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Over the past millennia, music has actively been performed and listened to by mankind, thus also playing an important role in establishing sociocultural identities that have evolved over time. In parallel, for many centuries, newspapers played an important role in informing society on a regular and frequent basis on topics noteworthy at that time. Therefore, in retrospect, these newspapers offer windows into historic topics of sociocultural significance, including cultural and musical life. Thanks to ongoing digitization efforts, large-scale newspaper corpora now have become broadly available and accessible. Taking the digitized historical newspaper collection of the National Library of The Netherlands as an example, in this paper, we discuss how considering music-related mentionings in newspapers can enable potential new research directions and questions. We discuss open syntactic and semantic data-related technical challenges when analyzing music-related mentionings in digitized historical newspaper collections. Finally, we discuss how successful detection of music-related mentionings can also benefit engagement of non-scholarly end users, concluding with an invitation to the interdisciplinary research community to actively contribute to the given use case.

he number of scholars involved with the study of African sculpture and related aspects such as painting, decoration, architecture, oral literature, dance, music, costume, gestural symbolism and drama, is still very small.' Within the total body of scientists who place the study of African cultures and societies in the center of their scholarly analyses, students of the African arts constitute a minute group. Within the disciplines of art history, anthropology, comparative literature, and so on, they represent an even smaller fraction. The amount of primary scientific materials and documents available to these few scholars in libraries, archives, museums, private collections, and in the field, is immense. Although uneven in quality and coverage, the materials at our disposal are extremely rich and diverse in scope and content.2 The primary documents are not easy to handle, for they are scattered in many places. Published and unpublished sources, extending over a long period of time, are written in several European languages and, increasingly, in some African ones as well. A substantial number of these sources

Ivor Guest has written this book to trace the history and development of the ballet at the Paris Opera. Though not yet published in English, Paul Alexandre's translation into French of Guest's work is now available through Flammarion. According to the New York Public Library's Dance Collection Catalog, it is the first work since Laloy's 1927 volume to deal with the history of ballet at the Opera right up to the present. Guest is a well-known scholar who has built his international reputation as a dance historian over 30 years with books on the romantic period, the Second Empire and the biographies of Elssler, Cerrito, Zucchi and Zambelli. In a field where bias abounds, Guest manages to gather, order, and present his material in a logical, clear and straightforward manner. It is only toward the end of the book looking at the Opera ballet's most recent history, that we sense the author's desire to convince us that the Opera remains a strong force as it searches for "a new identity." For the most part, Guest lets us look at the development of the Paris Opera ballet without trying to cram its importance down our throats. Guest deals with his material chronologically in chapters which develop period themes as he perceives them. Chapter headings indicate the uneven flow of ballet history through the doors of the Paris Opera: "The Cradle of Classical Dance," "Virtuosos of the Rococco Period," "Noverre," "The Reign of the Gardels," "The Apog6e of Romanticism," "The Decline of Romanticism," "Decadence," "A Period of Transition," "The Lifar Period," and "The Quest for a New Identity." Guest weaves an enormous amount of material into these chapters in a narrative style that makes this book hard to put down even if your French is rusty. What were the audiences like? At various times they were hostile, hard to please, fickle, rude and easily provoked and aroused. Who were the administrators? How did they relate to their dancers? What were the personal qualities of a Noverre, a Gardel, a Staats or a Rouche that marked their tenure at the Opera and their ability to bring out greatness in a performer or performance? Did the Paris Opera continue to operate or did it fold during times of political crisis (there were quite a few between the days of the Ancien Regime and the Reign of Terror, through the Communes and including the First and Second World Wars). What of Guimard's union against de Visme's directorship at the Opera and the strike of 1912? The fact that Guest has written the history of the Opera ballet into a cultural and political context makes Le Ballet