The concluding part of this two-part survey of music and disease looks at examples that arose from pandemics in the 19th and 20th centuries, including: works by Stephen Foster and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel written in the wake of a series of cholera outbreaks, and the sometimes curiously lighthearted musical response to the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Before the dawn of the Third Reich, Jewish scholar Hugo Leichtentritt encountered three fellow musicologists: Oscar Sonneck, Carl Engel, and Harold Spivacke. Each of these men would assume the role of Chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress and be instrumental to the preservation of the oeuvres of international artists, including Leichtentritt.
Meet three members of the Seeger Family—Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and their daughter Peggy Seeger—through their music, writings, and correspondence in the newly described Seeger Family Collection. This wide-ranging and personal collection provides a number of avenues for research in folk and modern music, musicology, and family history.
The Library of Congress has recently published two LibGuides related to jazz music. They are “Jazz Stock Arrangements: A Resource Guide” and “Jazz Research at the Library of Congress.”
Part one of this two-part survey of musical responses to past pandemics focuses on sacred music from the years that the Black Death ravaged medieval Europe. Texts such as the Stella Celi Extirpavit and Recordare Domine illustrate the penitence and fear of the wrath of God that prevailed until the Enlightenment.
