The Music Library Association has announced its publication awards for 1999.(Brief Article)

The Vincent H. Duckles Award for the best book-length bibliography or other research tool in music was presented to two publications: David Fallows for A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415-1480 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and James B. Sinclair for A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles lves (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). The MLA Publications Awards Committee noted that "David Fallows has opened his workshop to outsiders, allowing us to benefit from his thoughtful scrutiny, over the course of fourteen years, of some 2,000 songs in at least seven languages and preserved in nearly 200 manuscript and printed sources. The Catalogue's importance does not lie in its comprehensiveness, however, to which, in any case, it makes no claim rather it lies in the acuity of its author's judgements regarding genre, concordance, attribution, and style. The sort of vade mecum that earns gratitude with every use, what co uld easily have become unwieldy is instead elegant and practical." [For a review of this book, see Notes 58 (2001): forthcoming.--Ed.] The Awards Committee further noted: "It would be difficult to imagine a better Ives resource than James Sinclair's Descriptive Catalogue. Rising to the occasion, it is, simply, more than an identifying thematic reference, more than a documentation of sources, more even than its own title claims. The medium has been tailored to the oeuvre. Internal references from work to work do more than record attributes of the material: they contribute to the biography of the works and their author. More information than has been collocated before now establishes borrowings and models, while the significance of premiere performances and recordings has never been made clearer." [For a ...