This new finding aid reflects the Music Library's ongoing efforts to improve access to its archival holdings. With the Notations finding aid completed, we are now at work cataloging the great body of additional correspondence that is part of the John Cage Collection.

See the Music Library's website to view the Notations finding aid, as well as additional information about the John Cage Collection.

Special thanks to Music Library staff members Jennifer Ward and Ruth Young for their work on the Notations finding aid and their continuing work processing our Cage materials.

For more information, see the article on the NewsCenter site.

While oversize scores present challenges in all libraries, the Music Library has an unusually great amount of oversize scores due to the library's particular emphasis on twentieth-century and contemporary music, which often is published in large formats to allow for the very large orchestras and unorthodox notation used by many composers since World War II.

To make room for the new shelving, the reading room has been slightly reconfigured. The new layout provides a large open area with tables and seating as well as wireless internet service and study carrels that can be reserved.

The Music Library thanks students, faculty, and all its patrons for their patience while we made this improvement, and we hope that everyone finds it easier to access oversize scores and that the reading room is a more welcoming and comfortable area for studying.

These acquisitions, which complement other Ravel manuscripts in the Music Library's collection, were purchased with support of the Constance Heilman Brakke Endowed Fund, the James A. and Sally Ann Hagan Endowed Fund, and the Christine S. Lewis Music Library Fund.

Morris holds a B.A. in Music History and Theory from Oberlin College, an M.A. in Folklore with a concentration in Ethnomusicology from Indiana University, and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a member of the Music Library Association, and his publications include The King's Theatre Collection: Ballet and Italian Opera in London, 1706-1883 from the John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection, Harvard Theatre Collection (Houghton Library, 2003; rev. ed. 2006), Italian Ballet, 1637-1977 from the John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection, Harvard Theatre Collection (Houghton Library, 2005), sixteen articles in the Encyclopedia of the Blues (Routledge, 2006), and reviews in Notes and the Journal of American Folklore.

In addition to making its holdings of manuscripts and other rare materials available to students, faculty, and visiting researchers, the Northwestern University Music Library lends items to museums for special exhibitions. In this exhibit, the Music Library highlights selected items that have been presented at museums in the United States, Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. Unique original works by John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie, and others are included, and catalogs published in conjunction with the exhibitions are also displayed.

Reference and General Questions
Effective immediately, I ask that all e-mail reference questions and other general queries be sent to musiclibrary@northwestern.edu This is now the primary e-mail address for the Music Library, and all messages sent to that address will be routed to the proper staff member. For telephone queries, the Music Library's usual phone number should be used: 847-491-3434.

Library Instruction Classes
Faculty wishing to schedule library instruction sessions for their courses should contact me to arrange a time and to discuss what topic(s) you would like to have covered. For the interim, I will be coordinating all classroom instruction. In most cases, I plan to teach the sessions myself, but, when this is not possible due to scheduling conflicts, I may draw on staff from the Main Library's reference department to assist. Faculty who would like to include library instruction in their courses are encouraged to contact me as soon as possible.

Congratulations, Jeanette!

For more information, see the Talking Jazz website. Talking Jazz is available in the Music Library Listening Center (CD25102).

Providing easy access to a broad body of analytical literature, the book aims to assist a variety of users, including:

• Students seeking analyses for coursework or term papers
  
• Performers interpreting works for performance and preparing program notes
  
• Composers looking to understand musical structures and compositional techniques
  
• Scholars whose research draws on analytical writings
  

The work, Daughters of the Lonesome Isle, is a piece composed by Cage in 1945 for dancer Jean Erdman, who was a leading figure in American modern dance, a collaborator with both Cage and Merce Cunningham, and a featured dancer in the Martha Graham Dance Company.

"This manuscript is an extraordinarily important addition to the materials we already have in our John Cage Collection," says D.J. Hoek, head of Northwestern's Music Library. Northwestern's Cage Collection is the largest repository of Cage's correspondence and ephemera anywhere in the world. It includes many of the original manuscripts by other composers that Cage collected, but only a handful of his own compositions.

In memory of her father, Dina has given copies of her book to the NU Library and will distribute copies to other libraries around the world.

Ravel's manuscript for Sainte consists of a calligraphic title page followed by two pages of music notated in ink with a number of erasures, minor alterations, and some editorial markings in pencil. Perhaps most notable are Ravel's changes to the fourth measure, which he rewrote entirely, choosing different harmonies and bass motion in his revision. Ravel's initial version of measure four, though crossed out by the composer, remains legible.

This manuscript complements another early Ravel manuscript acquired by the Music Library in 2004. This other item, an extended fugue composed circa 1899, is a complete, unpublished work with many corrections in blue pencil, presumably applied by one of Ravel's teachers at the Paris Conservatoire.

The manuscript for Sainte, as well as the earlier fugue, were purchased with support of the Constance Heilman Brakke Endowed Fund, the James A. and Sally Ann Hagan Endowed Fund, and the Christine S. Lewis Music Library Fund.

Jennifer holds an M.A in Musicology and an M.A. in German from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Bachelor of Music from DePaul University, and has completed additional courses in music history at the University of Salzburg. Her prior positions include serving as curator for the University of Wisconsin's Gunnar Johansen Celebration and as a staff member of the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society in Madison.

We are pleased to have Jennifer join us!