Every once in a while you get word on or stumble across a site that's so early in its creation that it's barely in existence, but shows so much promise you can't help but get excited about its possibilities. Such is Laurent Doubrovine's Past Paris Productions section of his Laurent's Musical Home on the Web site. He plans a detailed listing of musicals that had productions in Paris -- that's including French originals and imports, in translation or otherwise. The elegantly laid out list contains information about the authors, cast, dates of production, recordings, and subsequent productions, as well as other minutiae he's uncovered.
I say he plans this because at present his listing is impossibly short. Heck, I've only spent two weeks in Paris my whole life and neither of the productions I saw is even mentioned -- yet. So, get out there and lend Mr. Doubrovine some support and provide him with some details about any Past Paris Productions you may know about.
Also in its infancy is the Old Songs mailing list -- dedicated to popular song prior to the Rock and Roll era. This mailing list is fairly high volume and subscribed to by some extremely knowledgeable and erudite musicologists, professional musicians, and collectors. You'll find questions and discussions on everything from the work of Jerome Kern, George M. Cohan, Victor Herbert, and the like, the ethnic makeup of Tin Pan Alley, and requests for photocopies of original sheet music (all in public domain, of course!). This is another "no-foolin'-around" list for serious students and collectors -- they know their stuff.
The list's server address is: majordomo@brooklyn.cuny.edu. To subscribe, send email to the server address with ONLY the following in the email body: subscribe oldsongs-l ...making sure you leave off any signatures and other info. You don't need a subject for the email; the list's processor software will pull all the information it needs from the email's header. You will be sent the information you need in order to post to the list; the above address is for subscription and list processor commands only. To unsubscribe follow the above directions, except send: unsubscribe oldsongs-l. For those of you who'd prefer not to receive many separate messages daily, they also maintain a digest version. To subscribe to the digest, send email to majordomo@brooklyn.cuny.edu with ONLY the following in the email body: subscribe oldsongs-l-digest ...again making sure to leave off any signatures and other junk.
Happy New Year -- go see a show!
Go To Page: 1
