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National Library Week
by Leanne Hillery, Assistant Librarian

From April 13-19, the University and Law Libraries will join libraries across America in celebrating National Library Week, an annual observance sponsored by the American Library Association since 1958. The purpose of National Library Week is to draw attention to the contribution libraries make in the cultural and civic life of our country. This year the national theme for the celebration is “Join the Circle of Knowledge @ Your Library.”

As in previous years, the University and Law Libraries will offer several events to make Regent’s National Library Week celebration memorable:

Essay Contest. Regent Students were invited to submit essays of not more than 250 words or a video no longer than 2 minutes on the topic:

How would you persuade your fellow students to use the Regent University Libraries?

WAVY-TV meteorologist, Jon Cash

The winning entry will be announced and read or shown during the National Library Week student appreciation luncheon (see below) and published in an upcoming issue of Library Link.

Student Appreciation Luncheon. Thursday, April 17, 12:00-1:00 (inside the University Library). The luncheon will feature a performance by the Varsity Improv Players and a talk by John Cash, WAVY TV 10 meteorologist and author.

New “Faculty Recommends” Posters (throughout the week in the Library Lobby). Find out what Regent professors are reading.

Fine Amnesty Week. All fines will be waived for items returned April 13-19.

Since at least the 1990s, there has been no shortage of technophiles predicting the imminent end to “bricks and mortars” libraries. Once everything has been digitized, they inform us, there will no longer be any need to go to the library, so all funds previously targeted for library buildings should be redirected towards achieving this lofty goal. Near the end of the first decade of the 21st Century however, it becomes ever clearer that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the imminent death of libraries have been greatly exaggerated.

In a recent article in University Business, librarian Richard McKay writes that “offsite computer access is changing, but will not destroy, the campus library.” The Library provides at least three functions “that tend to retain their essential value in spite of the way in which they are presented”:

• Professional reference service
• Hard-copy access
• Public space

Of these three functions, McKay writes that public space provides the libraries with the most significant challenge in meeting the varied demands of users. Recent developments that have had important impacts on the atmosphere of academic libraries include tolerance for cell phone conversation, curricular emphasis on assignments requiring collaborative work, and the increasing value placed on comfortable surroundings. To meet these new expectations, many university libraries, including Regent, have created “information” or “library” commons, to provide public space for collaborative research and as well as a friendly, inviting atmosphere where students can relax, enjoy reading that does not require complete silence, and even watch breaking news on television.

At the same time, McKay emphasizes that providing quiet space, both for individual and group study, remains a key responsibility of academic libraries. According to McKay, “the quality of the study space that the library provides to its patrons reveals the school’s attitude toward the scholarly values it theoretically supports. For this reason, the Regent Library has designated the entire second floor for quiet study by individuals and groups.

To return to the idea that electronic information is making libraries obsolete: Speaking at the National Press Club in April 2000, Librarian of Congress James Billington warned that “it is dangerous to promote the illusion that you can get anything you want by sitting in front of a computer screen.” “It is isolating. It is a lonely thing.” In contrast, “libraries are places, a community thing.” At the University Library, we believe Dr. Billington’s words are well taken. By combing the best in recent innovations while preserving what readers have always loved about libraries, we hope to keep the University Library at the heart of scholarly and intellectual life at Regent.

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Library Faculty Recommendations
by Leanne Hillery, Assistant Librarian

Quiet Study Options

Philosopher in Meditation (detail)
Rembrandt van Rijn

With the creation of the Library Commons, the first floor of the Library is no longer the quiet sanctuary for study that it once was. Talking, collaboration, socializing, and of course, consulting with reference librarians, are now encouraged. Indicative of this change is the continuous display of CNN News, with moderate audio, on the two plasma television screens on the first floor. With all this collaboration, consulting, and news watching, where can students now go to find quiet study space? 
 
The second floor is now the designated quiet zone. The entire floor is intended for quiet individual and group study. Throughout the floor, there are tables, study carrels, as well as group and single person study rooms that are ideal for study, solitude, and reflection. The group study rooms may be reserved at the Circulation Desk.  Rooms accommodate between 2-8 people for private group work.

The Library also has a limited number of carrels and rooms that are assigned for an entire semester. The Circulation Desk handles both types of requests. To reserve a room or carrel for the semester, students must submit a request form. Students may check out library materials which can be kept in their assigned room or carrel. For more information about reserving a carrel or room for a semester, visit the links below:

Carrels:  http://www.regent.edu/general/library/services/circulation/assigned_carrels.cfm
Study Rooms:  http://www.regent.edu/general/library/services/circulation/study_room_policy.cfm

Whatever your needs for privacy or silence in the Library, the answer is never more than a flight of stairs away!

 

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Collection Spotlight-- Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, by Christoph Wolff
Reviewed by Harold Henkel, Assistant Librarian

The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.

-- Johann Sebastian Bach

Writing about Russian icons, Leonid Ouspensky observed evocatively that “Byzantium was preeminent in giving the world theology expressed in words [and] theology expressed in the image was given preeminently by Russia.”^* Whether or not one agrees with this view, the idea that Christian theology found perfect pictorial expression in one form of painting leads one naturally to consider music. In what music does theology find unsurpassed expression? For many Christian listeners, the answer to this question must be Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750).

While Christoph Wolff in no way attempts to deemphasize the role of faith in Bach’s work, he clearly views Bach the composer as being also a scientist and even metaphysician. For Wolff, Bach is most usefully compared with Isaac Newton (1643-1710). Wolff does not belabor the point, but emphasizes that the work of both Newton and Bach was ultimately a search for truth, for the “operations of God.”

Wolff is perhaps the greatest living authority on the music of Bach, so his full length biography of the composer was greatly anticipated by musicologists and music lovers. Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician is a demanding work because Wolff explicates Bach’s life and his music, on the musicological, theological, and philosophical levels. Wolff, who published his first book on Bach in 1968, clearly reveres his subject and writes movingly about the details of Bach’s life. Wolff describes a devoted husband and father directly involved in his children’s upbringing. Music was the Bach family business, and all of Bach’s pedagogical works (e.g. the keyboard Inventions and Symphonias) were first written for the instruction of his children in playing and composition.

In his analyses of the church music, Wolff can be illuminating about the theology that underpins Bach’s musical thought. For example in the chapter on the St. Matthew Passion, Wolff shows how in the opening chorus, “Come, you daughters, help me lament,” music and text are perfectly united to connect the Passion of Christ with the vision in the Apocalypse of the of the eternal Jerusalem, whose ruler is the Lamb, evoked in the chorus by words “O innocent Lamb of God.”

Despite Wolff’s appreciation for the theological content in Bach’s music, his primary interest is in Bach’s contributions in the science and art of learned music. In the book’s prologue, Wolff lists some of Bach’s achievements along with a representative composition:

• Fugue and canon (The Art of Fugue)
• Major-minor tonality (The Well-Tempered Clavier)
• Harmonic Expansion (the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue)
• Extended polyphony (the unaccompanied violin, cello, and flute pieces)
• Instrumentation (the Brandenburg Concertos)
• Small-scale form (the Orgel-Büchlein) and large-scale forms (the St. Matthew Passion)
• Style and compositional technique, from retrospective to modern (the B-minor Mass)
• Musical affect and meaning (the church cantatas)

Since the central argument of Wolff’s book is that Bach cannot be fully appreciated as merely a composer, but must also be understood as a scientist or philosopher (in the pre-Enlightenment meaning of those words), it is curious to me that he does not place Bach in the context of Medieval and Renaissance composers for whom it was understood that music is a form of mathematics. The idea that musical composition and science are related would certainly not have been new to the composers of the Notre Dame School, Ockeghem, or Josquin Desprez. Bach himself owned editions of Palestrina (c. 1525-1594), probably the earliest composer to whose music Bach would have had access. He also composed a set of unaccompanied sacred choral works to which he assigned the archaic nomenclature motets. Even more important in this regard is Bach’s interest in his late years in strict canon (e.g. the Goldberg Variations, the Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue). Bach must have understood himself (as no doubt Wolff does as well) as being part of a very old tradition of musical-mathematical investigation, but Wolff does inquire into this area.

The contribution of Bach to music and Western culture is of course too huge to be covered in a single volume (Philipp Spitta, writing in the nineteenth century, required three volumes to tell Bach’s story), so any biographer not wishing to produce an encyclopedia-length work is faced with the agony of selection. In Wolff’s biography, we are fortunate to have the selections of one of the greatest scholars of the most learned musician.

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^*Leonide Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1982), 45.

Are you interested in writing a book review for the Library Link? If so, please contact Harold Henkel at harohen@regent.edu.

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