Stephanie's Pillowbook

I thought I would share with you some blogs and other sites about food and cookery that I have discovered over the past year. All of them have certain things in common: interesting writing, inviting photographs, and yummy recipes! So, here are the ones I enjoy the most:

• A Slice of Cherry Pie – lovely photographs and great writing.
• Eat Like a Girl – passionate writing about food and excellent photographs.
• Ambrosia and Nectar – the most original and fascinating recipes.
• Jumbo Empanadas – delightful writing about cooking, eating and life.
• Feeding my Enthusiasms – the title says it all!
• Lucullian Delights – subtitled An Italian Experience it is full of fabulous photographs and enticing recipes.
• Cooking the Books – mostly cakes from various cookery books.
• Culinary Concoctions by Peabody – more gorgeous photos and recipes to make your mouth water.
• Mrs B’s Baking – delicious home-baked cakes and biscuits.
• Joy of Baking – just look at those cakes!!

First posted in November 2007

I collect scores. In the first place because I enjoy playing music on the piano – although I don’t get much chance these days: I had to give up my piano when I moved (in any case it was in urgent need of repair, so much so as to be unplayable); now I have to be content with picking out the notes as best I can on a four-octave MIDI controller. But I do still seek out music to play and even with the MIDI keyboard it is instructive and fun to work through reductions and transcriptions. Secondly, I like to read music – that is, look at the score and hear the music in my head. I can”t read everything equally well: it depends on my familiarity with the music itself or at least with the style (so, I can “imagine” a piece of nineteenth-century piano music that I’ve never heard before much more accurately than, say, a Renaissance madrigal or an avant-garde string quartet). Thirdly, and most importantly at the moment, I often like to follow the score when I listen to music. Doing so makes it easier to concentrate for a start. And then, comparing the written notes with what one hears is always fascinating. Looking at a score one tends to hear more as well, to notice little things, inner details, that the ears alone might not have detected. On top of all that, the score adds a certain physicality to the experience of listening. Any musician will tell you that having a piece “in your fingers” increases one’’s understanding immeasurably. If you look at the music you can at least imagine how it is played and how it would feel under one’’s fingers. I haven’t explained this very well.

Anyway, in the recent past the average score was expensive and fairly difficult to obtain. However, thanks to the invention of the scanner and the internet it is now possible to build up an extensive collection. Here are a few useful links:

The first place to visit is undoubtedly the International Music Score Library Project, a wiki hosting nearly 30,000 public domain scores. This great resource was forced to close not so long ago thanks to bullying lawyers at Universal Editions. The whole sorry saga was summed up in this BBC News article by Michael Geist. Anyway, the site is back up now. IMSLP should certainly be consulted for the major composers – it has, for instance, all the Haydn sonatas, all the Beethoven sonatas and variations, almost complete Chopin, Schumann, Brahms piano works and so on. There is plenty of more obscure music available, too. They have various projects in hand – adding files from the MIT archive, for example, and the Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe. There is also a comprehensive list of links to other sites.

One of the first places I discovered offering scores for download was piano.ru. It has been around a long time and has a lot of interesting stuff, especially Russian music, not yet on IMSLP. Parts of the site are in English but most of it is Russian – it’’s not too difficult to navigate, however.

The Sibley Music Library at The Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester is well worth a browse. It is especially strong on the less-well known Romantic repertoire.

An excellent forum is Pianophilia. There is a concentration on piano music, as the name suggests, but not exclusively so. Most of the offerings have been scanned particularly for the forum and are not available elsewhere. The works of living (or recently deceased) composers are not allowed. There is a lot of fascinating and erudite discussion – many of the contributors are practising musicians as well as scholars and teachers and others involved in the music world. Really, it is a quite wonderful site and full of treasures.

Much of the rare music that was originally uploaded to Pianophilia has been preserved at a new site, The Henselt Library of Nineteenth-Century Piano Music.

For the works of Mozart there is just one place to go – the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum containing the entire Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, that is, the complete works in a modern edition. Surely one of the great resources of the internet. Viewing and downloading the pdf files is not the most convenient method ever devised but it is not too irritating.

There are plenty of other places but those I have listed above are the best and should satisfy even the most eager collector. I do want to mention, though, a couple of sites that offer the chance to view composer’’s manuscripts. First of all there are the extremely rich and absorbing Digital Archives at the Beethoven-Haus Bonn site – not just manuscripts and first editions but sketches, copies made by Beethoven of other composers” work, letters, pictures and extracts from recordings. Almost as fascinating is the very large collection of material at the Schubert-Autographs site. Finally, there is the Chopin Collection of first and early editions at the University of Chicago Library.

By the way, if you do download scores a lot you will notice that many come divided into smaller files. I recommend pdftk to merge them back together (there are versions for all platforms) – it’’s just a quick little command-line application but very useful.

Musical scores are not just useful – they can themselves be works of art. This is particularly true of much modern music. The blog, scores/improvisations/texts, has some fascinating graphic scores and there are some more great examples in this gallery. The Block Museum has an interesting exhibition of graphical scores called Pictures of Music with illustrations, discussion and an introduction to interpretation. A Young Person’s Guide to Treatise has pages from Cardew’s score along with quotations and links. You can download the fascinating anthology by John Cage called Notations from Ubuweb. Most wonderful of all, though, is the page on BibliOdyssey entitled The Visual Context of Music.

First posted in August 2007