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The Atlantic Chapter held its annual meeting on a
blustery but colorful autumn weekend October 17-18, 2003 at The
Pennsylvania State University in State College. The opening
session met in the newly renovated Foster Auditorium of the Pattee
Library.
The first presentation, by Carl Rahkonen, explored the
traditional music of Western Pennsylvania as found in the Samuel P.
Bayard Collection at Penn State. Bayard was a distinguished Professor of
Comparative Literature whose lifelong work was the collection of folk
music and folk songs, especially from Western Pennsylvania and Northern
West Virginia. Between 1948 and 1963, he recorded some 68 informants on
31 reels of tape. These field recordings, together with his other
research materials, are in the Special Collections Department of the
Penn State Libraries. Bayard's collection also contains more than two
hundred published tune books, most dating from the nineteenth century,
but many from the eighteenth century.
The second presentation given by Barry Kernfeld, editor
of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2002; 1988), was entitled, "Napster
in the 1930s: Bootlegging Song Sheets." His talk surveyed the
forgotten story of bootleg song sheets (initially, newspaper-sized
sheets of pop-song lyrics; from the mid-1930s song-lyric magazines). The
bootleg sheets, which emerged in 1929, elicited an hysterical response
from the music industry,
which fought vigorously for roughly a decade, using every legal ploy
available, before discovering, extremely reluctantly and somewhat
inadvertently, that assimilation was a much more successful policy than
prohibition.
We then had a wonderful reception in the Mann Assembly
Room of the Paterno Library, with hors d'oeuvres sponsored by Nancy
Eaton, Dean of the Penn State Libraries, and wine provided by Laura
Probst, Head of Public Services. The Special Collections Department
displayed a recently acquired collection of 18th century dance books.
Some old time fiddlers from Pennsylvania, who had come to our meeting to
learn more about the Bayard Collection, provided impromptu music for the
reception.
Saturday morning began with a catered continental
breakfast in the Mann Assembly Room. We were then favored to hear from
Peter Kiefer, curator of the Penn State Fred Waring Collection, known as
Fred Waring's America. He presented us with the historical background
and significance of Waring's life and career. We then enjoyed a tour of
Fred Waring's America, a special facility that contains Waring's entire
music library of 6500 titles, including scores and instrumental/choral
parts; more than 10,000 recordings on disc, wire, tape, kinescopes, and
videotape; twenty thousand photographs and slides; scrap books with 7600
pages of clippings; and his business and personal correspondence. The
most visible part of Fred Waring's America consists of historical
memorabilia, including Tom Waring's piano, hundreds of pieces of cartoon
art, the famous "cartoon tables" from the lounge room at
Shawnee Inn, and of course Waring blenders.
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Minutes of Business Meeting
The Chapter is involved with various kinds of outreach: funding travel grants for new members to attend our annual
meeting and the National MLA meeting we are going to host in Arlington, Virginia on
February 9-15, 2004. We are also making presentations on music librarianship to library
schools and library associations within our chapter. We held elections this year and Steve
Landstreet (Free Library of Philadelphia) was elected as Vice Chair/Chair Elect. Mary
Prendergast (University of Virginia) was re-elected to another two-year term as
Secretary/Treasurer. Our 2004 annual meeting will be held at West Virginia University
in Morgantown. We have accepted an invitation for our 2005 Chapter meeting to be held
at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore.
Respectfully submitted,
Carl Rahkonen
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Atlantic Chapter Chair
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