As well as the usual delights of the festive season—feasting , games, music and dancing—telling stories has long been a feature, especially spooky stories, which became increasingly popular in Victorian times, reaching their height in the early twentieth century when M.R. James, one-time Provost of King’s, published his ghost stories. One of the most popular of…
“The People’s Collection, Wales” is a fascinating online collection of items from museums, archives, libraries, and individuals in the Principality. A Christmas postcard from “Jack” of the 38th (Welsh) Division to “Edie” was part of an exhibition commemorating the Welsh experience in the First World War, a project led by the National Library of Wales. Perhaps, slightly…
Christmas Day in the Workhouse. This gloomy poem was a stalwart of the Victorian Christmas fireside. There’s a rather jollier parody in the British Library’s collections – http://sounds.bl.uk/World-and-traditional-music/Roy-Palmer-collection/025M-C1023X0007XX-1400V0
Miners singing Christmas carols underground at Bersham Colliery, Rhostyllen, Wrexham. Courtesy of the National Archives, UK. Have a look at their wonderful Flickr page – https://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalarchives/
Christmas with the choir of Cambridge University Library…
Some fascinating Christmas oddities as discovered by COPAC – http://blog.copac.ac.uk/2015/12/11/celebration-of-christmas/
The choir of Clare College, Cambridge at the Library of Congress.
The Hathi Trust’s pages can be a great way of finding some more obscure Christmas musical fare. How about Liza Lehmann’s No candle was there or the festive children’s operetta The trial of John and Jane? It struck me having a quick search for Christmas music on their site, that there is a huge wealth of musical…
Fascinating blogpost from New College Library, Edinburgh, about the festive treasures in their hymnology collection: http://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/newcollegelibrarian/2014/12/08/christmas-is-coming-at-new-college-library/
A selection of unusual Christmas music from the British Music Collection : – https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/exhibit/british-music-collection-christmas-exhibition/QRHup94d
More singing in the library. This time courtesy of the librarians of the University of St. Andrews. The carol was taken from a text held in their Rare Books Collection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLXibizhGI8
Christmas at Westminster Music Library There will be a seasonal event on December 15th at Westminster Music Library, for more details see Joint Force Christmas. With thanks to Ruth Walters and the staff of Westminster Music Library.
Flash mob celebrating Wexford Library’s first birthday in style
A recording courtesy of the Norwegian Institute of Recorded Sound’s 2009 Advent Calendar. The Star of Bethlehem by Stephen Adams was hugely popular in the early twentieth century. www.recordedsound.no/lyd/index.htm?filid=109 Less well known is Stephen Adams’ connection with a notorious murder case – the Maybrick poisoning. Adams was the brother of the victim, James, who was also a suspect in…
The British Library celebrates a Victorian Christmas – http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/victorian-christmas
December, this year, is a month of musical feasts with Christmas towards the end. But first, it’s Happy Hanukkah from the Judaica Sound Archive at the Recorded Sound Archives of Florida Atlantic University
Christmas with the Yorkshire Music Library. Have you sung all of these? https://uk.pinterest.com/ymlibrary/christmas-music/
A few weeks ago I was trying to sort out the blogging rota. As the MusiCB3 bloggers headed off for their Christmas breaks I was left with the Yuletide blog that will take us into the New Year. I thought I knew exactly what I was going to blog about – something festive, perhaps traditional Christmas…
Christmas with the Under-5’s at Westminster Music Library With thanks to Ruth Walters and the staff of Westminster Music Library (especially Santa!)
If you don’t use a library that often you might think that they are quiet, studious places. They are most of the time, but there’s always room for some Christmas festivities, such as this performance of an old Spanish carol by the Manchester Community Choir at Manchester Central Library…. For a performance in a really…
Christmas at the Royal Academy of Music. “Here’s one I made earlier”. Rebecca Nye created this natty Christmas tree from a used Vistaflex roll and green paper tape.
Mounting a library exhibition is an act of faith. You aim to draw attention to some aspect of the library’s collections, and hope that it will interest those who come to see it. But there’s usually no way of gauging the impact of the display other than the number of visitors coming through the doors…
“It’s Monday morning, and you’re faced with 30 sceptical 13-year-olds.” So begins Helen Wallace’s article on Ten Pieces II in this month’s BBC Music magazine, describing a scene assuredly all-too-familiar to many a secondary school music teacher. Music – and, in particular, classical music – is indeed subject to scepticism, disdain and even ridicule by…
The Bodleian Libraries’ outstanding collection of 1.3 million maps and half a million printed music scores can now be discovered by searching SOLO, the Libraries’ online catalogue. The Libraries’ maps and music collections are among the largest and most important of their kind in the UK but, until now, records for the majority of their…