Brand from Home | December 02, 2021

Brand History

Antaeus Theatre Company as part of their The Zip Code Plays Series presents 91201: Glendale, The Six Pianos of Miradero. Written by Alex Goldberg and directed by Lisa Sanaye Dring. In the Spring of 1925, Glendale founding father Leslie C. Brand is dead and grieving widow Mary Louise is ready for the reading of the will. But who is the mysterious young woman also in attendance? Based on true events and historical figures; the play looks at the nature of philanthropy and the true inheritors of Mr. Brand’s largesse.

Music Playlist

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. Do you need some music DVDs to watch over the holidays? Check out these titles.

Here are some music and stories for December holidays!

Read about Music

Oxford Music Online is the online gateway to Grove Music Online with the ability to search The Oxford Dictionary of Music and The Oxford Companion to Music. You can login with your library card number. Check out this article on jazz drummer Max Roach.

New Music Books

Music Events

Performing Arts Live is a database for current Southern California Theater, Dance and Classical Music events.

Films Online

Explore the collection work by work through MoMA’s ArtSpeaks program. This series of short films has MoMA staff sharing personal impressions of an artwork in the galleries. Over 40 short films are available including works by Picasso, Philip Guston, Chagall, Maria Martin and more.

A wordless animation, Snack Attack is a perfect animated short for all ages to discuss perceptions, stereotypes, inferences, predictions, aha moments, flashbacks, and more. The film is also used in creative writing and ESL lessons, often to help express tense and time markers.

An Eagle’s Feather is an illustrated children’s book the Lab produced in 2015 with the Philippine Eagle Foundation (PEF) to raise awareness for the critically endangered national bird of the Philippines. This rare forest raptor is critically endangered due to deforestation and hunting. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology shares its plight in this animated storybook video. Download An Educator's Guide featuring eight pages of activities that target national science, math, writing, and art education standards for grades K-5.

Take a moment to learn about color in this quick short by Buenos Aires-based Studio Ronda. CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black), in printing, CYMK refers to the 4 process inks used to print those images on paper. How do you create full color images with just four super strong colors? Mr. Yellow, Mr. Cyan, & Mr. Magenta are mixed together in three different ways.

Art Exhibitions

Glendale’s Arts & Culture Commission is launching Art on Orange, a Storefront Art Program that will beautify a vacant unit on 250 N. Orange St. Please join us for the program’s Opening Reception on the evening of Friday, December 10 from 6:00pm – 8:00pm to see installations made by local artists Cathy Hrenda, Jennifer Swain, and Diane Williams in response to the theme of “Resiliency.” Their works repurpose found objects into art, address the adversity of marine life, and reinterpret meaningful cultural articles. Throughout the evening, community members will have the opportunity to speak with these talented artists, listen to music by musician Mark de Clive-Lowe, mingle, and enjoy desserts from Maggie’s Pastry. Art on Orange will be on exhibit from December 10, 2021 to January 29, 2022.

Beyond the Box: Utility Box Mural Art Program.

In July of this year, a Call for Artists was made to local and regional applicants for Beyond the Box, a mural project supported by the City of Glendale and the Glendale Arts & Culture Commission with funding from the Urban Art Program. The program goal is to bring beauty to unexpected places such as public infrastructure, in this case utility boxes. There are currently over 100 painted utility box murals in Glendale. This year, seven artists were selected to paint murals over the weekend of October 22-24, 2021. The theme this year was “Celebrating Mental Health Awareness,” a crucial topic as life begins to normalize following the global COVID-19 pandemic. The Glendale Arts & Culture Commission has an art map to guide you to all of our Beyond the Box murals.

Checkout some inspiration from the library. Learn how to make a butterfly card, or other fun arts and crafts ideas using CreativeBug our online learning resource.

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

Karen Dalton : in my own time. The new documentary on troubled folk singer Karen Dalton, In My Own Time, brings the mysterious and widely unknown musician’s story to light, and does a fantastic job of creating a work that exists within the tone of its subject. The documentary, like many of Dalton’s songs and poems, are deeply personal and somber. What I appreciated about the documentary (other than just existing) was it showcased a dilemma which was at the crux of Karen Dalton: confidence versus self-hatred, which was a juggling act that would eventually crush her. Dalton, a wildly talented folk singer both sought fame and actively avoided it; a wildly independent woman who pulled people close than pushed them away. The documentary is both a celebration and a condemnation, and it’s honesty and intimacy makes it one of the better musician documentaries out there. Borrow a copy through our Link+ services. -GG

Beloved street photographer Bill Cunningham had an entire career as a milliner and fashion critic before he found a permanent home at the New York Times. He started writing a memoir sometime before his passing in 2016, and it was discovered and published three years later as Fashion Climbing: A Memoir with Photographs. Fashion Climbing starts with Cunningham pushing his way into the fashion world of the late 1940s as William J., a milliner, who quite literally sustained himself through the lean years on fashion alone. If you’ve seen either of the two documentaries about his life, The Times of Bill Cunningham or Bill Cunningham New York, you’re familiar with his cheerful disposition, restrained living, and his exuberant love for and

documentation of the most expressive of fashion displays. Unsurprisingly, he brought extreme creativity to every career space he inhabited in New York. There are some melancholy parts of the memoir—Cunningham describes disappointing his conservative Catholic family, for instance, and having to restart his career when wearing hats becomes passé—but overall Cunningham tells his life story in a conversational and hilarious way that’s a quick and interesting read! -SB

Webern – Works With Opus Numbers (Pierre Boulez – Sony Classical). Anton von Webern (1883-1945) was one of the most famous students of Arnold Schoenberg and a huge influence upon the avant-garde after World War II. Over his life his music becomes more abstract and dissonant. Webern adopted Schoenberg’s serial technique starting from opus 17 but his music retained it’s uniqueness. Many of his works have a pointillism, often just a few notes assigned to each instrument - creating colorful shifts. I’ve been asked by library patrons about albums to listen to which might help get out of creative ruts and for me this album certain helps to stretch my ears. Webern’s works are short, compressed and he was meticulous about every detail of sound. All of his published works fit on three CDs. I find the instrumental and orchestral pieces much easier to listen to than the vocal works. My favorites pieces are the 5 Pieces opus 10, the Symphony opus 21 and the Concerto for 9 instruments. Serialism was a dead end for most composers of the period but there were also masterworks and Webern wrote quite a few of them. His arrangement of the Ricercar from Bach’s Musical Offering shows his orchestral genius as his pointillistic style brings new light to the piece. I’m sorry Naxos didn’t include a PDF of the booklet but Brand Library also has the CD with the booklet in the collection which has excellent notes on each piece. For musicians who want to get into more technical depth read Anton Webern: an introduction to his works by Walter Kolneder. This is an important set and the CD has been checked out from the library 167 times as of this writing. -BW