Fine Arts Weblog

A performance of Richard Lerman’s Travelon Gamelon will start at 10:30 a.m. on 4/19 at the Missoula Art Musuem, promenade to Bernice’s Bakery, and then move on to Bonner Park for the actual concert at noon.

This work begins with a promenade of 20 bicycles wired with amplifiers which imitate the sounds of a gamelan.  The concert performance is for 3 amplified bicycles.

For more information on the sound artist, Richard Lerman, as well as some images, sounds, and even as score of this work, please visit this web site: http://www.west.asu.edu/rlerman/ .

Musicologists from the Martin Luther University in Halle recently discovered an organ composition entitled Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns haelt (Where God the Lord does not stand with us [my translation]).  For images and text of this exciting new discovery, you can view the article from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (In German) or read about it in English from News.com.au.

I’m very excited to let all of you know that ARTStor is up and running!  This new resource allows you to search for over 300,000 images from many different time periods, cultures, and artistic media.  Please go to our databases page from the Mansfield Library web site and select ARTStor from the alphabetical listing to give it a try.

If you are a faculty member and interested in obtaining instructor privileges within ARTstor, please contact me directly and I’ll be happy to share the needed information with you.

Another interesting feature of ARTstor is the Offline Image Viewer.  You can download the viewer from the resource and it allows you to view ARTstor images without being online.  You first need to register with ARTStor to get access to this.  After going to the ARTStor main page and entering the site, click on the “register” button and create an account with your University of Montana e-mail address and a 7-character password of your choosing.  After registering and logging in, go to the “Tools” menu and download the Offline Viewer.  I’m happy to show you how this tool works if you’d like to make an appointment; again feel free to contact me directly to do this.  From my experience, the Offline Image Viewer was pretty easy to download and to figure out how it worked.

Please also try getting to ARTStor from your home computers.  Should you have any problems accessing the resource remotely, please let us know and include the error message you may have received.

Lastly, please let us know if you have any other questions about this new resource.

You can now browse two photo collections from the Library of Congress on Flickr.  The first collection consists of nearly 1,600 color photos from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information; the second collection contains about 1,500 images from the George Grantham Bain News Service.

For more information on these collections click here.  To access the images on Flickr click here.

The photo above was taken by David Bransby in June of 1942 at the Vega Corporation in Burbank California.

Please also keep in mind that these photos, as well as documents and media from other collections, are available online through the Library of Congress’ American Memory site.   You can listen to sound recordings, view videos, and browse manuscripts, photos, and music scores related to the “American experience.”

Here is a link to a 1/15/2008 article in Der Spiegel which gives the details of this discovery by scholars at Heidelberg University in Germany.

24 Untitled Works (2006-2007) is a series of vibrant and colorful paintings by Albert Contreras (b. 1933) now on display on the 2nd floor at the Mansfield Library. It is a part of the Montana Museum of Art and Culture’s permanent collection.

To find out more about Contreras, try a search for articles using the terms “Albert Contreras” in Art Full Text or LexisNexis Academic. You can get to these databases by clicking here and selecting them from the alphabetical listing.

Jean Arp’s Colonne de Reve (Dream Column) is now on display in the Mansfield Library lobby. Arp (1886-1966) was well-known for biomorphism in his works in which he used shapes resembling those seen in living things. He was also associated with the Dada and Surrealist movements.

Colonne de Reve was sculpted from limestone and bronze and completed in 1958. It is on loan from a private collection to the Montana Museum of Art and Culture and will be on display at the Mansfield Library from 12/17/2007-4/9/2008.

To learn more about Arp you can do a search in Grove Art Online under “Arp, Hans” or click here for books.

German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen passed away on December 5th 2007.

For an obituary in the New York Times, click here.

For a listing of items we own by Stockhausen, click here. If you’re looking for items about Stockhausen, click here.

Browsing our score collection on the third floor can be tricky since their call numbers are in Library of Congress Classification (LC) rather than Dewey Decimal Classification. For a helpful guide to browsing scores by LC call numbers click on the link below:

http://www.library.unlv.edu/music/info/lccall.html

This link will take you to UNLV Music Library’s Guide to the Library of Congress Music Scores Classification. This is a pretty comprehensive guide on how these materials are organized. Keep in mind that the guide in the link above will help you browse this part of our collections, but it is not intended as a representation of the scores that the Mansfield Library owns.

For those of you who are new to Library of Congress call numbers for scores, here are some good mnemonics to help you browse our items.

* Items beginning with only the letter “M” are scores (sheet music); so, “M” is for music.

* Those beginning with the letters “ML” are usually books about music, for instance music history; so, “ML” is for literature about music. However, the majority of the Mansfield Library’s collection of items with ML call numbers are opera and musical libretti or texts.

* Items beginning with the letters “MT” are usually books about music theory, music education, as well as instrumental or vocal techniques or methods. Keep in mind that the majority of the Mansfield Library’s collection of items with MT call numbers are either score anthologies or instrumental/vocal technique books.

The Inside Higher Ed blog has an interesting post on the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ new guidelines on Fair Use.

Read the blog entry:
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/16/fairuse

Read the Society’s guidelines.

http://www.cmstudies.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8&Itemid=1