Stanford's 50-year-old archive celebrates sound, BY CYNTHIA HAVEN
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/april1/archive-recorded-sound-anniversary-040109.html
Composer Kurt Weill's Railroads on Parade was one of the most popular attractions at the 1939-40 World's Fair in New York City. It has never been performed since.
This shouldn't come as a surprise. The 70-minute pageant had a singing cast of 250, with horses, cattle, Pullman cars and 12 real steam locomotives onstage as part of the production. Not exactly the kind of show that can be revived even by the most ambitious university repertory company.
There's only one known recording, and Stanford has it. The 16-inch LPs are in the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this academic year. The archive contains about 350,000 sound recordings and 6,000 print and manuscript items, documenting all aspects of 20th- and 21st-century culture. It's one of the five largest sound archives in the United States.
Open from 1 to 5 p.m. weekdays, the archive is secreted in a hard-to-find corner in the basement of Braun Music Center. You know you've landed in a different world when you see the archive's signature piece: a 1908 Aretino phonograph, with a bright green horn, facing its dark twin, the black-horned 1906 Standard phonograph.
Both are nestled among a number of large, closed wooden boxes containing mysteries of sound. A 4-foot-high 1890s treasure, with curved legs supporting a mottled wood box with several keyholes, is a music box that has five large interchangeable cylinders, each playing six tunes. Pull the hand crank on the left, and the brass cylinder turns, with seven bells chiming an additional layer to the tune. Another, smaller music box with an inlaid wood lid featuring a music motif and tiny, hand-painted ivy leaves twining the square of glass inside, plays Gounod, Sullivan and Verdi. The brass cylinder is about 15 inches long—about the size of a roll of aluminum foil.
Gray cardboard boxes against the wall contain gifts from violinist Jascha Heifetz (1901-87), including his never-released recordings. Others contain the earliest tape recordings—of German vintage, circa 1930s. American servicemen returned home with them and founded Ampex to duplicate the technology.
The holdings "go back to the very earliest recordings, on cylinders," said Jerry McBride, head librarian for the Braun Music Library and the archive.
The archive made waves nationally when it was the venue for last year's premiere of the newly discovered "world's oldest recorded sound"—an 1860 phonoautograph recording of "Au Clair de la Lune."
Clearly, however, the archive is not just a place for music lovers: It also includes broadcasts of Eleanor Roosevelt's radio program "Over Our Coffee Cups"; in her clear, upper-crust inflections, she counsels American women on the evening following the Pearl Harbor attack, saying, "Whatever is asked of us I am sure we can accomplish it; we are the free and unconquerable people of the United States of America." It holds the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and Adolf Hitler.
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