The approaching XXIII Olympic Winter Games shine a spotlight on the Korean Peninsula, and the very tentative steps toward cooperation between the two Koreas in the current highly-charged political climate. Music is playing a role in that arena.
The Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound is pleased to announce the appointment of Gurudarshan Khalsa as Project Archivist for 2018. Gurudarshan will be processing the Strong Museum Collection, the Richard Howe Collection of Musical Instrument Literature, a portion of the Robert Baxter Collection, and also several small collections in the Archive of Recorded Sound. He will also create finding aids that will make these collections accessible to the public.
The Music Library is the recipient of a magnificent collection of classical music compact discs donated by Dr. David R. Kessler. The collection consists of 7,701 titles on 9,546 discs resulting from Dr. Kessler’s lifelong love and involvement with music. He began listening to classical music on the radio in New York in his early teens, where he listened to music several hours daily and took notes on what he heard. He also began seriously studying the piano.
The Stanford Libraries have started a subscription to Met Opera on Demand, which streams more than 600 full-length Metropolitan Opera performances, including more than 100 high-definition videos known from their showings at movie theaters, classic telecasts originally broadcast live on tv from 1977-2003, radio broadcasts (audio only) of performances going back to 1935 from the Saturday matinee radio broadcasts, and more recent satellite radio broadcasts.
Ginsberg comes up fairly often in this blog (e.g. Rebecca Wingfield's recent post about "Howl" going up online), but the release of over 2000+ audio cassette recordings to SearchWorks is truly another cause for celebration. These recordings represent a staggering amount of primary source material associated with the Beat Generation, the bulk of which date from the 1970s to 1990s.
The University Archives is happy to annouce the availability of a new exhibit for the KZSU Project South Collection featuring streaming audio and downloadable transcripts for this pioneering civil rights campaign. During the summer of 1965, eight students from Stanford University spent ten weeks in the southern states tape-recording information on the civil rights movement.
For a number of years the Archive of Recorded Sound has been collecting catalogs published by recording companies from around the world. Although the ARS continues to collect these catalogs on an ongoing basis, the materials that are currently in the the Record Catalog Collection have now been processed, and a finding aid is available in the Online Archive of California. In addition to record catalogs, the publications in the collection include promotional and advertising mat
It has been some time since there has been a report on the Player Piano Project, but there has been a great deal of activity toward the design and construction of a piano roll scanner. We are working with Anthony Robinson in England who is a player piano enthusiast and the designer of a roll scanner which we believe is one of the best scanners in operation to date. Anthony graciously and generously agreed to work with us to create a scanner that would handle scanning large numbers of rolls easily and efficiently.