Talks 7. Variety

Abstract

“Theater in the Margins: Three Case Studies of Annotation in the Berg Collection”: Marginalia, a kind of responsive writing hinging on an earlier text, can be both private and public. Three books from the personal libraries of three esteemed writers in the New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection position the annotator as a performer, using the margins to articulate a public interpretation of the text. This talk will look at the ways in which writers (Charles Dickens on A Christmas Carol; Vladimir Nabokov on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; and Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden on Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That) respond as readers, using marginalia to stage their own interpretations of classic texts.; “Come Together Now: A Successful Partnership of Northwestern University’s Music Library and Beinen School of Music”: During the John Cage centennial in 2012, Northwestern University’s Music Library and Beinen School of Music partnered to create a series of events that showcased the university as a center for Cage research. The Music Library, which holds one of the most important Cage special collections, created the exhibit “Sound and Silence: John Cage Composing Himself.” The curator performed a DIY 4’33” (Cage’s famous silent work) with an orchestra of university and community members. This talk will highlight a positive collaboration of two university units, provide an example of leveraging departmental strengths toward shared goals, and show how performance and a music collection can illuminate each other.; “Printed for Performance: Ceremonial and Interactive Aspects of Books from Europe’s First Presses”: This presentation demonstrates that many of the books printed in Mainz during the pioneering decade of the 1450s were made and used not for isolated desktop study, but rather for performance–liturgical ceremonies, oral reading, or group learning. Although the earliest European printers faced monumental technical challenges, they succeeded (with the cooperation of the first users of their books) in developing effective typographic means of fulfilling the essential performative functions that had been established within the manuscript tradition. These fifteenth-century solutions continued to resonate in books throughout the typographic era.