RECORDINGS AT RISK GRANT-FUNDED PROJECT: “Vassar College Archival Audio Recordings Project: Music as Document and Indicator of Social Change “ Presentation 5/31/24 for Reunion Weekend.
S. Canino 11/21; rev 5/24
[Example] Photo from: Vassar College. Class of 1949. Vassar's Soph Party [sound recording] : The Spiral Weekend. New Haven, Conn. : D.D. Smith, [1947?]
https://vaslib.vassar.edu/search/Y?searchtype=Y&searcharg=vassar%27s+soph+party&searchscope=1
“The Spiral Weekend” was a class party (1949) “protest to Hollywood’s Psycho Thriller” Names of characters are all spoofs on famous and well-known actors of the day.
[see photo of contents from “The Spiral Weekend” 78 recording jacket.]
The Music Library is the repository of the Vassar College Archival Audio Recordings collection. This collection of approximately 320 recordings, captures nearly 80 years of VC music traditions, class parties (or musicals), acapella singing groups, school songs, oral histories, and intercollegiate and local music collaborations between faculty, students, student singing groups at other colleges, and the surrounding community. These unique recordings help to document changes in higher education, student awareness of national-level news, and the effects of Vassar’s transition from single sex to a co-educational college.
Much of Vassar’s collection has been deteriorating, inadequately cataloged and inaccessible to researchers. In 2017, an assessment of the collection was made by AV Preserve. At-risk and deteriorating carrier formats in the collection were identified and recommendations made that immediate steps be taken to preserve these recordings.
As a result, a grant was sought. The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) offers a Recordings at Risk grant which is described on their website:
“Recordings at Risk is a national regranting program administered by CLIR to support the preservation of rare and unique audio, audiovisual, and other time-based media of high scholarly value through digital reformatting.” [https://www.clir.org/recordings-at-risk/]
In 2018 a proposal for a CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) Recordings at Risk grant was written, but it was unsuccessful.
Those who have written grants know that it can often be an iterative process. We went back to the granting agency to learn their concerns with our application and find out what we could do better or differently. There were two main concerns:
Based on their suggestions, another digitization vendor was investigated and gave us an estimate and I did more research into the holdings of other institutions.
In 2019 staff from the Dickinson Music Library, Digital Scholarship and Technology Services under supervision of Nicole Scalessa, and Vassar's Grants Development Office under supervision of Gary Hohenberger, collaborated to write a successful proposal for a CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) Recordings at Risk grant.
If I can brag a little: Our application was one of only 19 selected from a total of 43 applications. [CLIR email letter 4/16/2020] The fact that Vassar is a small liberal arts institution made our winning even more significant as many of the winners tend to be large educational institutions.
In our proposal: Vassar Libraries partners with the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) and George Blood Audio Visual (GBAV) to digitize recordings at greatest risk, provide online access, enhance metadata, ingest master files and metadata into Vassar’s digital repository. NEDCC and GBAV were contracted to digitize these recordings. We capitalized on the differing strengths of each vendor. NEDCC is the only vendor to offer the IRENE technology to libraries (captures audio on delaminating and fragile recordings carriers). GBAV was able to digitize the CD recordings quickly--in bulk.
While this grant work has been spearheaded by the Music Library, it has truly been an interdepartmental achievement!
This collection is fascinating!
CONTENT :
Institution-venerating songs such as "Fling the banner wide" and "Vassar in beauty dwelling", preserved in the 1940s, give way to "The product of a liberal education" and "The feminine mistake" in recordings of the 1960s, and are completely replaced with the social consciousness of folksongs like "Great Mandella" and popular songs like "California Dreamin’" and "Leaving on a Jet Plane" in the 1970s and 1980s. Recordings of art music made by both faculty and students, many collaboratively, also demonstrate repertoire shifts, exposure to different types of music and the social experiences fostered through music during this time.
Following the move to co-education in 1969, intercollegiate choral productions completely disappeared. Class parties no longer existed. Students were exposed to the music of new composers such as Netty Simons and Louise Talma, as private recordings of their new compositions were sought after to broaden student knowledge. Recent oral histories with music faculty emeriti help place this musical environment in historical context. The digitization of the collection will finally enable a complete picture of this world to be examined.
The changing social aspect of musical traditions, changes in musical styles, and the impact of co-education on the music of the women’s college that became co-educational in 1969 make this a rich collection for scholarly exploration. This project will expand the resources available to researchers exploring the role of music on college campuses.
RESEARCH VALUE:
We were fortunate that writers of letters in support of this grant project were not hard to find. They lamented the dearth of resources for their research:
Joshua S. Duchan, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Music and Director of Graduate Studies in Music at Wayne State University
“As Associate Professor of Music History at Wayne State University, my research includes collegiate a cappella groups, small student ensembles that perform popular music using only their voices. One of the nation’s oldest women’s a cappella groups, the Night Owls, is based at Vassar. Had I been able to access a digital archive of their music, it would have greatly enriched the historical narrative I offered in my book-length study, Powerful Voices: The Musical and Social World of Collegiate A Cappella (University of Michigan Press, 2012).
Jewel A. Smith, PhD Adj. Ass. Professor of Musicology University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music wrote:
“The holdings at Vassar, documenting the social and serious art music when the school was still an all-female institution, is largely unavailable elsewhere and thus significantly increases the value of these recordings. Digitizing this archival recorded material is crucial in preserving this historic body of information.”
Dr. Lloyd Winstead Senior Associate Director Willson Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia, wrote:
“Audio collections like those at Vassar expand the available research resources relevant to the history of American higher education and further add to the tapestry of that history. ...“My book, When College Sang: The Story of Singing in American College Life (2013), explores the history of American college through singing. Other than the appropriated recordings of record producers of the mid-twentieth century, and phonograph recordings of official college singing ensembles, there are few early recordings of college singing and still fewer of those are accessible. Having access to these recorded songs and oral histories would be tremendously valuable to researchers who are investigating the role of music and popular culture on campus life during this period of significant transformation in the history and landscape of American higher education. “
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Digitization will foster scholarship in this under-researched area by preserving this rich primary source material and that is what the grant is enabling us to do.
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There have been a number of challenges and plusses as we have accomplished this project:
Challenges: This project has been highly detailed and consuming. Part of this project required pulling together a detailed inventory of over 300 recordings. Though technologically and economically a good decision, using two vendors to digitize our recordings brought it’s own challenges. The highly detailed packing instructions for both vendors differed dramatically and aligned only in their urgency. When we wrote this application in 2019, we never could have imagined a pandemic with delays and supply chain issues. Challenges obtaining packing materials was rivaled by challenges in physically gathering staff to pack materials as we navigated lockdown, furloughs and illness-related absences always knowing that there would be additional delays ahead as other Recordings at Risk grant recipients would get their recordings to these same vendors ahead of us.
[Photos of meticulous preparations for mailing the recordings at risk as required by each vendor.]
[Photo of complicated organization of audio files as returned from the vendors. Each one underwent QC]
Copyright is another challenge: As you may be aware, the copyright of audio recordings: is owned by the performers, composers, lyricists, and interviewees involved in a recording. Few written permissions appear to have been sought. Due diligence has to be made to acquire permission for public access whenever possible.
As part of this project: In order to make this recorded information available to scholars for the creation of new knowledge while protecting the rights of potential copyright holders, Vassar College is not going to distribute copies to the public, either in a fixed medium or as online downloads, without the express permission of rights holders or their heirs. Vassar will, however, provide members of the Vassar community, visitors to campus, and off-campus scholars with demonstrated research needs, limited access to the recordings for listening and study only. Download of audio content will not be permitted.
At the end of this presentation Nicole Scalessa will be showing you the database of this material in the Digital Library as well as the formal research request process for those wishing to access specific items in this collection.
Plusses: This project has allowed us to “play to our strengths.” While challenges were great there were some distinct pluses: The VC archival recordings collection is the best situated of any of our peers. A Survey on my part disclosed that peer College archival recordings are often little understood and --if they still are preserved in institutional libraries--they were usually scattered in various institutional collections (E.g. Music Libraries, Special Collections, alumni offices). One of my favorite responses, when I was able to track down some recordings at an institution that will remain nameless, was, “Oh, yeah, that must be what’s in that dusty box on aisle 14. We really should list what’s in it.”
No wonder we had no trouble finding researchers to write letters in support of the project!
Our other plus is that Vassar has the staff of the Music library which includes an expert music cataloger. To give you an idea of why this is a plus: Recently the VC library tried to hire a general cataloger and all applicants stated (unsolicited) that they could catalog many types of medium--except for music. Music is among the most complex type of item to catalog, especially sound recordings. So concerning Recordings at Risk project : Music cataloging is an essential part of this project. As recordings are cataloged according to stringent national library standards, cataloging details are harvested by Nicole and her team unto metadata for the digital library which will help give context to the digitized sound files to be housed there.
This project has been so exciting for me to see this valuable resource become a reality and know that it will be so important for researchers. It is also exciting for me personally because I’ve never been able to hear some of these recordings for fear of creating further damage!
For example: that Item marked on the container: Richard Wilson interview with (American composer) Walter Piston--was not an interview at all but a concert of Piston’s works performed at VC. BUT the interview with 20th century American composer, Steve Rieich turned out to be a goldmine--where he discusses the origins of one of his famous pieces “It’s gonna rain” studied in every 20th century music history course!
Other treasures include: a recording of pianist and Vassar professor, Marta Milinowski, the only known recording of a student of Teresa Carreño (1853-1917) known as the “Valkur of the piano”—a pianist, composer, conductor, and singer whose papers are housed in the Vassar College Special Collections.
2 Examples:
1)This recording of the a cappella group Matthew’s Minstrels singing Billie Jean is not my lover includes references to contemporary figures in the news at that time like Mary Jo Buttafuoco, and the then very aging U.S. senator, Strom Thurmond.
Audio File: CD R8182 (08)--start at 2:50!
2) Peace --VC college classic (sung at all VC college chapel services):
Audio File: CD 7571, last band
