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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Performing A Comeback: Assessing The Biography Of Alma Mahler Via Youtube Performances, Rachel E. Scott
Performing A Comeback: Assessing The Biography Of Alma Mahler Via Youtube Performances, Rachel E. Scott
Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library
The life and work of many nineteenth-century women composers cannot be satisfactorily studied or understood due to a lack of documentary evidence. In the case of Alma Mahler, however, it is not a lack of manuscript materials or biographical accounts that preclude the appraisal of her legacy, but rather the sheer volume and often contradictory nature of accounts. Although her early life writing emphasized the importance of music, she later downplayed her identity as a composer and emphasized her role of patron of the arts and muse to “great men.” I would argue, however, that if biography is a tool …
Betrayed By The Bibliographic Record: How Catalogs Construct Authorship And Constrain Their Own Authority, Rachel E. Scott
Betrayed By The Bibliographic Record: How Catalogs Construct Authorship And Constrain Their Own Authority, Rachel E. Scott
Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library
This cautionary tale outlines how a librarian with an understanding of and respect for cataloging processes was the perfect candidate to be duped by a false attribution in a bibliographic record. In the process of compiling a list of compositions attributed to Alma Mahler for my dissertation, I encountered a handful of works not yet addressed in the scholarship on her compositional work. Despite numerous red flags, and much to my detriment, I invested a great deal in one of these unqualified and unsubstantiated attributions that turned out to be false. In the wake of this false attribution, I have …