September 11, 2008 Library of Congress and the American Musicological Society Announce Lecture By Annegret Fauser On Sept. 18

The Music Division of the Library of Congress and the American Musicological Society, in joint partnership, will present the second in a series of lectures highlighting musicological research conducted in the division’s collections.

Annegret Fauser presents “After Pearl Harbor: Music, War and the Library of Congress" on Thursday, Sept. 18 at 7 p.m. in the Coolidge Auditorium, first floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. This event is free and open to the public; no tickets are required.

Fauser studied musicology, art history and philosophy at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in Bonn, the Université de la Sorbonne-Paris IV and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Bonn in 1992. Before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she taught musicology at the Université François Rabelais in Tours, the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and City University, London.

Fauser's research focuses on music of the 19th and 20th centuries, and in particular that of France. She has published on French song and opera, French women composers, exoticism, nationalism, reception history and cultural transfer. Her publications include monographs on French orchestral song and on the roles of music during the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, and an edition of reviews of the first performance of Jules Massenet's opera “Esclarmonde.” She has also co-edited, with Manuela Schwartz, a major publication on Wagnerism in France. Currently she is writing a monograph on music in the United States during World War II, jointly editing (with Mark Everist) a volume on the institutions of French musical theater and editing the correspondence between Nadia Boulanger and Aaron Copland.

In March 2009, the series continues with a lecture by Jeff Magee, chairman of the musicology department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who will talk about his work on Irving Berlin.

The Library of Congress, the nation's oldest federal cultural institution, is the world's preeminent reservoir of knowledge, providing unparalleled collections and integrated resources to Congress and the American people. Many of the Library’s rich resources and treasures may also be accessed through the Library’s Web site www.loc.gov and via interactive exhibitions on a new, personalized Web site at www.myLOC.gov.

The Library’s unparalleled music holdings include manuscripts, scores, sound recordings, books, libretti, music-related periodicals and microforms, copyright deposits and musical instruments. Manuscripts of note include those of European masters such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms and those of American masters such as Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein and Charles Mingus. The Alan Lomax collection of field recordings of American roots music, Woody Guthrie’s original recordings and manuscripts, and one-of-a-kind recordings of bluesman Robert Johnson from the 1930s are also among the Library’s musical treasures.