Madge Gillings and Mrs Bagot Stack on record
The Women's League of Health and Beauty Exercises—music from the early 1930s, and a beautiful documentary, all online.
Which was the first ballet to be rehearsed to piano?
It's hard to find out when people first rehearsed ballet with piano rather than violin. An article from 1963 might have the answer.
OCR errors and ballet
Optical character recognition (OCR) errors in pdfs can cause some pretty fundamental problems of understanding. Here's one from ballet.
Brahms, Tchaikovsky and the polysemic hairpin
Following on from an earlier post about Tchaikovsky's hairpins, today I learned about the Brahmsian hairpin too.
More background on the party scene song in The Nutcracker
Since writing about Bon Voyage Cher Dumollet nine years ago, I've found out a lot more. Here are some sources.
Kostrovitskaya’s career as a plasterer
In these days when artists are insulted by the idea of having to retrain as something else, let's take a moment to remember Vera Kostrovitskaya, famous pedagogue—and plasterer, restorer of…