Library of Congress Celebrates Charles Strouse

Yesterday the Library of Congress officially received personal papers from musical theater composer, Charles Strouse, and the man himself also was interviewed and honored at a special performance at the Kennedy Center during the evening. Strouse, who will be turning eighty on June 7, will publish his memoirs, Put on a Happy Face, on the first of June. The LC acquisition complements another collection held by the Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Many happy returns!

Image credit: All American / Fay Gage; Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog #2007683580

 

SAA Annual Meeting Preliminary Program

Well, if we have received ours in the mail, it seems pretty likely that by now most everyone will have gotten their hands on the preliminary program for the 2008 Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting. Of course, you also can read it online, but its annual arrival in our mailboxes serves as a handy reminder to all who are planning to attend to register, or, certainly, to at least secure a hotel room at the conference rate as soon as possible.

Happily, this year’s conference will offer quite a few sessions of interest to performing arts archivists, including one sponsored by the SAA Performing Arts Roundtable, “Getting to the Heart of Performance: Archivists as Creative Collaborators” (406) on Friday, 29 August, as well as the PAR meeting itself, which will help kick things off on Wednesday, 27 August (we hope many of you will be in town that early). More about those events and other programs of interest to come soon (maybe we can even get some of the participants to contribute a few blog posts).

Disappointingly, the preliminary program itself gives surprisingly short shrift to San Francisco’s fabulous performing arts history (and those individuals, institutions and organizations that have helped to preserve and provide access to it). We hope to rectify that situation a little bit, by occasionally bringing to you some images of material from these collections. The original photograph above (of a 1920s stage production) is from the Collection of Chinese Theater Images in California, held by the Museum of Performance & Design (formerly SF PALM).

Image credit: A bomb throwing revolutionary confronts warlord Yuan Shih-kai, staged at the Great Star Theatre / [ID# ark:/13030/kt0g5014tw; Digital Archive of Chinese Theater in California, Online Archive of California]

 

Provincetown Playhouse Threatened

 

As reported in today’s New York Times, much anger has been aroused over New York University’s plans to raze (and rebuild) the historic building.  Maybe this “dialogue” will evolve into a full blown “conversation” at some point.  In the meantime, if you’re interested in voicing your particular concerns, Matt Windman’s blog offers some tips.

Image credit: New York Public Library Digital Gallery Image ID #482856

 

 

Now I’m Here

The connection to performing arts archives seems to grow ever more tenuous in these posts, but Ephemeral Archives felt we must salute Brian May on the occasion of his official installation as the fourth Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University yesterday.

Does this mean that the LJMU Special Collections and Archives will collect even more actively in the area of performing arts?  Collections they already have processed include: the England’s Dreaming Punk Archive, Everyman Theatre Archive (some of which is digitized) and Frankie Vaughan Archive.

It also gives us another excuse to gratuitously link to another YouTube video.

 

 

Popular Music Conferences Hit Seattle

The seventh annual EMP Pop Conference is taking place this entire weekend in Seattle. Last evening’s keynote panel, Ritmo and Blues: Hidden Histories Shaking Up “American” Pop (which kinda sorta sounds like one of the breakfast specials at the nearby 5 Spot) offered a diverse set of musings on the featured exhibition at the museum, American Sabor: Latinos in U. S. Popular Music.

You can read an overview of the conference offerings and atmosphere here. Doubtless there will be many attendees live blogging it, but, sadly, we don’t have the time to join them.

Not to be outdone, the University of Washington’s School of Music is presenting a Music Theater symposium today and tomorrow. Topics to be discussed include William Finn, Flower Drum Song, Porgy and Bess and Cabaret.

 

Crawling Back Into the Archives

Reading from the West Coast, I was struck by that phrase in Ben Brantley’s myopic blip of a review of the City Center Encores! staging of Juno last week in the New York Times. Oh you jaded, jaded New Yorkers! Not appreciating sufficiently either Encores! or performing arts archives.

Image credit: NYPL Digital Gallery Image ID #TH-57070

 

Monika of the Mariinsky Retires

 

But where is she leaving her papers?

You can see her take her final bows in a video on the Reuters site or watch her in action on a YouTube video below:

 

 

Vienna State Opera House Exhibition on Austrian “Anschluss” Period

As reported in Reuters, the Vienna State Opera opened a small exhibition on Monday commemorating a dark period in its history. The display, which is entitled “70 Jahre danach,” reveals the treatment of the venerable institution’s Jewish employees following the Nazi annexation of Austria seventy years ago today. A brief description of the show as well as some images of original documents can be found on the Web site of the Staatsoper.

 

New Seasons and Opera Notes

‘Tis the season for performing arts companies to promote their new seasons.

The Metropolitan Opera recently announced its plans for the gala opening night program of its 125th Anniversary season scheduled for March 15, 2009. As reported in today’s New York Times, “the evening will feature stars, so far unnamed, performing in costume before projected sets recreating historic moments at the Met.”

Anniversaries always bring an organization’s archives to the forefront and the Metropolitan Opera Archives can be justly proud not only of its ongoing contributions to the company’s Web site as a whole, but to the interesting resources it provides to the public on its own portion of the site. The most prominent of these tools is the MetOpera Database, but there are other riches available on the site as well. I was struck anew by this fact while reading through the Times obituary of tenor Giuseppe di Stefano, which concludes with his own musings on his career and reputation in later life: “I don’t have to go around insisting that I had one of the great voices. Fortunately, I made enough recordings to let people judge for themselves.” Those seeking instant gratification can simply click on over to the Sounds of the Met portion of the Metropolitan Opera Archives site, which makes it easy to find at least one or two samples of just about every major performer who appeared at the Met.

By sheer coincidence, I also noticed that yesterday marked the anniversary of the death of baritone Leonard Warren on stage during a performance of La Forza del Destino in 1960, arguably one of the most dramatic moments in Met history. Hopefully this won’t be one of those “historic moments” recreated in the 2009 gala.

Image credit: NYPL Digital Gallery Image ID #1558429

 

Call for Papers SIBMAS 2008

There’s still time to send in a submission…*

Call For Papers

Deadline: All proposals for papers must be received by 31st March 2008.

There will be three types of papers considered for the 2008 conference programme:

Invited Papers: A number of keynote speakers will be invited to participate.

Full Papers: A paper addressing one of the stated themes (see below). Full papers should last 20 minutes.

Exhibition Papers: Papers will be issued to delegates and presented as part of an exhibition and trade fair session on August 28th. Presenters will be expected to discuss their papers with delegates and will be provided with an opportunity to demonstrate an audio-visual or online resource (digitisation, electronic archive, database, etc). Roving French/English interpreters will be available.

All presenters will be listed in the conference programme and their papers will be published in the subsequent published Proceedings.

Conference Themes

Papers on the following themes will be welcomed:

The ephemeral nature of performing arts documentation and examples of projects which have attempted to present documentary material in an innovative way, in traditional or electronic formats.

Lessons to be learned from other disciplines and cultures about the challenge of recording intangible heritage.

 

Examples of innovative methods of collecting evidence through, for example, reminiscence work; oral history projects; proactive collecting through close collaboration with performing artists, etc.

 

Exercises in recording the whole process - in creating a production from the initial idea through to public performance.

 

The special characteristics of specific forms of documentary materials: such as costumes, photographs, designs, etc, and their reliability as a source of evidence.

Re-staging and reconstructions as a means of reliving theatrical performance.

Format for Proposals

Please complete the Proposal Form and e-mail to sibmas@rsamd.ac.uk. All proposals must

be submitted in full by 31st March 2008.

An expert panel from SIBMAS’s executive committee will consider proposals. Prospective

presenters will be contacted by 28th April 2008 with the panel’s decision.

*Image of the The City of Glasgow Pavilion at the 1938 Empire Exhibition from the NYPL Digital Gallery, Digital Record ID 1525311.