Search and retrieval of on-line information residing within program
and liner notes
Used with permission.
ABSTRACT: This article examines the issues and some problems in researching and finding obscure composer,
composition information, and historical data relating to performers and ensembles which can often be found
in ephemeral materials such as concert program notes, or "liner notes" of recordings. The article
discusses the nature of program notes, Internet resources for such notes, searching possibilities and problems
within a few search engines and their limitations, other possible resources of such information, and
finding experts leading to discovery of the required information.
Concert Program notes
Research and retrieval of information about obscure composers and their
works, music ensembles, and their performers is often found in concert
program notes and recording liner notes.Some of the larger orchestras
have libraries and keep these, but they are not all cataloged, indexed,
nor are they digitized for easy access.Below are some links to sources
of some of these are available electronically.Recording "Liner notes"
are also some of the elusive, but tremendously useful sources of
information about musical works and their composers and the performers
written often with authority by experts.
Many writers produce program notes for the various musical organizations
performing works of composers. These works may be new or old, and often
obscure, so a lot of research goes into producing even these rather
specific short notes.Some may come from personal experience with the
music or composer.The composer may have been on the spot and interviewed
at the time of the premiere and talked about him/her self and the
composition. Often the writers of notes are independent scholars and
experts in the specifics.
When an artist or ensemble wants to perform a piece and add information
about the specific composition and composer in /their/ program notes, or
someone is writing a paper or book about an artist or an organization,
searching for the information is sometimes difficult.
Music Librarians can find much of this information, but it may be buried
in books which are just now becoming useful and searchable online with
Google Books project, Amazon.com, and other such ebook databases as
Project Gutenberg, and the various full text library collections found
here http://www.lib.uci.edu/collections/ebooks-and-etexts.html wherein
one could possibly find such information more easily than doing
Interlibrary Loans, hoping to find a nugget of information about a
composition or composer.
If a piece has been recorded one might find notes with the recording
known as *"Liner notes"* which would give much information about such
works, and composers, dates, et al, however, this is becoming more rare
and confusing with the CDs than with the LPs and 78s and the online down
loadable recordings files come with a mixed bag of miss-information as
well as mixed up recording files of parts of works by different
composers.This is not contained to recordings either and is part of the
problems with credible documentation and dating within the Google Books
Project.
Program or Programme Notes
In addition to the Google Books project and the plethora of ebooks on
the market or in library collections which can now be searched, there
have been collections of musical organization performance programs and
the associated notes mounted in digital form on the Internet, and more
are being mounted all the time.Below are some such sites.
http://www.mikewheeler.cadenza.org/orchestral.htm
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl/domesticnotes.htm#program
http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/works/torke/program.php
https://www.carnegiehall.org/PerformanceHistorySearch/#!
*_Retrieval issues and problems which could or should be addressed?_*
Some orchestra libraries keep programs. However they are not cataloged,
indexed, nor are they digitized and searchable for the gem of
information sought.These are sources of important historical data
information relating to the ensemble, the composers, and the artists.
There are famous personal record collections, some are now within
institutions with catalogs, still inaccessible to most, and haven't been
made available online. Therefore the catalog, the liner notes with the
recordings are also not searchable.
Searching problems
Hear are a few of the issues faced when searching the Internet, or any
documentation:
1.Different spelling and mis-spelling of names; see the above /Program/
or /Programme/ notes.
2.Different titles of the same piece; some popular titles mixed with
true titles from the score, or Uniform titles given by catalogers as
documented in various indexes of works of composers.Some of these
differences lie with the fact a given piece may have been arranged for a
different instrument than as originally composed.
Below are some of the situations others have presented relating to
problems with the Internet search:
Randolph Ran Hock, principal of Online Strategies and author of The
Extreme Searcher's Guide to Web Search Engines. Hock has provided seven
practical searching tips:[1]
1) no search engine covers everything;
2) different search engines miss different things;
3) retrieving large numbers of results is not necessarily bad;
4) all search engines offer advanced search techniques to improve results;
5) meta-search engines are not the same as search engines;
6) Google is great but not the only search engine; and
7) be prepared for changes in all search engines.
Even in Google Books, which are not different from problems of searching
found elsewhere and with online digitized collections, one can find all
sorts of errors in dates and places.
Geoff Nunberg observes; "...how well is Google Books doing this and what
if anything will hold their feet to the fire? This is almost certainly
the Last Library, after all. There's no Moore's Law for capture, and
nobody is ever going to scan most of these books again. So whoever is in
charge of the collection a hundred years from now --- Google?
UNESCO?Wal-Mart? --- These are the files scholars are going to be using
then.All of which lends a particular urgency to the concerns about
whether Google is doing this right. This is 'the last library.'So it's
important to get it right. But dates, authorship information, categories
are often pretty bad."[2]
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1701
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/GoogBookSM.pdf[3]
Searching possibilities
One way to search for information on performers, ensembles and Program
notes is to use some of the following iterations of terms.
Through the use of this search "string,"*"Program notes music
directory"*, one can find additional links to program notes.Other search
strings below can also find these elusive documents. Depending on the
search engine the quotes may not be necessary.The new Blekko search
engine with the "slash tag" system may become a more useful search as
tags are added for this. Currently, although not established, /Music
performance /program notes/brings up several interesting sites with
notes on composers and their works, although not for a specific work or
composer.
*_"pdf program notes Perlman Hindemith" using Google_*
The above search terms using the quotes produced basically what was
intended:
a.Digitized files in PDF:These documents are likely to have more
information on specific items than web sites.
b.Perlman was the performer: Answers what works of Hindemith did he
play? Maybe not in their entirety but resulted in good hits, rather than
a lot of announcements.
c.What Hindemith violin compositions were played (in this case by a
specific performer) and one can discover notes about a particular
composition, after further searching the results.
The latter, c. is not as easy as it might be in this example, without
using some form of advanced software engine which will search only the
first results.
This search worked best with the quote marks in place. There are
variations on how to bring up sites of PDF content depending on the
search engine.
"*_pdf program notes Perlman Hindemith"_* [without quotes]
This was a search performed in Clusty (now called Yippy! Lookout Yahoo!)
which is a "clustering" search engine. On the left of the screen (shown)
it brings up some of the possible meta data to use.The Bing engine
brings up some really strange, unrelated data.
Clusty/Yippy!Bing
Searching with different engines with the same terms with or without
quotes will offer the researcher some differences to dig deeper into
cyberspace to find the gem about an artist, composer, or composition.On
the other hand, Alltheweb nor Yahoo!, were not as successful.
/Concert "Program Notes"/ terms used in an OCLC World Cat search.
The search terms Perlman and Hindemith in the same search did not
provide the requested information, but did find a plethora of notes from
which to narrow down the search to composer "Author" Hindemith.This is a
method to identify documents applicable to the research, since these are
just holdings citations, not necessarily digitized collections.
Although this search shown above, found much in the way of program
notes, they were basically citations leading to actual notes. Checking
out the items or interlibrary loaning them, or emailing the librarians
to get copies or faxes of a specific item would have been necessary to
locate the obscure information.
Unless Google has changed, the keyword position of a set of search terms
is important, so one needs to remember the most important words of your
search should be at the front, and the more specific your search is, the
better.If what is searched for is not found, then the next search, the
terms can be less specific or broader.
*_Using search "syntax"_* will allow for a much narrower search and may
be more useful for this sort of research.
Examples using syntax*inurl:, site:,*
*Inurl:programnotes*
*"program notes" site:edu*
*"program notes" site:org*
*"program notes" site:org "perlman hindemith"*
Using such search syntax is covered in Calishan's book, Web Search
Garage. A quick overview of the various syntaxes which can be used can
be found here: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html
While looking exclusively for program notes found on program pamphlets
passed out at concerts and performances, correspondence found in some
digitized collections of writings of other scholars is possible and useful:
Example: http://www.whitwellessays.com/ .This site contains a large
collection of documents, some in .doc some in .pdf.In this list was a
letter from author of /Pioneers in Brass/ (primary source information)
regarding Glenn Bridges' impression on hearing John Phillip Sousa:*Glenn
Bridges to David Whitwell, Fraser, MI, September 24, 1980**.... *Among
others, there was a letter from Leonard Smith, trumpet clinician and
conductor, Mr. Bridges' friend and Colleague. While these were not
"notes" within orchestral, band, or individual performance programs,
they can lend to the search for oral history notes for the researcher.
In finding an obscure piece of information may depend on the size of the
search engine index, but not always.A chart of sizes of indexes can be
found here, although such things are moving targets:
http://searchenginewatch.com/2156481
It's also instructive some search engines use the same index, but in a
recent study, relevancy was suggested as a better measure of the size of
*/coverage/* which*//*may be more
important.http://searchenginewatch.com/2167411
There are also other comparison charts pointing out some of the search
problems with the different engines: http://www.philb.com/compare.htm
Another possible type of search would be to use the Boolean type
operator with Google called*_Around()._*
*Paul Hindemith around(4) "program notes"*
Using the above operator to find Hindemith information within program
notes serves up a large number of hits; About 18,800 results. Although
these hits include the word "around" and "4," the hits do bring up
actual "program notes" that are not ordinarily found using the other
searches above.
By adding Perlman to the end of the above search group, About 12,700
items are found. Certainly all of these will not be useful, but such a
search does seem to turn up more relevant "program note" hits than
others. Using quotes around "Paul Hindemith" the hits become about half;
about 5,510 results.But using quotes will also eliminate notes that use
the last name primarily without the first name except perhaps given in a
photo or graphic which might not be indexed.
These sketchy examples clearly show finding an obscure piece of
information is still difficult even when you have search engines to
help, if indeed the items are available on or through the web. Hours of
work go into sometimes un-fruitful searching for this sort of
information or dates.
Sometimes just finding and calling experts is easier.Finding where
experts might be can be easierusing this matrix below.And sometimes
using Tile.Net http://tile.net/lists/ will help find discussion lists
where the experts will be found. Tile.Net includes Majordomo, ListProc,
and Listserv lists.Twitter, Facebook and other social networks indexes
are clouding the field and often detract from the research, making it
more time consuming, but could open up the right expert leading to
others who have the information, just as one does networking at
conferences.
In final analysis, while locating information within and throughout the
Internet is better than it has ever been, there are still problems and
issues, not the least of which is music information retrieval (MIR.) The
fact some collections in libraries are still not documented, digitized
for searching, nor even noted on web pages, creates the need for better
communication of what libraries have in their collections, for which
reason the Association for Recorded Sound Collections was originally
organized in 1965.Often a researcher can only find out about resources
at conferences, looking up organizational meeting or proceedings
documents, reading journals or through references in scholarly
papers...or by being there where it happens in the first place, and
saving the ephemeral materials which someday find their way to libraries.
Finding the right resources has become a field in itself; knowing how to
search, not just research dealing with the found information and
qualitative structuring of the research. Such a Mother Lode of
resources can be found at: https://digitalresearchtools.pbworks.com/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Tenopir, Carol, "Online
Databases-The Web: Searchable, Hidden, and
Deceitful" in Library Journal.com © Media Source, 07/15/2002. Web 03 Dec. 2010.
[2] Nunberg, Geoff. Google Books: A Metadata Train Wreck, Language
Log, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of
Pennsylvania, and Linguistic Data Consortium.August 29, 2009 @ 5:46 pm ·
Filed by under Books, Computational
Linguistics Web 03 Dec. 2010.
[3] Nunberg, Geoff. Google Books: The Metadata Mess, Language Log,
Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of
Pennsylvania, and Linguistic Data Consortium. Presentation; Google Book
Settlement Conference, UC Berkely, August 28, 2009. PDF of PowerPoint
slide presentation. Web 03 Dec. 2010
--
Trescott Research -- Paul T. Jackson
Information & Library Development
26301 SE 424^th St., Enumclaw, WA 98022