Classical Guitar Music in Printed Collections

This article describes a website I created that leverages the advantages of the online space to combine features of an index and a thematic catalog. The index itself is online at http://guitarmusicincollections.com; the article is posted below.

Classical Guitar Music in Printed Collections.pdf

Ward Library Technology Plan

In this paper I try to envisage how a tiny, self-service community library in the mountain hamlet of Ward, Colorado could benefit from an appropriate application of technology backed by minimal resources. The organizational details are completely imaginary, but the technical details and the community description are real.

This paper was chosen as part of the portfolio of student work presented to the ALA accreditation team when they visited DU in 2011.

The Ward Library has always held a special place in my heart. Once when I visited there I found this poem on a sheet of typescript tacked to the wall:

In the Ward Library
our thighs burned, but our grins stretched
as we stared at shelves and shelves
of dusting books.
Unread books are as bad as Bradburyís burned books
so we shifted, scrambled, and gleefully pulled books
off their shelves and into our laps to glance at them
quickly and then place them down in distraction
to move to the next book, or the next shelf.

And this is my school
and these are my professors;
my friends, sitting dazzled by written words and images.
It seems moronic to move away
and go to school,
when all I need is right here,
behind a padlocked door,
with its combination written above
and a log staircase rising over shelves of books
to more shelves of books.

And here we are,
my friends and me,
sitting in our private corners,
but taking breaks from our written words
to let a few slip from our lips.
These are my lectures,
the small talk that breaks silence,
and replaces it with our white teeth
emerging from our mouths
as laughter erupts from our guts.

I study their concentration
as I look up from our writing
and it encourages me to look back down.
These are my poetic days
constrewed with friendly stanzas.

July 11, 2009

Ward Library Technology Plan.pdf

Trends in Performing Arts Librarianship

This is a video of my talk on current trends in performing arts librarianship.

Metric Conflict in the Brandenburg Concertos of J.S. Bach

My principle preoccupation as a music analyst has always been phrase rhythm and hypermeter. In this work, I have tried to apply the most widely-accepted definitions and concepts in a particularly subjective area of theory to the analysis of some of the greatest orchestral masterworks of the Baroque era. While I have not found a single overarching narrative to the way metric sructure unfolds over the course of these works, every piece has its own story to tell.

I developed a hybrid analytical notation to express the structure of these pieces, using some ideas from Lerdahl and Jackendoff and others from Jonathan Kramer. The way the notation is adapted to express metric conflict on a given hierarchical level is my own.

High-resolution images of the analytical graphs are posted separately under the "Brandenburg Analyses" tab of this site.

Brandenburg.pdf

Tradition and Innovation in Balinese Gamelan Angklung: Issues in the Development of Angklung Kebyar and the Music of American Gamelan Tunas Mekar

I have long loved gamelan music and played for several years with Denver's Gamelan Tunas Mekar, one of the premier American community groups performing Balinese gamelan. (This is related, though only indirectly, to how I met my Balinese wife.) Tunas Mekar performs several styles of gamelan, including a hybrid style called angklung kebyar. Before I wrote this paper, angklung kebyar had never been fully described in the literature, though its existence was certanly no secret. I presented it on March 31, 2007 at a meeting of the Southwest Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Angklung Kebyar.pdf