Music Library News

IPA Source Provides Phonetic Guide to Arias and Songs

Voice students and faculty will be pleased to see the Music Library now provides access to IPA Source. This database contains International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions and literal translations of opera arias and art song texts. Over 4,000 individual musical works are included.

Access to IPA Source is available on or off campus, from the Music Library homepage or the ER directory.

Ligeti Piano Concerto Returns to NU

With the recent acquisition of the manuscript for György Ligeti's Piano Concerto, the Music Library has added to its collection an item significant not only to the history of music but also to the history of Northwestern.

Ligeti, a leading figure of the post-World War II avant garde, was asked in the early 1970s by conductor Mario di Bonaventura to compose a piano concerto. Following years of delay, the first version of the concerto was premiered in October 1986 in Graz, Austria, under the baton of Maestro di Bonaventura with his brother, Anthony di Bonaventura, as soloist. Subsequent revision of the concerto led Ligeti to compose two additional movements, and the premiere of the complete five-movement work was given in Vienna in February 1988, again with the brothers di Bonaventura performing.

The following November, Mario di Bonaventura conducted another historic performance of the concerto, this time with Volker Banfield at the keyboard, in the work’s American premiere at Northwestern University’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall. Though at the time he was a faculty member at Dartmouth College, di Bonaventura had connections to Northwestern through his wife, Dorothy, an alumna of the School of Music, and his close friend George Howerton, Dean of the School of Music from 1951 to 1971. Describing the American premiere of the concerto as “a big, dramatic, compelling kaleidoscope of sounds” with “grotesque splashes of instrumental color, eruptive cluster chords, [and] passages that sound like controlled aleatory,” the Chicago Tribune praised the performance, in which “the orchestra played as if possessed” and di Bonaventura proved to be “a model collaborator.” As a token of this collaboration and their friendship, Ligeti gave di Bonaventura the manuscript for the Piano Concerto, which became one of the conductor’s most prized possessions.

In 2006, the Music Library began conversations with Mr. di Bonaventura about this manuscript. Learning of the Music Library’s extensive holdings of original materials by prominent twentieth-century composers like Cage, Lutosławski, and Boulez, and also knowing well Northwestern's historical association with the concerto, Maestro di Bonaventura decided the Music Library would be the ideal permanent home for the manuscript.

As Ligeti's final, carefully notated draft of the work, the manuscript serves as a valuable resource for studying the dense harmonies, close counterpoint, and complex rhythms that characterize the concerto. The acquisition of such a manuscript would be notable under any circumstance, but given the work’s ties to Northwestern, this is an especially important addition to our library.