April’s object of the month is a copy of Paul Hindemith’s Wir Bauen eine Stadt (1930), songs composed for children and given its world premiere in Glasgow in November 1930. Our archive contains the score used by pianist and composer Erik Chisholm (a former student of the Conservatoire) who accompanied the Orpheus Junior Choir (now the Phoenix Choir). The composer himself performed a number of sonatas with Chisholm earlier in the evening; his dedication in the score reads: ‘with hearty thanks for the beautiful introduction to Glasgow’ – Paul Hindemith Nov. 30 [1930].

Leo Blech (21 April 1871 – 25 August 1958) was a German opera composer and conductor who is perhaps most famous for his work at the Königliches Opernhaus (later the Berlin State Opera / Staatsoper Unter den Linden) from 1906 to 1937, and later as the conductor of Berlin's Städtische Oper from 1949 to 1953. Blech was known for his reliable, clear, and elegant performances, especially of works by Wagner, Verdi, and Bizet's Carmen (which he conducted over 600 times), and for his sensitivity as an accompanist.

The Ruhr Piano Festival, which came into being in the mid-1990s, has launched a new online project called Explore the Score:

http://explorethescore.org/index-english.html

In Explore the Score, selected works are explained and analyzed by leading performers.

The Ewha Music Research Institute (EMRI) recently completed a 3-year project to establish a database of East Asia’s Educational Music Documents in October 2014. The result, Ewha Music Data Base (EMDB), now showcases the EMRI’s work of collecting and digitizing music education materials of East Asia: over 12,000 items of various types of music materials are listed. Its website (eMUSICdb.info) has been open to the public since November 1, 2014.

Josephine Baker died forty years ago today (April 12). She was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri on June 3, 1906 to a washerwoman named Carrie McDonald and a vaudeville drummer named Eddie Carson, who left the mother and child shortly after Josephine’s birth. She left her birth country to make a name for herself with La Revue Nègre in France, quickly becoming renowned for her barely-there dresses and no-holds-barred comic yet slightly erotic dance routines, and then used that fame and fortune to create and support her own utopian idea of how the world should be by gathering together an adoptive family of twelve children from all over the world that she called the rainbow tribe.