Tag Archives: music

Illuminating Explorations: Music and Childhood Culture

Hannah Neuhauser, 2025 PhD in Musicology, Butler School of Music


“Illuminating Explorations” – This series of digital exhibits is designed to promote and celebrate UT Libraries collections in small-scale form. The exhibits will highlight unique materials to elevate awareness of a broad range of content. “Illuminating Explorations” will be created and released over time, with the intent of encouraging use of featured and related items, both digital and analog, in support of new inquiries, discoveries, enjoyment and further exploration.

Music is a portal and can unlock a door to a fantastical sonic landscape, brimmed with mystic, melodic magic. We turn a page and open ourselves to discovering an entirely different realm, full of magic and mystery. Dangers may lurk around each corner, giants may want to gobble us up for lunch, and at times, the path may be so utterly twisted that we almost lose ourselves. Suddenly, the darkness becomes light, and in silence, we find ourselves back in the safety of our childhood bedrooms. The lion’s roar – a radiator. The pitter pattering of tiny Wild Things – the rain outside. Yet within a small, singular space, we traveled to another world and returned on the other side changed. In Throw the Book Away (2013), Anne Doughty remarks that regardless of how much a child reads, it is the experience of self-reliance and youthful agency that will ensure a protagonist’s survival in an unknown labyrinth. They must hear the warnings, read the signs, and act on their own. 

Cover image of the score book Songs and a Sea Interlude by Oliver Knussen and Maurice Sendak, from the opera Where the Wild Things Are.

This exhibit recreates these aural portals. However, instead of reading a book, we invite you to immerse yourself in the experience of children’s music. The Music and Childhood Culture Spotlight Exhibit seeks to inform scholars of the rich history of children’s music by highlighting hidden gems from the UT Austin library collections. Did you know A.A. Milne commissioned his own songbook for Winnie the Pooh in 1929? Or that Carole King wrote a children’s television special called Really Rosie in 1975? It was a huge hit and we have the score, which you can check out to sing to your younger friends! Selections also range from audio recordings like Danny Kaye’s narration of Tubby the Tuba (1947) to Oliver Knussen’s operatic score of Where the Wild Things Are (1982) and a wealth of interdisciplinary scholarship from Mozart’s influence on childhood labor (Mueller) to the rise of Young People’s Records (Bonner). 

Cover image of the score book Really Rosie by Carole King

Music is a psychological tool to study emotional regulation “without rules or limitations, it is pure assimilation” and media can stimulate fantasy for children to pretend “as if” they are something else (Gotz et, all, 2005 p.13). Numerous scholars discuss the sentimentality and destruction of child development due to media dependency, but children will always make their own ideas of media to understand, transgress, rebel, and connect with their surroundings (Parry, 2013). Here, in this exhibit, we seek to highlight the positive attributes of musical media that allow children (and our inner child) to enact their own creative cultures through their imaginations and identify the “traces” of media that we value. 

Cover image of the book Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood by Adeline Mueller

I hope you enjoy these discoveries as much as I did. 


Works Cited 

  • Doughty, Amie A. Throw the Book Away: Reading versus Experience in Children’s Fantasy. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2013. 
  • Gotz, Maya, Dafna Lemish, Hyesung Moon, and Amy Aidman. Media and the Make-Believe Worlds of Children. Routledge, 2005. 
  • Parry, Becky. Children, Film, and Literacy. London: Palgave Macmillan, 2013.

Whit’s Picks: Take 2 – Gems from the HMRC

Resident poet and rock and roll star Harold Whit Williams has recently taken on a project to catalog the KUT Collection, obtained a few years ago and inhabiting a sizable portion of the Historical Music Recordings Collection (HMRC).

Being that he has a refined sense of both words and music, Whit seems like a good candidate for exploring and discovering some overlooked gems in the trove, and so in this occasional series, he’ll be presenting some of his noteworthy finds.

Earlier installments: Take 1


 

Black Tambourine / Black Tambourine

This short-lived yet highly influential late 80’s D.C. area band strummed and shoegazed ahead of its time, foreshadowing the twee-pop genre. Fuzz, feedback, and post-punk drumming backfill the sugary-sweet AM radio vocals. Their complete recordings here, with six previously unreleased songs.

 

Nancy Elizabeth / Wrought Iron

Mancunian folk singer-songwriter Nancy Elizabeth Cunliffe haunts in a most wonderful way on this spare, moody, and ethereal album, released on UK’s The Leaf Label.  Ballasted by minor-key piano and acoustic guitar, her voice drifts out to sea, lilting with love and loss.

 

Avery Sharpe Trio / Live: Fraser Performance Studio at WGBH

Long-time bassist for legendary McCoy Tyner (as well as giants Art Blakey and Archie Shepp), Sharpe stretches the trad jazz piano/bass/drums setting here into something completely unique, showcasing his virtuosic chops on sweet old standards and bold originals alike.

 

Dave McCann and the Firehearts / Dixiebluebird

Wind-driven ballads from Ontario’s Dave McCann, backed by his roots-rocking band the Firehearts and produced by Nashville’s Americana icon Will Kimbrough. This collection sets out upon that long stretch of heartworn highway, but brings the listener closer to home with each bittersweet song.

 

William Hooker ; Christian Marclay ; Lee Ranaldo / Bouquet.

Avant-garde jazz drummer Hooker, artist/composer/turntablist Marclay, and Sonic Youth guitarist Ranaldo anesthetize, improvise, and terrorize the more than willing crowd in this live recording from NYC’s Knitting Factory. Ambient musique concrète + furious drum flurries + dissonant guitar squawk = Exquisite Chaos.

album cover
William Hooker, Christian Marclay, Lee Ranaldo. Bouquet.

Sample audio from Bouquet at Allmusic

 

[Harold Whit Williams is a Library Specialist in Music & Multimedia Resources Cataloging for Content Management. He also writes poetry, is guitarist for Cotton Mather, and records ambient electronic music under the solo name The French Riot.]

Reflections on a Practicum

Mark GoodwinMark Goodwin is a project assistant for HeadsUpGuys and student librarian in the Music, Art and Architecture Library at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He undertook a practicum with Music Librarian David Hunter of the Fine Arts Library at UT this spring. He has graciously provided the following reflections on his time in Austin.

For my two-week practicum, I was extremely fortunate to be given the opportunity to work under Music Librarian and Musicologist Dr. David Hunter at the Fine Arts Library at the University of Texas in Austin. My time there resulted in profound growth on both a professional and personal level.

The Fine Arts Library.Dr. Hunter was an outstanding mentor. He has a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge relating to the profession and was more than willing to share this wealth of experience with me. He was also exceptionally kind and constantly made sure I was getting the most out of my time, even going above an beyond my role in the library to inform me of events occurring throughout the city. In terms of my role, Dr. Hunter had me take on an assistant-type position in which I shadowed him and helped with his daily duties. This was key to making the experience an invaluable one for me, and I am extremely grateful to Dr. Hunter for giving me this role. Continue reading Reflections on a Practicum

¡A Viva Voz! gets funky with Ocote Soul Sounds

Ocote Soul Sounds members Adrian Quesada (white shirt) and Marti
Ocote Soul Sounds members Adrian Quesada and Martin Perna. Photo courtesy Ocote Soul Sounds.

¡Baile!

The Benson Latin American Collection is going to be “coconut rock” central next Thursday (4/8) when Austin-born psychedelic Afro-Latin funk band Ocote Soul Sounds throw down the beats as part of the eighth annual ¡A Viva Voz!

Featuring the bandleaders of Grupo Fantasma and Antibalas – Adrian Quesada and Martin Perna, respectively – Ocote Soul Sounds has been described as “sounding like a sun kissed Brazilian soundtrack from the ’70s.”

¡A Viva Voz! kicks off  at 7pm with a lite reception and presentation by dj t-kay of KOOP 91.7 fm before the band starts to jam and those so inclined shake it up on the dance floor.

Continue reading ¡A Viva Voz! gets funky with Ocote Soul Sounds

Coming soon to a library near you…

av_retrieval_graphicThere are no more excuses to be made for not getting knee-deep into the Libraries’ music collections.

The Fine Arts Library (FAL) has officially launched a retrieval service for its combined collection of audiovisual materials. Now users can have CDs, DVDs and other media shipped to the most convenient library branch for pick-up in around a couple of days.

I happened to be working with our Social Work & Government Librarian, PG Moreno for an article in our print newsletter, when I noticed that he had a box set of Stax/Volt Records singles on his desk, and I immediately became covetous. Continue reading Coming soon to a library near you…