What’s new this summer at the Marvin Duchow Music Library?

Text and images by Skylar Cress

During the academic year, you’ll find me working through a jazz performance program at McGill’s Schulich School of Music. This summer, I had a change of pace through an internship at the Marvin Duchow Music Library as part of the IMPRESS program at McGill. The internship involved work on several projects aimed at enhancing the service offerings of the Music Library. Check out what’s new and improved as a result! 

One of my projects involved the creation of a brand-new topic guide for the Music Library, Indigenous music and musicians! This guide features selected resources, including books and journals available through the Music Library, along with free web resources, that can be used to find information about Indigenous music, musicians, musical traditions, and scholarship. Included are sections with resources for discovering repertoire and for finding sources of audiovisual materials. The primary focus of the guide is on Canadian and other North American sources. 

I also enhanced the guide for Audiovisual equipment at the Music Library by including a new category of equipment! A section titled Small equipment for on-the-spot borrowing has been added to the page that lists equipment available through the Music Library’s equipment lending service. Complementing the existing list of equipment that must be reserved in advance, the new section includes all small equipment that can be borrowed on the spot. These items can be borrowed for 3 hours or 2 days, depending on the item. From chargers to cables, adapters, headphones, and more, check out the list for any small equipment needs! 

Did you know that as a McGill student, faculty, or staff member, you have access to several audio and video streaming resources for recorded music, operas, concerts, ballets, and music documentaries?

During my internship, I updated the Library’s 4th-floor streaming resources display (IG / FB) which highlights recently released albums, music, concerts, and more! See the Music streaming resources guide for more information on available streaming services at the Marvin Duchow Music Library. 

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Marvin Duchow Music Library staff are grateful to Skylar Cress for his work in contributing to the services of the Music Library during his summer 2025 internship with the IMPRESS program at McGill. 

The Score’s the Thing: Humour and the Absurd in the Music of Brian Cherney: new exhibit

The Marvin Duchow Music Library’s latest exhibition entitled, The Score’s the Thing: Humour and the Absurd in the Music of Brian Cherney celebrates the Canadian composer Cherney’s recent 75th birthday and focuses on five theatrical pieces written over a thirty year span.

Three of the first four works (Tangents I, Group Portrait with Piano and Playing for Time), composed between 1975 and 1981, explore and expand upon several integrated and overlapping themes. Cherney examines, in various humourous and improbable ways, the influence of nineteenth-century Romantic music on late twentieth century performers and composers who share a love for its beauty but also must bear the weight of its unshakable influence. He also critiques classical music performance traditions and pokes fun at the absurd relationships between live performers and seemingly inanimate musical instruments.  The “irrational” and “ghostly” appearances of 19th century musical excerpts and the theatrical conjuring of the composers themselves reinforce expressions of anxiety and ambivalence. The fourth theatre piece from this period is born out of Cherney’s frustration with the lack of live and recorded performances of Canadian music.  In Trois petites pièces, the second movement joins together snippets of traditional music notation with a collage of 19th and early 20th century lithographic images thereby creating a score that is according to the composer, “so visually interesting that it doesn’t need to be played.”   Decades later, Cherney combines the fruits of these early theatrical and absurdist experiments in the 2009 piece entitled Brahms and the German Spirit.  In this extended and complex work he expands his examination of 19th century German high-art music and culture and contrasts it with Jewish musical traditions and history, culminating in the powerful imagery of the Holocaust.

We hope you will take the time to look carefully at the scores and read the small essays or captions (English, French, Yiddish) accompanying each work in the display cases facing the elevators and on the third floor wall north of the Library front entrance. For your convenience, there are also two video performances of Brahms and the German Spirit located on iPads in front of the complete score.