music plays an important part in Jarman’s work. In this post for LGBTQ History Month, let’s see what’s out there.

What to choose? Buying our sheet music

What to choose? What to buy? There’s a huge amount of sheet music out there. Deciding what to spend our limited budget on can appear a challenge. For this post, we’ll look (in a broad brush way) at how we choose what we do and why.

Along the way, you’ll hopefully spot new composers, new music, new sounds in the making. And maybe give them a listen too.

The Sound of music – Christmas edition

If you think of the Trapp family at all, it’s probably in relation to The Sound of Music, movie or musical. In this post though, we’re looking at something which came from the Trapps’ real life as a singing group in America during the 1940s and 50s.

Wasner: The Trapp family book of Christmas songs (publ. 1950)

‘Trapp family book’ – paper front cover

The publisher’s blurb.

The Trapp (or, von Trapp) family spent most of the 1930s based in Austria and touring throughout Europe and the US. Once Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, they fled first to Italy and then to the US, where they stayed. Their local priest in Austria, Franz Wasner, remained the choir’s musical director and is the guiding hand behind our book of carols.

‘Can’t get by without you’ – song sheets by Black artists

As we near the end of Black History Month, I found time to raid our song sheet boxes in search of suitable exhibits. Was the choice overwhelming? No, but there are more examples than I perhaps expected. Let’s see what I uncovered.

You may also be interested in another, more historical BHM post we did a while back: Harriet Beecher Stowe in song .

Enriching your musical learning

If you’re studying to be a musician or singer, it can be easy to focus only on your course requirements. Studying for exams, building up repertoire, or an apparent lack of time can all lead to a narrowing of your musical horizons.

The Library of Birmingham’s Music Library can help you explore further afield. With many thousands of scores, books on music, and performance sets, the Music Library is one of the largest local authority music libraries in the UK. We welcome all new and existing customers. Although our services are aimed at everyone in the city, there’s plenty to interest students. Joining Birmingham Libraries is free and easy to do, and many services are free of charge.

Come with us on a short tour of the Music Library and discover what we have to offer you.

Back to the (start of the) 80’s again

A while back, we had a look at a random selection of song sheets from the early 1980s, Back to the (start of the) 80’s . In honour of Birmingham’s Gay Village and their ‘Back to the 80’s night’, here’s another, possibly even more random selection from the first half of the decade. Which songs do you know, or even remember from the first time around?

For all the Music Library mostly stopped buying single song sheets in the 1980’s, we still have an intriguing, though limited selection. Let’s start with this one:

Brian May & Queen  Save me  (publ. 1980)

Queen – Save me

The Game was Queen’s eighth studio album and is described either as ‘disco’ influenced, or when they turned towards pop rather than rock. The Wikipedia article quotes some responses to its original release. You’re left wondering whether they’re talking about the same music.

Made in Birmingham 4 – Ruth Gipps

CBSO concert from the BBC Proms listing

If you’re anything like me, Ruth Gipps will be little more than a name. Admittedly as a female composer, she stirs a little more interest than some of other composers of her time. What I didn’t realise is her connection to Birmingham and the CBSO. This month’s BBC Proms concert (see above) which includes her music set me looking.

Let’s explore that connection alongside her music.

Lucille Corcos – illustrating the Savoy operas

Not for the first time, a chance encounter with an item from our stock sparked the idea for this post.

A colleague approached, carrying a large, battered, evidently fairly elderly book. “What d’you think about this?” A hint of excitement in her voice warned me everything wasn’t quite as it appeared. It didn’t take me long to find out why. Join us in discovering Lucille Corcos, her art, and her love for the Savoy operas of Gilbert and Sullivan.