In my research of the last two papers, I have found it more difficult than not to find big ole’ articles or even single chapters about either the person or place I was researching. I felt like Shia LaBeouf in the movie Holes: digging and digging…searching and searching…
…Feeling hopeless until I find a golden nugget!
These golden nuggets have kept me going throughout my research process. Here are a few prime examples:
“As a teacher, [Ricardo Viñes] also left an important legacy, educating a younger generation in the aesthetics of his own pianism. His most famous pupils were the great French pianist Marcelle Meyer (whose recordings of French repertoire from the second quarter of the twentieth century tell us much about the performing tradition of these works as communicated to her by Viñes)…” 1
This one represents around 98% of the things I found about Marcelle… She doesn’t even get a whole paragraph. Come on!!! They couldn’t even put the information about her in a proper sentence. They just stuffed it all in parenthesis as if it almost didn’t matter… There is much I could say about that, but I digress.
Thankfully, the Casino de Paris was a lot easier to research, yet I still survived on little tidbits like this one:
“Music hall producer Jacques Charles, a master of show-stopping titillation and exoticism at the Casino de Paris, began his work of “making the negre.” 2
Though these small little fragments of information at times got frustrating, I learned that I could use these tidbits and their surrounding contexts as launching points for my next search out into the vast wildernesses popularly known as Catalyst, Gallica, etc. You could say that a combination of these tidbits with a healthy dose of optimism got me through (and is still) getting me through the dark times. And that, my friends, is worth celebrating!
1 Matthew Jordan, Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity (Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 103.
2 David Korevaar, and Laurie J. Sampsel. “The Ricardo Viñes Piano Music Collection at the University of Colorado at Boulder.” Notes 61, no. 2 (2004): 361–400. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4487361.