Brand from Home | January 13, 2022

Performance Series Applications Open

Music Ensembles are invited to apply for two exciting performance series. Music ensembles must be trios or larger. Application submission deadline: January 28, 2022 at 5:00PM (PST).

222 East Concert Series

Performances for the 222 East Concert Series are scheduled for Saturdays in Fall 2022 from 4:00pm-5:00pm.

Performance must be 1 hour in duration each.

Brand Library Plaza Series

Performances for the Brand Library Plaza series are scheduled for Fridays in Summer 2022 from 7:00pm-8:30pm. Performance must be 1 hour and 30 minutes in duration each.

Brand Association Newsletter

Catch up on the latest news from the Associates of Brand Library & Art Center, the non-profit organization that supports cultural, arts and educational programming at Brand Library & Art Center. Learn about recent events and what is coming up in the next few months. Please click HERE to read. Enjoy!

Music Playlists

Listen to a streaming playlist from Freegal Music, Naxos Music Library,Naxos Jazz Music Library, Hoopla or Music Online from Alexander Street free with your library card. Alexander Street will ask for an academic institution, use Glendale Public Library.

We have a wide variety of streaming music you can listen to by logging in with your library card number

Here are some new CDs we have received in the last few weeks.

Here are some new CDs we have received in the past month

Podcast

Gramophone Podcast – the leading British classical music magazine’s podcast includes insight and opinion from leading figures in classical music. Recent guests have included Marin Alsop, Steven Isserlis and Thomas Allen.

Art Exhibitions

Black Souls is on view from Monday, January 17 - February 26, 2022 at Adams Square Mini Park Gas Station, 1020 E. Palmer Ave. Glendale, CA 91205. Black Souls is a tribute of artwork, in memory of the Africans that lost their life on the American soil alone and far from their land. There will be about 20-25 African masks lined up with wood bars lined up to each other to represent the American flag, floating in 2/3 of the mini gas station. which will express a 3D flag. Learn more about the artist Martial Yapo.

Let Me Talk is on view at the Brand Library & Art Center from January 22 - March 19. A provocative exhibition featuring paintings, sculptures, installation, and photography by a diverse group of 24 artists, curated by Ada Pullini Brown and Jill Sykes includes a special edition portfolio of 52 new prints called Utopia/Dystopia, which were produced at the famed East LA printmaking workshop, Self Help Graphics. The works in Let Me Talk point to the many issues that are a part of the current, deeply dark, and coarsened public discourse. The common thread explored in the works by these artists is the desire not to despair or remain silent.

Films Online

Each day, 90-year-old Wayan gathers his nets and mesh sacks and sets his small boat out on the coast of Bali, although he’s adapted his routine in recent years: rather than harvesting food for his family and community, he scoops up wrappers, bottles, and other refuse and carries the discarded material back to the beach for recycling. San Francisco-based director Dana Frankoff visits Wayan at his coastal home in her impactful debut Voice Above Water.

Director Pascal Schelbli describes his 2019 short film The Beauty. A cautionary reimagining of the world’s rampant plastic pollution, the arresting animation reenvisions waste as lively sea life: a bubble-wrap fish puffs up, a serpentine tire glides through the water, and an entire school of discarded footwear swims in an undulating mass. Plumbing the vast expanse of the littered ocean, The Beauty magnifies the enduring nature of waste and lays bare the insidious effects of microplastics as they enter the food chain and impact the overall health of the ecosystem.

Migrants is an incredibly powerful award-winning animated short film by students at the Pôle 3D school in Tourcoing-Roubaix, France about a parental polar bear and a young cub who find themselves looking for a new home after their native Arctic land becomes completely untenable due to climate change. The student team of Hugo Caby, Antoine Dupriez, Aubin Kubiak, Lucas Lermytte, and Zoé Devise approached their graduation project knowing they wanted to create a film that addressed societal issues. Inspired initially by the story of the Aquarius, a watercraft filled with refugees that stirred global headlines when it was refused entry at Italian ports in 2018.

Checkout some winter inspiration from the library.

Can't find it at the library? Try out Link+ our network of 70 public and academic libraries from across California and Nevada. Just click on the link from the catalog or watch a tutorial to learn more.

Brand Library Staff Reviews

Ysaye – Sonatas for solo violin James Ehnes. Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931) was a famous Belgian violin virtuoso but was also a composer and conductor. Most of his compositional output is neglected except for these famous six sonatas for solo violin op. 27 (1923) which are standard virtuoso violin repertoire. James Ehnes (b. 1976) is a Canadian violinist and violist and has made wonderful recordings of Bach, Beethoven, John Adams, Aaron Jay Kernis and others. With the pandemic raging in early 2020 he decided to work on recording solo pieces. These pieces are sparkling virtuoso showpieces and are a bridge between 19th and early 20th century music. The influence of Bach, Paganini, Vieuxtemps and Debussy are all in Ysaye’s work. Sonata no.2 quotes from Bach and there are a couple of Sarabande slow movements and a fugato which all point to Bach’s influence. Modern techniques such as whole tone scales, sul ponticello (a raspy sound created by bowing near the bridge) and dissonances are part of his style. There are virtuoso bow and left hand techniques and even a new technique Ysaye invented where the violinist plays five or six note chords. Ehnes is fantastic. I haven’t compared this to other available recordings but I imagine most reviewers would rank this exciting new performance very high their lists. There are many other recordings of the Sonatas you can listen to on Naxos Music Library for comparison. (BW)

The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television--

Rod Serling was best known for his sci fi anthology series The Twilight Zone that ran with modest success on CBS from 1959 to 1964 and exploded in popularity in syndication. There is a lot to be said about the show’s development and what happened to its creator in the process, and illustrator Koren Shadmi’s biographical comic The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television gives us a creative retelling of the story. Serling’s life story plays as if it could be an episode of the show—he tells it to a stranger on a flight presumably bound for (what we can only imagine) another dimension. The Twilight Man starts with the broad strokes of Serling's war experience and career writing for radio and television years before his teleplay “Patterns” was widely acclaimed and producers who had rejected his scripts previously circled back into his life. Shadmi shows how the pointed social critique present in Serling’s work was progressively diluted by a combination of censors, sponsors, and network executives. Constantly fighting the industry, he asked the masters of science fiction how to disguise contemporary stories in speculative fiction to pass censorship. If you know Serling's story, or can guess how this is going, there’s chain smoking, financial loss, self-doubt, and family woes. It’s all tersely drawn in The Twilight Man in black and white, exceedingly compelling and tragic. (SB)