Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

The Chopin collection at the University of Chicago Library includes over 400 first and early printed editions of musical compositions by Frédéric Chopin, maintained in the Special Collections Research Center. Because Chopin's works were often published concurrently in several countries with variant texts, scholars can establish a sequence of publication by comparing a range of printings.

Chopin Early Editions consist of digitized images of all scores in the University of Chicago Library's Chopin collection. Users can search or browse Chopin Early Editions via a variety of data points, including titles, genres, and plate numbers.

Orchestras in the United States . . . need to update what they're offering audiences in order to survive.

That terse assessment comes from Henry Fogel, president and CEO of the American Symphony Orchestra League. In his opinion, orchestras can't rely on tried and true formulas. A new century demands a fresh outlook.

"But the standard classical symphony orchestra concert doesn't look any different than what Brahms saw," Fogel said.

Shaw never cared for the media attention his work generated, however, complaining that headlines like "Mozart's Music Makes You Smarter" oversimplified his studies.

For the rest of his career, Shaw continued to study the effect of classical music on the brain, though he distanced himself from the various commercial enterprises his research inspired.