Derek

Guide to Dating Arthur P. Schmidt Publications

Or, “When did Arthur P. Schmidt print my sheet music?” This is a guide that I created primarily for myself, but which anyone who has a few of Schmidt’s publications sitting on the bookshelf or tucked into the piano bench may find useful. The problem is that the copyright notice on the music displays theContinue reading “Guide to Dating Arthur P. Schmidt Publications”

Mr. Schmidt Goes to Washington

Having recently traveled down to Washington, D.C., to conduct some research at the Library of Congress, I found myself reflecting on my (thus far) limited yet always memorable experiences digging through our nation’s libraries and archives. An archive can often be rich in information yet also almost meaningless without a historian (like me—or you!) toContinue reading “Mr. Schmidt Goes to Washington”

Guess the Composer!

Mapping the Boston Music Trade, 1865–1915

Arthur P. Schmidt in the Digital Age

Adventures in R

The path was humbling, the path was steep, the path was sometimes so obscure that I wasn’t sure I knew the way. But earlier this summer, my first scratch-built digital research project went live on the shinyapps.io hosting platform. Written almost entirely in the R markdown programming language, A Visual Guide to Some Nineteenth-Century ComposersContinue reading “Adventures in R”

Arthur P. Schmidt & Company: A Walking Tour of Boston

⚠️ This blog post has since grown up to become an ArcGIS StoryMap called Arthur P. Schmidt & Company: A Walking Tour of Old Boston July 2023

Is That You, Mr. Berlioz?

In my large lecture courses, I often introduce musical examples by displaying a portrait of the composer in question. For composers who lived up through the early nineteenth century, I show paintings. For the more recent composers, I show photographs. The oldest of these photographs are (unavoidably) grainy, black-and-white affairs. They are an excellent meansContinue reading “Is That You, Mr. Berlioz?”

Music History Anthologies

The University at Buffalo is the first institution at which I’ve encountered the undergraduate music history survey being delivered across only two semesters. Brandeis University offers a sequence of five courses, as I recall, but with the requirement that students take just three of them. The music history faculty here at UB have recently beenContinue reading “Music History Anthologies”

American Musicological Society, Boston 2019

I am very pleased to be presenting a paper entitled “Sounding the Interrogative: Cadential Attenuation as Syntactic Device in the Madrigals of Sigismondo d’India” on Friday, November 1, at the 85th annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. The session, to be chaired by my friend and colleague Joel Schwindt (Boston Conservatory), is entitled “RhetoricalContinue reading “American Musicological Society, Boston 2019”