separated at birth: WEMI

Functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR) is a conceptual model of the bibliographic universe to describe entities, relationships, and attributes. The first group of entities are Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item (WEMI). A Work is intellectual or artistic creativity and it is realized in an Expression, which is embodied in a Manifestation and exemplified in an Item. This is easiest to wrap your head around with something like Hamlet. The story was created in the brain of William Shakespeare (or whoever). It was realized in something like The tragicall historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke which was embodied in an edition printed in 1603 in London for N.L. and John Trundell and exemplified in the copy at the Huntington Library. Lots of print resources only come out in one edition and this is a heck of a lot of infrastructure for the library catalog to carry.

In the library cataloging rules such as Resource description and access, relationships and attributes are linked to particular levels. For example, the creator William Shakespeare is a relationship to the Work. If the Huntington copy has a later binding, this is a relationship to the Item. This all gets more complex for music and visual arts and other resources. There's a concise and helpful discussion of "FRBR, WEMI & music" on the website of Gilmore Library of Music at Yale.

Even more concise is a quotation from Michael Tilson Thomas in an article in last Sunday's Times. The quotation is from a 2017 interview. "I have encouraged people to color outside the lines for lack of a better analogy. We're not trying to reproduce the notation here. We're trying to get back to the inspiration that caused the notation to exist." It is not often that FRBR and WEMI are spoken of so aesthetically.

ARLIS/NA @ CDMX

I just got back from the Art Libraries Society of North America conference in Mexico City, our first conference in Mexico although we have been proudly North American all of our collective lives. We have already met a few times in Canada (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Banff). Mexico City is a gritty city, like I like 'em. Gritty, busy, noisy, diverse, full of architectural treasures, good and interesting art, food (fancy and plain).

On our last afternoon, after the business meeting, Bill and I walked over to see the murals in the Secretariat of Public Education building. Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, and others. We meandered on the way back, partly on the Calle de la República de Cuba. In addition to bridal shops and gay bars, we saw this building that could use some attention and maintenance. I think a third-floor deck would be just fine through those open arches.

That evening, we went to the Palacio de Bellas Artes for a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico. The program included an overture by Louise Farrenc (Opus 23), a double bass concerto by Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf (KR 172), and the Third ("Organ") Symphony by Camille Saint-Saëns. The music was lovely. The conductor was a joy to watch. The hall has a Tiffany dome as well as a Tiffany (glass) stage curtain. The first and third works were played on the full stage. The Ditters von Dittersdorf only uses a chamber orchestra so they put some chairs on the front of the proscenium and lowered the Tiffany glass curtain for that portion of the concert. We were physically as well as musically in heaven. Bill had purposely chosen seats in the top of the house (más alta, por favor) so we were close to the Tiffany dome.

Now back home and last night was the dance showing by choreography students at Alfred University. Pretty glorious too. Stendhal much?

(view from exhibit hall at the conference, Hilton Reforma)

(my CDMX picture album on Flickr)

refugees and peacemaking

Today's New York Times has an article about refugees stuck in a "grinding U.S. process" as they await permission to come to the land of the free. We've increased the turmoil with our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our adventures in Syria, Israel, and Palestine. We've helped make it well nigh impossible to peacefully survive in a wide swath of the Middle East and South Asia.

The Global War on Terror has been about as successful in bringing justice, liberty, and peace to the world as the War on Drugs. Perhaps the problem is the WAR part of both of these efforts.

Facing the article on the refugees is one about a concert in the Cathedral Plaza in Havana. There, Lang Lang played a Steinway while Cuban music superstar Chucho Valdés played another piano and the Cuban National Symphony Orchestra (conducted by American Marin Alsop) played Tchaikovsky, Gershwin, and works by Valdés and other Cuban composers. Steinway is contributing the piano to the Cuban Institute of Music.

I know it's not black-or-white, or just war-or-peace, and that it's been fifty years of embargo and distrust between Cuba and the United States. Cuban refugees have been mostly successfully absorbed into life in Florida and I wish more international relations and interactions could be on the music side.

Thursday adventures in Rochester

Thursday is usually one of my days to work at Scholes Library but I had a visit to the dermatologist in Rochester today. So it was off to the big city for a bit of adventure. I wanted to check the used bookstores to see if I could find of copy of The Gallery by John Horne Burns. I had finished not long ago the new biography on Burns entitled Dreadful: the short life and gay times of John Horne Burns by David Margolick. Imagine my delight that Greenwood Books had a copy and the added bonus was that it was a copy of the original 1947 Harper & Brothers edition that had belonged to the composer David Diamond. Franlee, the owner of Greenwood Books, said that she had bought several thousand of his books when his library was being cleared out. Normally I'd rather not have a marked copy but this copy had the marks of someone in whose notes I might be interested. On the way from the East End to the dermatologist, WXXI announced that they were going to be playing his fourth symphony tomorrow, 2015 being the centennial of his birth.

After I bought my book, I went over to Spot Coffee which is located in a former Chevrolet dealership.

I had last Thursday's New York Times with me, to read as I had a bagel snack and coffee. I was saddened to see the obituary for Phil Patton. I have enjoyed reading his essays and books since I was reading the chapter on Route 66 in Open road: a celebration of the American highway (1986) while sitting in a cafe named Route 66 in Amsterdam (yes, the one in the Netherlands). And I even saw a small version of the route sign on someone's mailbox post as I drove home.

Another article in the paper that especially caught my eye was a profile of fashion designer Nicole Hanley Mellon. She had been on a trip to Cuba in the spring. The article states that she "was initially confused by the Cuban capital. 'The first day we were there, it felt like there was no commerce. Each day, through conversation and observation, you peel off another layer.' She met a college student who was 'pretty candid and spoke about the way you're taught art to express a social issue or a political issue more than being personal, which I found interesting.'" This sense of the importance of social welfare and equality was something that seemed alive to me too when I was in Cuba in May. I just hope that Cuba doesn't become just another Caribbean island.

Cuba: music and opera, and using what you have

Our Cuba tour package included one of the first performances of "Cubanacán" -- the first new Cuban opera in fifty years, according to their website. It is based on a book about the building of the National Art Schools on a former golf course. Michael Cooper wrote about it in the New York Times on the day before we left for Havana. The opera was intriguing, the singers were good, and we saw it in front of the triple arch at the front of the School of Plastic Arts. Talk about context.

The worst moment of the trip for me was the evening at the Buena Vista Social Club. Tourist trap, and I felt trapped in the club when I would have loved to escape. The performers were good enough but seemed mostly to be going through the motions.

Far more exciting than Buena Vista was the music that greeted us at several sites along the way or during a meal. Here's Alabao playing at Las Terrazas:

I bought their CD and it is very evocative for me. You can google "alabao cuban band" and find several videos of them. Las Terrazas (The Terraces), by the way, is an ecopark and biosphere with reforestation and new housing. We got treated to music by a family troupe at lunch that day. Very fine.

The regular greeting drink was a mojito but these had little or no rum. Now, the Hotel Nacional bar made a yummy mojito for those late-evening discussions. My swizzle stick collection includes a turkey with drumsticks on a platter; there must have been a special on them at Walmart. Or, rather, you use what you have. I was amused to see French-language signs on a couple school buses, presumably because the buses came from a francophone country. It is more important that you have the bus than getting it repainted.

The sign above the windshield says "Ecoliers" and I saw this bus in the neighborhood around Kcho's studio. He has done a lot of neighborhood improvement and community work there (aka social practice) and pays for a wifi hotspot.

MoreMostArts

Don't want to get boring but the MostArts Festival just gets more wonderful every day. Today's lunchtime concert included the Poulenc Sextet for Piano and Wind Quintet (opus 100, for 100% fine!). New music to me, excitingly played. Tomorrow, as well as the evening gala concert, there's a Roman glass demonstration at the studio of Angus Powers, up the hill, just past the farm. And raku demonstration too.

If you happened to land on this post first, the previous post here was an introduction to the MostArts Festival happening this week in Alfred.

MostArts

This week has been the inaugural MostArts Festival: summer music & art. There have been evening concerts and noontime hour-long "Sound Bites" all week. I don't think I realized how much I'd been missing hearing live music. Today's noontime "Sound Bite" included Piano Trio Number 2 by Dimitri Shostakovich. I have a recording of piano trios 1 and 2 by the Oslo Trio and it's one of my favorite CDs but I don't think I've ever heard Number 2 live. I was thrilled.

As the trio (piano, violin, cello) progressed, I noticed that a student with whom I've had a number of interesting conversations got up and left. I ran into him as I walked home and he said he was viscerally disturbed by the music and had to leave. Each to his own, and I just responded that the visceral reaction showed he was alive.

The noontime chamber concerts have been my favorite part of the festival, with a few works each day by a variety of composers. The musicians are from around North America and vary quite a bit in age. There's a clarinetist -- Camila Barrientos Ossio -- that I love. She plays beautifully and it is interesting to watch her move to the music. She was part of an ensemble that played the Mozart Clarinet Quintet in yesterday's Sound Bite.

Also as I was walking home, one of the pianists that is judging the young pianist competition (Anthony Pattin) was remarking to a local couple that he's been pleased with the festival so far and that chamber music festivals of this quality are not common. He predicted that they'd be lining up next year. I sure hope that Lisa Lantz, the responsible music professor at Alfred University, can pull it off again.

cultural missteps

Light snowfall in the air, off to the BFA senior shows and then the AU Symphony Orchestra concert. I ran into Lydia at the BFA shows. She had posted a note in Facebook on the listing for a show by Adam Katseff so I had assumed she was in New York City. But there she was, having returned in the last 24 hours. We compared notes on recent trips to NYC: where we stayed (Ridgewood and Bushwick), what we saw (Chris Burden, Mike Kelley), neighborhoods, where we ate. John and Ellen joined us and we sadly got into a bit of Brooklyn name-dropping as John and Ellen groaned. Both Lydia and I would love to live in the City, the art is so exciting and invigorating, so "sparkly" as Daniel said.

And then off to Miller for the concert. The house wasn't open so I took out Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie, my current reading. The next story was "Gentrification" wherein a white guy is living in a black neighborhood, the only white, but they're all just folks. Then the white guy does something that he perceives as neighborly, contrary to the customs of the majority black population. He becomes the unwanted. Culture is so inborn and it is easy to go astray.

Getting an apartment in an affordable neighborhood might very well mean living in a minority-majority area. It would be so easy to be "wrong." As I was walking home, thinking about the carol sing-along during the concert, I contemplated how, for some, singing Christian carols could be wrong. I certainly bristle when the Pledge of Allegiance is recited before Alfred Town meetings or the national anthem is played before village band concerts in the summer. No one from New York City would tolerate that. And I'm a child of the 1960s when those emblems of American allegiance got tangled up in the Vietnam War.

Rieu : violin = Rastrelli : cello

When we were in Capo d'Orlando, our B&B host, Calogero Nici, talked about his love of the violinist André Rieu who plays classical music with glitz and circumstance. Not actually to my taste. I prefer "real" (unadulterated) classical music, don't need it all popped up.

I had read a notice about the Rastrelli Cello Quartet coming to Houghton College as part of their U.S. tour. I read the notice to mean that they were something like a traveling Kronos Quartet. Their "non-traditional programming" is more in the lines of Rieu, classical music for the masses, than Kronos. More Vegas than downtown NYC. Or the Miller Theater at Columbia where I heard some great contemporary classical music when I lived in the City. They're good, don't get me wrong about that, and they played the glissandos and glitz with skill and musicality.

If you're interested, here's a link to the video page on the Rastrelli website. One of the things we really enjoyed was how four Russian guys, all playing the cello, could be so different in physical appearance and playing style.

daughter, thought her, water and Sherman Alexie

Doug sent me a link to Sherman Alexie being interviewed by Bill Moyers and I am enjoying his reading of a couple poems: one about Yo Yo Ma's cello and another about Facebook. Now you can guess part of why Doug sent me the link to the interview but it's also interesting to listen to his words about being bi-cultural and bipolar and bi-political. Poetry is sometimes more about words than prose and rhyme is clearly word-y. And that brings back the wonderful rhymes of yesterday's concert of the Penn Yan Community Chorus. These words from the Neighbors' Chorus from La jolie parfumeuse by Offenbach especially thrilled. I loved the rhyme of daughter, thought her, and water.

Was she a very rich man’s daughter
Who showed that she was not all you thought her?
When with your songs of love you sought her,
Were you dowsed with water poured down from above?

Polish cabin fever

New Year's Day 2011 in Boston, and the weather is pretty close to perfect. It's in the 50s (at least) and the snow from the Blizzard of 2010 is disappearing except the stacks. What you need after the Eve's drunken excess is a quiet walk around the neighborhood. I'm at Bill's in Cambridge, Massachusetts and he suggested that I might want to see how the Fogg looks as it is being deconstructed and reconstructed to Renzo Piano's grand plan. They've taken down the back wall, lots of the guts, and Werner Otto Hall from the 1990s. The Fogg is next to the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts done by Le Corbusier in the early 1960s, his only building in North America (not including the U.N. building) and a grand brutalist building. You can see a lot more of Carpenter without Werner Otto and Fogg back in the way.

After I got home to Bill's, he was almost done with preparations for folks coming over at 4 and I insisted that he go get some fresh air rather than my going to get a bottle of wine. WGBH was playing a Rimsky-Korsakov work and it ended. The announcer started telling us what she would play next and I thought I'd like to hear the "Warsaw Concerto" ... so she announced she was about to play the "Warsaw Concerto." Magic. It must be a sign that the coming year will be fine.

For the curious, the picture is of the Lazienski Palace in Warsaw, taken by Andrew Ward, Getty Images, and picked at "random" from the Google Image results from "warsaw poland." The picture with snow was from a war game so not appropriate for me. And the fact that I picked a picture of a neoclassical (Palladian) building is totally coincidental.

immediate gratification

In the Times a couple days ago, there was a column by David Carr on "The media equation." He started with his visit to the Times Square Virgin Megastore where the old people were looking at CDs and the younger people were at the listening posts. And only three people were in the book section "including the old guy with the long coat and beard who seems to be in every bookstore." (He saw me?) Carr talks about the ease and customization of downloading a music file and how folks said MP3 files would be rejected because they weren't very high fidelity. Well, it turned out that "good enough was good enough." And there are the same thoughts about books. Carr doesn't mention it but I drifted off to thoughts of using Power Point to put together your art history lecture. It's so easy and the pictures aren't going to be like the originals anyway so why pretend?

Carr quotes Clay Shirky quite a bit because Shirky just brought out a new book entitled Here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. Of course there's something ironic about a thinker like Shirky publishing a tangible book-length print resource. By the way, Strand had three review copies last week ... though only two by the time I left the store. My little bit of "I want it now" even though I'm reading Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson at the moment. At last night's lecture by John Harris on "The destruction of the country house," he mentioned Fiske Kimball's purchase of rooms for the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the 1920s, some of which were later discovered to be composite fabrications.

Carr = https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/business/media/31carr.html

Shirky's Everybody = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody

gubaidulina

Wednesday night took me to Zankel Hall for a Sofia Gubaidulina concert. Wow! Double wow! It was incredible. The first piece -- "Rejoice!" -- was a sonata for violin and cello. The second and third pieces were for eight and seven cellos respectively, with a couple waterhorns tossed in for "On the edge of the abyss." Gubaidulina (goo-bye-DOOL-inna) was unable to attend because her husband died recently. Instead, they showed clips from a couple documentaries, good place setters. It was truly a delight to listen and watch, the way the sounds drifted between cacophony and harmony, the way the cellists worked their instruments. One of the documentaries talked about the way Gubaidulina touched the folk instruments, there was also something tactile about the playing of the cellos.

For a completely different experience, last night was a concert by the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir. Early music, Bach, Buxtehude and Corelli. Very different from the Gubaidulina. Good. I guess I preferred the Gubaidulina but the baroque concert reminded me very much of my mother and her love of Christmas oratorios.

At the mentoring panel on association participation on Wednesday, Jennifer enthused about the 18th century when I mentioned that I'd chosen an 18th-century panel at College Art. It occurred to me, as I was reading during the intermission last night, that I'm actually reading a book that dwells in the 18th century -- Princesses: the six daughters of George III by Flora Fraser.