As it turns out, it is very difficult to do research without access to a physical library.
I’m currently researching Igor Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments and its relationship to discourses of gender in 1920’s France. The piece has many characteristics that are typically associated with masculinity in music, and tied in with the high importance Stravinsky placed on traits like objectivity that are often perceived as male, it makes sense to read the piece through the lens of gender. This is especially true because gender roles underwent a significant shift during the interwar period in Europe, which heightened anxieties about gender, and what it “ought to” look like in practice.
Theoretically, given the significant number of sources discussing gendered perceptions in music, and the ways masculinity as a concept is constructed in general, as well as the apparent existence of sources discussing Stavinsky’s relationship to gender in particular, this should be a relatively straightforward point to research and craft. However, this is not an easy time to be conducting research, and attempting to research without access to physical library resources is proving to be very difficult. It seems that every source I think will be useful is only available in physical form, at a library roughly 2,000 miles away from me. Usually in my research process, I am able to look through indexes of books, and generally flip through to assess whether or not a resource has sections relevant to my research. In this case, even if I am able to get a scan of a book, I can’t assess its utility before receiving it. With all this difficulty, I can say that I am even more grateful for the library resources we have access to on campus, as well as the library staff and their efforts to keep up our access to these tools.
The other research difficulty I am having is with finding a review of the premiere performance. Interestingly, I can find many references in various professional program notes to the first performance of the
Symphonies of Wind Instruments and its apparently poor reception, but I can find no citations to trace these claims to. It turns out citations are, in fact, a good idea. I’ve spent about 10 hours over the past 3 days searching through newspaper databases from both France and England (where the piece was premiered), using every search term I can think of, and have yet to find any references to the performance. It seems inconceivable that nobody was reviewing, or announcing this performance given Stravinsky’s prominence (and the fact that major newspapers were publishing reviews of school concerts within the same month), but it does seem likely that that review is not in the databases accessible to me, or is at least filed under search terms that have not yet occurred to me. Luckily, there are librarians who are experts in this who can help, and for whom I am, yet again, very thankful for. If this experience has taught me anything, it’s that librarians may in fact be research magicians for being able to navigate these databases.