>> Hello everyone. I'm Kalina [phonetic] Black, and I work in the Library of Congress, and welcome to today's episode of Online Office Hours in the Library of Congress. We're really glad that you can join us today. We're going to be exploring the music division of the Library of Congress today and different digital collections that you can find at the Library. This event will be recorded, so any questions or other participant contributions may be made publicly available as part of the Library's archives. We're really glad that you're joining us today either live or by recording. If this is your first time, welcome. And if you've been with us before, welcome back. As you may know, these office hours are meant to be short and informal. We're going to get started with a 20-minute presentation from an expert, and then we're going to follow it up giving you lots of time for questions and conversations, and you'll have a chance to talk to each other and talk to the presenter via the chat. So, we're going to get started now using the chat. James, if you can go to the next slide. Everyone out there, if you can just tell us your name, where you're joining us from and what and whom you teach, that'd be very helpful. As I mentioned, today we're focused on the music division of the Library of Congress and online music collections you can use in the classroom. And we're joined by James Wintle. He is a specialist in the music division, and I'm really glad he can join us today. If you have questions for him or comments at any point, please feel free to post them in the chat box. We'll be watching that as James presents, and we'll also be posting links and can answer questions kind of as he's speaking. And of course, we'll be able to pose questions to him during the Q and A. So now, I am really happy to pass things over to James. >> Hi Kalina and Dana and everyone else who's listening today. My name is James Wintle I work in the music division at the Library of Congress. And I wanted to just give you kind of a quick overview of the kinds of digital collections that we have available to you, since a lot of you will be teaching with online resources and can't make it to the Library itself and need that boost for the classroom. So what I want to do today is look, as I said, at a few of the music collections that we have and then focus in on the ragtime [inaudible] because I just personally think it's very interesting, and it has a lot of different kinds of resources for you. So we'll take a look at that and give two specific examples about ways that you can use the music that's in that collection for classroom activities. So let's first start with a look at the Library website. This, of course, is the title of the presentation, not the Library website. And here we are at the front page, loc.gov, as you see at the top there. And there are actually two different ways to go about finding notated music on the Library's website. The first as you can see here is a dropdown menu and a search box. And you go down and you select where it's in blue here, notated music. And then you can search for whatever composer you're looking for or whatever instrument you're looking for, that sort of thing. But this is only going to get you music that has been digitized. This is not searching [inaudible] catalog. Those are two completely different things. The Library catalog will give you records for everything that is in the Library. And just in the music division, there are over 25 million music items. It's one of the largest music libraries in the world. And so we have quite a lot of stuff in the catalog. As far as the digitized music that you can use from home, there are still over 100,000 pieces of music digitized, well over that, and quite a few, but nothing compared to the actual physical collection. So, the Library catalog is one thing. This is searching only digitized items, that's the point to remember. And when you go down that same page just a little bit, you'll see circled digital collection. And that's where you can see some of those digitized items I was talking about gathered together by topic or by the collection that all of those things came from, various ways to look at groups of digitized items to give you a sense of what they are in some sort of larger context. The search box that we looked at before, that can be used simply to find individual pieces of music that might come from a bunch of these different collections. So if you're looking for the clarinet, for example, you'll find a number of different pieces of various kinds for clarinet. Maybe some pictures of a clarinet, various things like that. So it's going to be more like a Google search sort of activity in that search box from the previous page. And this is going to be specific digital collections. And to the left of that, you'll see the link to search the Library catalog, which searches the physical collections of the Library. So we'll go on into the digital collections. And as you can see here on the left, they're broken down by subject. So, the results of 430 different digital collections that we have on line, of those 430 collections, 94 of those collections pertain to the performing arts, and so that's what we'll be concentrating on today, obviously, since those are the music collections. And you can see here just the top line of the digital collections, you have liturgical chant, which is some of the oldest known notation. The earliest piece of music in that collection dates back to the late 9th century and is some of the earliest staff notation in the Western tradition. Obviously, there's some music notation from ancient Greece, but it isn't staff notation. So this is some of the earliest of that, what we would call neumes. So very early stuff there and some of the earliest things in our music collection, as well as the Aaron Copeland connection. And then if you scroll down the page, you'll see, if you click on performing arts, you get just to those selections in a slightly different search result here. And when you're looking at these digital collections, you'll see what's circled here view 55 items. That's how many things are in the liturgical chant collection as opposed to 133 items over just to the right in the African American band music and recordings collection. And that's actually one of the collections I just want to, I like the music because that is one of a few collections online where you can get ensembled parts as well as scores. So if you're looking for music to do with your band, this is the place to go. One of a few that we have where you can actually download individual parts, as well as scores and so forth. So African American band music and recordings is a great thing to remember if you're in that situation where you need performance materials. On the next, sliding down on the page a little bit here. We have 19th century song sheets over on the right-hand side. That has about 4,000 items, and these are what we call song sheets or songsters where just the words of a song are published on a sheet of paper. And then at the top it will usually say sing to the tune of some popular tune like Yankee Doodle or something like that. And this is a method by which a lot of parody songs and songs that were related to specific political topics would be distributed. So they were distributed like fliers. And so this song sheets collection is actually really valuable if you're looking at history and different issues were reacted to in society in general. So not necessarily for people who read music. Just for people who want to see kind of on the ground feelings about different issues that have come up. So that can be really fascinating. Again, if you're looking for repertoire, this American choral music collection has about 100 items, and these are scores for different voicings required for women's choir, men's choir and mixed. And this is something that the American Choral Director's Association did in collaboration with the library to put together some relatively unknown early American music for choral directors to use. So if you are a choral director this would be something that you might want to take a look at. Also, just to the left of that you see an American Ballroom Companion. These are dance manuals. So if you have a piece of music that you're listening to in your class or you're working on with one of your ensembles that is a dance form, which is something that we, as musicians, tend to deal with quite a bit. If there is a dance that you're dealing with and it's a, you know, a foxtrot or something that is not necessarily a dance that people who are in your class would know, you can go to one of these dance manuals and look at photographs of people actually doing the dance and how you do the steps of a particular dance. So if you're playing a minuet, for instance, and you're trying to think about the phrasing of that minuet, you can go to this dance manual and actually see how the steps go together, and it makes, it actually brings the music to life in a way that you couldn't really do otherwise. So that can be really valuable for creating that kind of social context around music, the dance manual. Here we have band music from the Civil War era. Again great for repertoire, baseball sheet music, vast amounts of sheet music of songs written about baseball. If you have people who are in a music class, maybe they're more interested in baseball than they are music. This is a nice way to make a connection with those people. The Library of Congress celebrates the sons of America. You see I have circled here 97,000 items, a vast collection of a lot of essays and various kinds of teaching materials associated with it that you maybe want to take a look at in depth. That's a really great collection for teachers. So take a look at that. Again, with repertoire we have the March King John Philip Sousa, 708 items. And this is another one of those collections where you can download parts as well as scores to all of his marches, and there are also recordings of those. So that can be very useful, and of course, you can download all of the parts for your band. Or if you just have, you know, five different instruments you can download those parts and see what happens. So it's a great collection to use. The patriotic melodies collection, if you have a particular part of your class, history class or so forth, where you have to teach the history of different patriotic songs, this is a resource for that particular bunch of music. There are essays about America the Beautiful and Star Spangled Banner and all those sort of things, as well as different editions throughout history that you can take a look at, patriotic melodies. And then the ragtime collection which we're going to look at a little bit more in depth, there's a collection of women's suffrage music you can see here, as well as [inaudible] collection. The William P. Gottlieb collection is a collection of photographs of jazz performers throughout history. And voices of the dust bowl is one of our collections from the American Folk Life Center, which is really fascinating as well. And then a collection of sheet music published in World War I, if you want to see the social issues that were fast, hotly contested in World War I, you can take a look at those. That, again, not all of the sheet music is going to be appropriate for all grade levels, because part of the World War I rhetoric was very racist against Japanese people, against German people. So the enemies in war were definitely being portrayed in unfavorable ways in a lot of the sheet music. So, you do have to be careful with that when you're looking at the World War I sheet music. And then you'd have the Yiddish American popular sheet music which is really fascinating if you'd like to get into the history of Yiddish theater in the United States and Yiddish popular song, which is a whole other fascinating realm of works. So there's a lot of resources in there. Going back to the ragtime collection, just so we can keep moving here, you'll see on the front page of the ragtime collection throughout the selection of a view of the sheet music covers. Again, as with the World War I collection, this is sheet music by and large that was published in the Jim Crow era, and so there are, even though most of these pieces were written by African American composers, there are still images from minstrelsy, very unfavorable racist images on some of these pieces of sheet music. So you have to be careful about what you pick and choose to use with your classroom, unless that's the subject that you're talking about. Unless you're talking about the history of portrayal of African Americans during Jim Crow era. Then you're going to have a lot of stuff to look at. But just to be careful not to sort of let people loose in this without giving them a warning first. That's all I'm saying. So about this collection, you see some of the sheet music covers. When you click on collection items, you'll see that the total number of items in the collection is 178. And that is over here on the left in this box, you see, and I put the box there. The box is not going to be there when you click on it. There are 146 pieces of notated music, 19 audio recordings, 10 videos, three webpages and two books. So, that's just a breakdown of how that works. When you get into the collection, you see a few different things. I just stopped on this particular set of two items because the Blue Ribbon Rag is actually one of the few pieces of ragtime piano music that was written by a woman, May Aufderheide, and she actually wrote a very beautiful piece here, but it's not a style that you see a lot of women writing. And she's one of the few that did. So I wanted to highlight that particular piece of music. And why is that true? Because ragtime was considered a kind of amoral music. Any time that music is changing in any kind of way, especially if it comes form African American community, a lot of the white people in charge will often be against that. And just like it was with rock and roll in the 50s, that, you know, this is not music for nice people, right. So the School of Ragtime actually is a method book that Scott Joplin wrote to dispel those kinds of feelings about ragtime and to make it seem more official and studied, right. So, what he was doing was A, trying to make ragtime more academic in a certain way and also to set his own compositions apart from other people who are writing them. Because it became a very popular style. So the School of Ragtime you see in the first paragraph here of the remarks what is scurrilously called ragtime is an invention that is here to stay. He goes on to talk about that. Real ragtime of a higher class is rather difficult to play, and he says syncopations are no longer indications of light or trashy music. And you read that and you know that people were saying that syncopated music was light and trashy. That it was not serious. And it says to shy bricks at hateful ragtime no longer passes for musical culture. And then he offers these exercises in order to help people play Joplin Rags. And so he's setting himself apart from other ragtime composers as someone who's writing classic rags. That was the other phrase that he and his publisher John Stark used in his sheet music. So in this collection, besides the pieces of actual sheet music, we have some videos here, a number of different people talking about ragtime. We have articles of history of ragtime, and article about the opera Treemonisha that is Scott Joplin's opera that he wrote an article about classic rag and so forth. Here's a little bit from the history of ragtime article just so you can kind of see what that looks like. The Ragtime Nightmare by Tom Turpin is the piece of music to your left. And that is a classic rag that was published in 1900. Tom Turpin was actually the first composer to publish a piece of ragtime piano music, although this is not that particular piece of music. But he is an important name to know if you're interested in the history of ragtime. There are a few different biographies, one of Scott Joplin, and we'll put it back. Here's one of the few pictures of Scott Joplin that we have. And this talks a little bit about the Maple Leaf Rag and also his opera Treemonisha which we'll look at a little bit more in depth. So one of the things on the ragtime website is the opera, the vocal score for the opera Treemonisha. And this is an interesting opera because, well for a number of reasons, it was self-published by Joplin in 1911. And he was trying to, as I said before, elevate ragtime music to become more academic and more steady then set himself apart from other ragtime composers. And one of the things that he wanted to do was really write an African American opera that incorporated some of these elements of ragtime music. And so this particular opera is about a young girl named Treemonisha who is the only literate person in her community. It takes place in 1884, that's the setting of the opera. It takes place in 1884 in a community of ex-slaves. And most of them are illiterate except for this young girl Treemonisha. And there's a group of conjurers who were kind of medicine men that sell charms to the people in the community. And she's trying to get the people in the community to let go of their superstitious beliefs and learn to read and become educated, and then they'll be able to better themselves. So the idea of the opera is that education is the key to making your life better, right. And so what I thought about that was there are questions that come up, whether you are performing excerpts from the opera or you're just talking about it, the idea of education and what education means to people is certainly a subject that you can discuss in class, right. So how does education benefit communities that has been historically excluded from that system. Can you embrace a system that has rejected your ancestors? Is that possible? These are all questions that come up with this particular opera. Is that the key? The second question being what problems can't be solved through education and why? So these are just ideas of if you bring up this particular opera and the views that are expounded in it, what kinds of questions can you use to start conversations within the class about that thesis, the thesis of the opera? So this is just a couple of ideas there, and there are obviously many, many more. Those are just some things that I thought of myself. And then if you look at the opera, there's a part at the end which can be really fun to use as an activity in a classroom. It's called the real slow drag. And after Treemonisha is saved, the conjurers, after she talks against [inaudible] and then was able, she was able to save herself essentially from that situation. And she goes back to her community, and they elect her as their leader. And so the 18 year old girl who knows how to read becomes the leader of the community, which is an extraordinary thing in itself. But this is, at the point at which that happens, they celebrate with this dance call the Real Slow Drag. And as you can see, there are directions in the vocal score, and this is, as you can see at the top here, [inaudible] 223 of the vocal score. And it tells you how to do the slow drag. This is what Scott Joplin wrote. And as we go along in the music, as you can see above the staff, all stop, put right hand to ear and listen to music. All hop, all skip, drag forward. And you can see there that throughout the song, and it's a son that starts out as a solo but becomes a duet and then goes into a whole course. And that any part of that actually would work in a performance situation. But whether you are listening to it, watching the video on YouTube or singing it yourself, you can use these steps that are in the score to make an actual dance from it. So that can be fun. So Treemonisha is one, and the other thing I wanted to look at real quickly, I know we're almost out of time here, is, or actually past out of time, is the Maple Leaf Rag. And I just wanted to talk a little bit about looking at ragtime music and dealing with the rhythm. And even if you don't have students who can read rhythms or read music, I mean, and if you're dealing with really any level, what I would encourage you to do is look at this piece of music over on the right-hand side and don't try and focus in on each individual note but sort of take a broader view back from it and look at the shapes. All of these notes on the page make shapes and patterns, right. And if you look at how those patterns repeat, the two circles or the two squares around the top line, you have one pattern and then another pattern that is the same in those two circles. They're red circles if you can see that. Two patterns that are the same. And then after that, you see a pattern that's similar but slightly different. And then something that's completely different, what you see around the green circle, and then it changes quite a lot more on the next line and then goes into a [inaudible] as you can see there at the end. But the point is, you have these repeated patterns. And what you can do with students is look at this music, talk about the shapes. Is it going up? Is it going down? Is there a lot of movement from low to high? Or is there not? Right. What is the difference between the patterns in the left hand, the bottom staff, and the patterns in the top staff? And what I've marked with these blue arrows are the beats and the measures. And where those beats come into lower part and in the upper staff where the accents are. And then you can see the difference between the beats and the accent. And the sort of off kilter way that the accents fall from the beats, that's what is syncopation, which is the sort of key element of ragtime music, right. So if you go to the beginning of the piece, you have a two, four, looks like two, four, but it's not really. The time signature in the two-fourths is how many beats are in the measure and what kind of a note gets the beat? Okay. So there are two beats in a measure, and a quarter note gets the beat in this particular piece of music. And so what you can say to a class, for instance if you're talking about these rhythms and you want to say hmm, if two quarters of something is how much space there is between each of these bar lines. And you see the lines that are going down on the music there denote bars of music. So in each of those bars that will be the equivalent of two-fourths, all right. So if there are two-fourths in that measure, and you look at the bottom line and there are one, two, three, four notes, that means you have two-fourths, possibly, two quarter notes equal a measure, right. So two-fourths equal four what? Eight, right, four eight. So you can make these little rhythmic patterns into math problems and talk about the rhythm in the piece, the shape of the notes and how the rhythm works together to make little math problems. And you don't have to know what the notes are. You don't have to really be able to read the notes. But you can talk about that in terms of rhythm and how rhythms fit together. So in the bottom, the left-hand bottom staff you have pretty much straight eighth notes. And top, you have a combination of 16th notes and eighths notes. And you could talk about how those fit together and how each of those patterns moves toward the highest note in the pattern, right. So you have in the first measure no note and then one two, come into the highest note. And then one, two, three coming to the highest note. And then one, two coming to the highest note. And then one, two, three coming to the highest note. So you have an alternating group of two or three notes going up to that what is a top E, but it's the highest note on the staff. So you have alternating two and three against a steady one, two, three, four, in the left hand, one, two, three, four. And the pattern, the shape of the note, is even more off kilter than that because it doesn't line up with the bar. As you can see how I have the squares around that particular pattern, it goes to the last half of the last beat of the second measure and then starts again. Because it starts with a pickup. So you have everything about this, this steady beat in the left hand, and the right hand working against it and the meter of the piece working against it. So you have multiple layers of rhythm going on at the same time. And you can ascertain that really without thinking about what the notes are. If you look at the shape of the notes and where they go from down to up on the staff and where do they meet the highest point. You know, where does the highest point come, and what happens in between those high points? You can really take a look at this music and see what's happened. You can take a look back and say okay, here's a repeated pattern. Here's another repeated pattern. Here's a slightly different pattern. And then the hands aren't playing together at the end of the second line and doing something completely different where it goes from the bottom of the staff all the way to the top of the staff. And that's going to be a period of transition. So you can kind of see the form of the piece by stepping back and looking at shapes. You can even have students make lines and draw around the notes to see what those shapes are and have a kind of interpretative drawing of what that is. So you see over here on the left I put a few different questions of where is there contrary motion? Where is the motion static? Meaning, when are the notes staying the same or staying close together? And how does that make you, how do you think that's going to make you feel when you look at this music and you see a lot of kind of busy work at the top. And then down on the third line you see relatively static motion compared to what you've seen before. How do you think that's going to make you feel? And you can talk about those shapes and those ideas and how that, how the students react to that emotionally, just the idea of it, right. And not, without having to worry about lots of flat and lots of sharp and the kind of detail of it, you can talk about the rhythm in terms of math and how numbers relate to each other if that's something that works for your particular classroom. Otherwise you can just sort of look at it in terms of shapes and feelings and how that comes across on the page. Because really, all notation to a certain extent is graphic notation. You're looking at the way that music moves, not just the way to play it. It's not just a key to play the right notes on the keyboard. It's really a graphic symbol of how the music moves through time. Does it go up? Does it go done? Is it going fast, or is it going slow? You can see that if you kind of work out the different note values. You can see how that movement really works on the page. And looking at printed music, notation like this conceptually instead of specifically with the, you know, the actual sounding of the notes yourself in mind, I think is a really useful thing to do, especially with younger kids and introducing them to the idea that music can evoke emotions in a number of different ways. And one of those through looking at it in shapes and feelings that come out of those shapes. And you can make those observations and then listen to the piece and say okay, how does actually hearing the piece change your perception of what you've learned, right. And so thinking about the things that I've said here, we're going to listen to the Maple Leaf Rag, and you can think about that, look at where I've circled different ideas here and see what you think. Okay? So here we go. [ Music ] Oops. Sorry. Let's try that again. [ Music ] And the music repeats so you can take another go at it. It's a little different and a transition. [Inaudible]. Very different kind of texture. All right. So you can think about that, and you can go into as much detail or as little detail as you'd like. And just thinking about music, and what I'm encouraging you to do is to use these pieces of notated music that we have on the website to think about music maybe in a different way. To introduce music to non-music classes if you're looking at the sheet music cover, the art on the sheet music. You're looking at the way that the music makes shapes to evoke emotions. There are all kinds of different things. They lyrics themselves, what is that saying about society at a particular time and place? You can use the sheet music in a lot of different ways, not just for playing a tune. And that's really the point that I wanted to make to you today, and I think you for your time. And please let me know if you have any questions and post them in the chat. Thanks a lot. >> Okay, thank you so much, James. And, you know, as James said, everyone please feel free to post comments and thoughts you came through as James was presenting. Yes, thank you so much, James, for that kind of overview and the deeper dive into the ragtime collection. A comment came in that noted, you know, that music and math go great together, and I totally agree. And I definitely appreciated what you said about kind of the shapes, the idea of graphically presenting music. I just wondered, while we're waiting for any questions to come in, if you could just say a little bit more about kind of ragtime in general. You showed the page with the history of ragtime. But could you just kind of help put it in context for us of kind of what it was reacting to, what it was sort of reacting against. And kind of say a little bit more about the syncopation and what are the elements of it, you know, we should know. >> Certainly, yeah. Ragtime really developed out of march music and different kinds of social dance music that was happening in the early 19th century, around the 1920s, 1930s, or sorry, 1820s, 1830s, 40s. There was a prediction [phonetic] of social dance that was really popular. And there was actually a group of composers who were from Philadelphia who were African American composers, some of the first African American composers to have their music published in the United States, were writing this kind of dance music, which were marches and cotillions and different things like that. And that kid of steady march music that developed into dances then eventually developed into a more virtuosic style of playing that became ragtime. And the thing that set ragtime apart was that it used the forms, meaning, you know, there's a bunch of music and then something that's a little different and then the same music from the beginning again, that kind of thing where you have a form for the music, like an ABA kind of form. It used the forms that you found in these social dances and marches but added this virtuosic element which was syncopation. So as we were talking about with the Maple Leaf Rag, the way that the left hand and the right hand of the music together was not exactly square. They were incorporating offbeat accents and putting things a little bit out of kilter to make the music have what we think of today as mores swing that would be a more exciting to listen to and also harder to play. So they could publish their music and play these rags for people and impress them with their virtuosity. So that was another part as well, and it became this real fad where in the 1890s you have a real kind of top bed of ragtime development in Missouri, of all places, which is fantastic. My family's from right around there. But Sedalia, Missouri is one of the places where Scott Joplin traveled and was the place, Sedalia, Missouri was the place where the Maple Leaf Club was, which is what the Maple Leaf Rag is named after, a place where he played there. And he was around that area. He was from Texarkana actually and moved up to Missouri. And St. Louis actually was a real hot bed of development for ragtime music. So you have that kind of area being the epicenter of this ragtime development, but it really spread all over. And so you have composers like, you know, Irving Berlin and things like that who are catching the ragtime bug because this kind of lively sort of rhythmic syncopation really caught on and was exciting for people. And that's what ragtime is really all about. >> Great, that's really helpful to know and just super fascinating. And I'm glad that you said a little bit more about Scott Joplin, and I'm really fascinated by kind of how you described Treemonisha and kind of the motivations, or some motivations for him to write that. And it kind of made me wonder if he had written kind of other works with a similar kind of, I don't want to call it social consciousness, but the sort of moral or the sort of message. Is there other music like that that he wrote? >> Well, you know there isn't a lot of that sort of thing, but he did write another opera. He wrote another opera that's lost, and you're sort of asking me this off the top of my head. So it's called -- >> I appreciate it. >> The opera is called The Dinner Guest or something like that. I don't know the exact wording of it. But the opera is about an African American person being asked to dinner at the White House. And it's about going to the White House and meeting the president which is apparently what this offer was about, but it is lost, and the score is completely unknown. But it's known that he wrote the opera. So there was a lot of what he was doing that didn't necessarily have an overt political message. But the way he was going about writing ragtime and putting out that book that I showed you called the School of Ragtime where he's trying to elevate the status of ragtime music and elevate the status of African American composers and extension, African American people in general by integrating what they were doing into the larger music establishment. Right. And that's really his, apparently from what he wrote, his view of what was the right way to go for African Americans at that time. This was post-Civil War. This is reconstruction, Jim Crow, the era where African American people were having a very, very bad time with it. And what were they going to do as a group, right, and his idea was integrate into the established white norms. Right. And that's what he thought was the right way to go. And that's what Treemonisha is really about and this idea of, you know, the guests for dinner, you know, becoming a part of the established society, right. So, it's as [inaudible] said, similar to what Harry Burley [phonetic] was trying to do, you know, 50 years later. It was still the same struggle, right. So yeah. So it wasn't overtly political, but there was a kind of underlying agenda to what he was doing. That's what I was saying. >> Okay, yeah. That's super interesting. Does the Library, I know in addition to sheet music and audio recordings, not kind of in the Library also collects manuscripts of course. So do we have any Joplin's papers or any kind of notes that might help, you know, provides a window into his process or his work or any other materials beyond the sheet music? >> You know, there really isn't a lot of that. We don't have any of it. But one thing we do have that's really interesting is with the vocal score for Treemonisha which we talked about a little bit, you know, he paid, there are very, very few copies of that in the world because he paid himself to have it published. And he hand-delivered the copy that we have at the Library. He personally hand-delivered that copy to the copyright office. And inside of the score, you can see the form, a copy, we in the music division made a copy of his actual original copyright form that he signed himself. And made a copy of it and sort of put it with his score so people could see it if they wanted to look at the score because it's just, it's a really interesting artifact. Obviously, the original is still in the records of the copyright office, but we were able to make a copy of it. This was decades ago that this happened. And it's there with the actual score itself. And the score is one of the few in the world that we then have made available for everyone to look at. And when the opera was originally performed, Treemonisha, as I said, was written in 1911. It was performed apparently only once in 1915 in a very sort of sparse production with Scott Joplin playing the piano and small cast in a very small theater of, that he put together himself and paid for himself, to attract investors in the opera. And according to his friends and different people who were there, it didn't go well. And the opera was never performed again until it was rediscovered in 1970 and was put on by Morehouse College with the Atlanta Symphony in 1972. So we didn't, we as a society, didn't know the music of Treemonisha until 60 years after it was written, even though the score came into the Library in 1911. It sat on the shelf, obviously. I mean there's not reason why anybody would have looked at it. But this opera is really one of the great American operas, and it laid dormant for over 60 years before anybody rediscovered it. And Scott Joplin was actually awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for writing Treemonisha. >> Wow, that's such a cool story. And that gives us a lot more to research and to look into. So aside from Treemonisha or others of Joplin's work, do you have any other that are favorite items or items you have connections to within the music collections. Or you're, I guess your area with the music division. >> Well, I mean there are so many of, I mean literally -- >> Hard to choose, right. >> Yeah. You know, there are a lot of different composers and different pieces of music that I particularly love. You know, we have all of the manuscripts, almost all of the manuscripts of the composure Samuel Barber, who is an American composer. That is very, just a composer who's music really speaks to me on a personal level, excuse me, that I really like a lot. That I've been able to, you know, look at those manuscripts and study them over the years that I've worked at the Library. It's just been a joy, you know. And it really is that sort of thing. The music collection is so big, it's so diverse, that for someone like me who is curious about all kind of music, it's just interesting every single day, you know. And if you ask me on a Tuesday what my favorite piece of music is in the Library, and you ask me on a Thursday, you'll get two different answers. So anything else? Oh, I got a chat here. Connection's fading a bit but one last question. Can you say a bit about your work and your professional path Library? Well, as I said, I'm a reference librarian in the music division. I began life as an opera singer and moved into music history after I sang in operas for a little while and decided that it probably wasn't the right thing for me to do. Went into music history and started teaching, and I really, really liked teaching music history. It was a lot of fun. But school started, the colleges where I was teaching, they started moving toward more online classes, and nothing against what we're doing today, but teaching online has never been one of my favorite things to do. I like to be with people and see the reactions and connect with people in that way when I'm doing lectures, ideally. Obviously, this is something that can't be done during the current time. But it's what I prefer. And I saw that the college [inaudible] was going toward a model that was going to include more online teaching, and it wasn't necessarily something that fit with how I wanted to do things. So, I thought it would be good to move on and got a degree in library science and ended up at the Library of Congress. And I've never been happier about anything in my life. So that was pretty much how it is. >> I'm back. Sorry about that. >> Just in time. >> -- in and out. I hope you can hear me again. Right. And I did catch most of the answer, so thank you for that. I was really fascinated by you saying that you were an opera singer previously. That's definitely something you don't hear every day. So, but also I'm glad you're with us today despite your kind of, maybe you're not super enthusiastic about teaching online. But thank you so much for sharing, you know, your expertise with us and talking with us about the music collections we have available online as well as music division. Obviously, there's much more to explore. And but it's great to have, at least a little taste, a little intro to what is available online. So thank you so much for joining us today. >> Happy to do it. Thank you. >> Yes, great. And thanks everyone for joining us. Thanks for participating and listening [music] a little music interlude there. Thank you so much for joining us, and we hope that you'll join us again for our next Office Hour. Next week we're going to be joined by our junior fellows, our two interns that have been with us for the summer, and they've been researching American nursing after World War I. So, we look forward to hearing from them, and we hope that you can join us again next week or check out any other recordings we have available on the Online Office Hours website. But thank you, again, James, and thanks everyone for being here today with us. >> Thank you. Bye-bye.