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Finding Online Program Notes

Search and retrieval of on-line information residing within program and liner notes

By Paul T. Jackson, October 2010

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

Biography

Mr. Jackson is an Information Specialist. A retired Special Librarian in Academic, Public, Corporate, and Prisons, he has taught research to Ph.D. candidates, published a wide variety of articles, written as bibliographer, essayist, contributing journal editor, reviewer of recordings and books, musician, librarian and both publisher and self-publisher. He is currently Editor of Plateau Area Writers Association's Quarterly and anthology series,/Contrasts./ He is a member of several musical ensembles.His career positions are recorded in Who's Who in America, Who's Who International, and a profile at his web site: www.trescottresearch.com .

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