This week's selection comes from Lucia Cavorsi, Audio Project Cataloguer.

There is no doubt Arturo Toscanini was a one-of-a-kind conductor. Renowned for his mastery, Toscanini was obsessed with the most minute details of a performance. But such a quest for perfection, whose outcome would undoubtedly delight listeners, came at a price for orchestra members: shouting, swearing, and humiliation.

Here is the conductor in New York during a seemingly frustrated rehearsal with the NBC Symphony Orchestra of Alfredo Catalini's Dance of the Water Nymphs from the opera Loreley. The tension in the room is almost palpable as Toscanini delivers his fiery tirade in a mixture of English & Italian before storming off in disgust.

Toscanini's outburst during rehearsals_New York, 1953 (1LS0002055)

 

 

Toscanini was a man who believed music was a religious ritual to be enjoyed in absolute silence. It was he who transformed his favourite love, Milan's La Scala theatre, turning it into an autonomous body, banning encores and putting an end to the shame of risottos being served in the balconies during performances. 

Intransigent both in music and in life, it is no surprise that Toscanini's favourite motto was: ‘Your back bends when your soul does’.

2017 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Arturo Toscanini and is being marked through a series of international celebrations including concerts, exhibitions, lectures and special releases. 

Follow @BLSoundHeritage, @BL_Classical & @soundarchive for all the latest news.

As Curator of Classical Music it is always fascinating to find unpublished recordings of renowned artists, but equally exciting is the discovery of discs that were made as experiments in the evolution of recorded sound.

In November of last year Diana Sparkes, the daughter of Hubert Foss, donated some discs of her mother, Dora Stevens.  These are HMV experimental discs dated 19^th May 1914 and written into the wax is ‘Experimental HE 9’.  The discs were not for publication, and as Dora was still a student at the time it is likely that the Gramophone Company chose her as a talented musician, suitable for the job.  Without access to the historical paperwork it is impossible to tell what experiments were taking place – possibly horn placement or groove spacing.  She sings a song Loving is so sweet by English composer Robert Coningsby Clarke (1879-1934), and you can hear her clear her throat during the piano introduction in this acoustic recording.  Later in her career, as wife of Hubert Foss, she had works written for and dedicated to her by Gordon Jacob and William Walton.

Loving is so sweet

A few weeks ago I managed to acquire two more fascinating HMV (by now EMI) experimental discs via an auction.  These are particularly interesting as they document one of the very first attempts, in April 1947, at using tape to disc transfer rather than direct cut disc.  Indeed, it might be the company’s very first experiment as the typed label is quite explicit.  The tape machine was probably either a liberated AEG-Magnetophon from Germany or a prototype of EMI’s own BTR1 which was developed at the end of 1947.  According to Reg Willard, who was an assistant to the Advanced Development Division, by October 1948 experiments in stereo were being made using the AEG-Magnetophon tape transport and EMI BTR 1 developed circuitry.

In addition, these April 1947 recordings are experiments with the new extended range frequency recording - “ER” as it appears on the label.  The first demonstration of this recording method was in 1944 to the Electrical Engineers but at that time it was probably a system (like Decca’s ‘ffrr’) for some sort of war work. It was not announced to the press until November 1947, so a certain number of recordings ready to exploit the method would have been kept in reserve from earlier that year.

EMI produced its own machine early in 1948. However, there was a shortage of tape at the time and the BASF stock purloined from the Germans had been so often cut and spliced that it was chiefly used only for transfer work rather than actual recordings.  No doubt EMI were aware of what was happening in the US at Columbia Records, who announced their long playing record – a revolution in sound reliant on tape – in June 1948 and local competition at Decca had already recorded Ernest Ansermet in 1946 conducting Stravinsky’s Petroushka using their own extended full frequency range recording system - ‘ffrr’- which had been developed to detect the engine sounds of German submarines. 

Experiments were not just being made with the recording technology - the cutting of the disc was also a crucial part of the process.  The run out grooves of the two discs recently acquired show that experiments were also being made with different lathes and cutters when transferring from tape – each disc being cut on a different type of machine.  In an effort to ascertain which set up would suit the new extended range recordings best, the extended range Blumlein cutter was probably fixed to the current lathe design, whilst probably an RCA cutter was attached to a 1920s lathe, providing no spiral groove at the centre of the disc.

So this recording from April 1947, one of the first efforts at cutting a disc from tape at EMI, comes from a crucial point in the evolution and history of recorded sound where various things overlap – the end of the 78rpm disc era, the first use of tape, experiments with extending the frequency range and the introduction of the LP.

Gerald Moore plays part of Schumann’s Papillons Op. 2.  Even through the surface noise of the shellac, immediately noticeable is the clarity of the piano tone and wide range of dynamics captured on the tape recording.

Schumann Papillons

In a future blog I will talk about an alternate take of one of EMI’s first issued ER recordings of conductor Nikolai Malko.

Thanks to Jolyon Hudson

For all the latest Classical news follow @BL_Classical

This week's selection comes from Tom Lean, Project Interviewer for An Oral History of British Science.

To anyone who grew up in the 1980s the Acorn BBC Microcomputer was the computer they used at school, a machine that gave countless Britons their first experience of computing and sold over 1.5 million units. Yet this iconic piece of computer hardware came about almost accidentally. With the world on the verge of a computer revolution in the early 1980s, the BBC were desperately searching the British electronic industry for a computer to accompany a new educational television series about computing. To a small company in Cambridge called Acorn Computers, having the BBC adopt their new computer as the BBC Computer was a deal that could transform the company into a major player. However, as Acorn designer Steve Furber recalls, there was one problem: they didn't actually have a new computer yet, and they had just a week to develop one...

Designing the Acorn BBC Microcomputer (C1379/078)

This clip is part of Voices of Science, an online resource which uses oral history interviews with prominent British scientists and engineers to tell the stories of some of the most remarkable scientific and engineering discoveries of the past century.

Follow @BL_OralHistory and @soundarchive for all the latest news.

National Life Stories co-ordinates the annual Goodison Fellowship which encourages the dissemination of the our oral history collections in the public sphere, such as in print, broadcast and new media.

In this article from the National Life Stories Annual Review 2016-2017, Michael Bird, one of the recipients of the 2016 Goodison Fellowship, reflects on his research for his book and the experience of guest curating the exhibition In Their Own Words: Artists’ Voices from the Ingram Collection (at the Lightbox in Woking until 30 July 2017).

Photograph courtesy of the Lightbox

‘I suppose,’ Sandra Blow sighed, when I showed her the first layouts of the book I’d written about her – a book, I fondly imagined, that we had in a sense created together – ‘there do have to be words between the pictures.’ Blow’s late friend Roger Hilton was more uncompromising, insisting that ‘Words and paintings don’t go together.’ Bad news for a writer on art.

But think again about Hilton’s testy aphorism. Art, like poetry, is often a business of putting together things that don’t obviously or usually fit – or, in Wordsworth’s phrase, the ‘observation of affinities /In objects where no brotherhood exists / To passive minds’. This is probably why I like the way that artists – as distinct from, say, politicians or academics – talk. About art, yes, but just as often about ordinary things, noticing ‘affinities’ in mundane situations that even very perceptive non-artists tend not to pick up.

The 2016 Goodison Fellowship was a licence to indulge this tendency. I had previously used a few Artists’ Lives recordings in research for four books. Now I ranged at will, sampling and pursuing, following threads and taking detours through (at the last count) more than fifty interviews – still just a fraction of the total. The aim was to gather audio material for an exhibition at The Lightbox, Woking, drawn from the Ingram Collection (which will take place this summer), and a book, a ‘history from below’ of post-war art in Britain.

What did I find? Relatively little factual art historical information that could not be found in more cogent and accurate form in books and paper archives. A lot about childhood, families, relationships – all kinds of life experiences that you can have full-blast, full-depth, without having been to art school or put on an exhibition. These are the common currency of oral history. The difference with Artists’ Lives is that the texture of the times – the experience of working with and living among particular objects and materials, existing within certain spaces and social relationships – is simultaneously animated by ideas. To hear an eel fisherman recall setting traps on the Somerset Levels is not unlike listening to Bernard Meadows explain lost-wax lead casting – a physical process at once practical and arcane – except that, for the artist, the object and the idea it began from or is somehow working towards are both present in the telling.

I was listening last week to Cathy Courtney interviewing Derrick Greaves (C466/83) , after recently having interviewed Ernst Gombrich for Artists’ Lives. What did Greaves think, she asked, about Gombrich’s curious lack of interest in seeing what went on in artists’ studios? He struck her, in fact, as ‘quite terrified of the idea of watching the artist doing anything’.

The rough world of the artist's studio

‘Well,’ said Greaves, ‘I would in no way wish to put Gombrich down’; but ‘it’s different for painters.’

You see, I think painters are rougher than that. They’re more … they’re bruisers, compared to most critics. And their, their impulse, their starting point, is in life, I think, most painters. And the work of the studio is also a rougher world – it’s a rough and tough world where it’s – you’re engaged with the most difficult thing, to translate that thing that attracts you, moves you in a life situation, with all its rough edges and all its subjectivity – to translate that and refine it in the studio, in your own terms so that it … it … holds that vital ingredient of the liveliness that you’ve been excited by in real life.

Visitors to The Lightbox this summer can listen to Greaves saying this while they look at his Portrait of Margaret; to Ralph Brown recalling his attempt, aged eight, to carve a snowman in the shape of a naked lady; to Rosemary Young reliving her terror of the nanny that she and Reg Butler employed for their children – and to forty other extracts from Artists’ Lives accompanying work by those artists. The artist probably won’t be explaining the work you’re actually looking at (as a curator or audio-guide voiceover would do), but their voice and the life-moment it conveys will put them in the room beside you. That’s the idea, anyway.

Photograph courtesy of the Lightbox

And the book? The oral history of art goes back at least as far as Vasari, whose tales of artists often begin ‘I have heard say …’. Modern art history, however, even popular history such as Gombrich’s Story of Art, is almost never ‘history from below’, informed primarily by the subject’s own sense of what constitutes their life and work. Is such a history even possible for modern art? I’m finding out. There are times when, listening to Artists’ Lives recordings, you have the sense of standing on a very specific historical stage: Terry Frost, for example, on his first paintings in POW camp in Germany, or Mary Kelly on the Women’s Movement in early 1970s’ London. But what comes across more consistently and variously is the changing texture of the times through which artists’ lives move and which, in their recollections, is not merely background or context but the air art breathes.

 

This week's selection comes from Niamh Dillon, National Life Stories Project Interviewer.

Prue Leith is well known to television viewers of the Great British Menu. She started her career as a chef and restaurateur in London. In this extract from a longer recording with Niamh Dillon for Food: From Source to Salespoint, recorded in 2008, she recalls a surprise visit from Princess Margaret. Her request for pheasant stew caused considerable consternation in the kitchen resulting in a fire, a singed jacket and a spilt pot of coffee. If only VIP's knew what happens behind the scenes!

Prue Leith and Princess Margaret C821/202

Prue Leith (courtesy Paul Tozier)

The full interview with Prue Leith can be found in Food, an online collection of oral history recordings that chart the extraordinary changes which transformed the production, manufacture and consumption of food in 20th-century Britain.

Follow @BL_OralHistory and @soundarchive for all the latest news.

 

This week's selection comes from Holly Gilbert, Cataloguer of Digital Multimedia Collections.

Mother and daughter, Jan and Ama, talk about why they both have dreadlocks. This is the first time they have told each other their reasons for choosing to wear their hair in this way and their motivations are quite different, though Jan’s hair definitely inspired Ama’s choice and they both really like the way that dreadlocks look and feel. They discuss how other people react to their hair and how this makes them feel as well as how their hair connects with their self-identity, their appearance and their blackness. Later in the conversation they talk about how fighting for racial and gender equality has evolved over time and is different for their respective generations, how their hair is part of being active in those fights and how choosing dreadlocks is a way of defining their own idea of beauty.

The Listening Project_Choosing dreadlocks

This recording is part of The Listening Project, an audio archive of conversations recorded by the BBC and archived at the British Library. The full conversation between Jan and Ama can be found here.

Follow @CollectingSound and @soundarchive for all the latest news.

On 6 July 1988 a massive explosion on the Piper Alpha North Sea oil rig killed 167 people. The oral history project Lives in the Oil Industry records the experiences of those who survived the disaster, and how it affected their lives.

Lives in the Oil Industry was a collaborative project between National Life Stories and the University of Aberdeen, where Hugo Manson recorded 177 interviews between 2000 and 2005. The project documents accounts from men and women representing all sectors of the industry – management, offshore workers, technical professionals and specialists and personnel from government and regulatory bodies – and also from the local communities whose stories are so entwined with the rigs that sit nearest to their shores. Together these voices record the major changes which have occurred in the UK oil and gas industry in the twentieth century, focusing particularly on North Sea exploration. Along with intrepid bravery displayed by the deep sea divers and engineers, the collection captures testimony from the voices of those workers, such as caterers and cleaners, who perform routine yet essential tasks that ensure the smooth running of oil rigs. Many of the interviews are available in the British Library Reading Rooms.

 Oil rig workers, no date

As the worst offshore oil accident in the history of the industry, it is unsurprising that the Piper Alpha disaster features prominently in the collection. The collection features – amongst others – the powerful testimony of Bob Ballantyne (1942–2004, C963/53) who survived and vividly recalls how it felt to be alone in the water amongst the inferno:

Bob Ballantyne

“I was afraid. I was terrified. And I thought ‘oh no, I cannae’. And I thought this was a bad dream that somehow, this was a nightmare. That somehow someone was going to turn this off. And I was gonnae wake up and back in the cabin and I was somewhere else. And it never happened. And also I had never been in the North Sea so far away from land. And I looked up at the size of this platform and it was absolutely huge; it was the biggest structure that I had ever seen in my life from that angle. And the noise was terrible and there were bangs, explosions, there were things clattering down and there were things falling off the platform. One of the seamen had told me that he could actually hear me above them. I was shouting, ‘You bastards come in and get me.’ And I never realised that anybody could hear me. But he said, ‘We heard somebody shouting’. And I told him it was me who was shouting for them to come in, because I wasn’t going to leave the platform, although I had the lifejacket on and was in the water. And I must say that because of the intense heat I was throwing the water over myself to cool down and the water wisnae cold. And I was burning up as well with it. And Iain Letham was the Coxswain on the Zodiac [rigid inflatable rescue craft] that had come in to pick [people] up and then it [the Zodiac rescue craft] blew up and Iain was the only survivor. And Iain floated by me with his lifejacket and hat on. And I pulled him in beside me – and it wisnae a rescue or anything like that, it wisnae any hero thing. It was just, I just wanted someone to talk to, or somebody to be with me, that I wouldn’t be by myself. That there’s another human being here.”

The testimony of Alan Swinton (1926–2004, C963/134), Chaplain at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary at the time of the disaster, is equally compelling as it gives a different viewpoint on this harrowing day:

“What was your first notion that something was wrong?

“I lived across from the helicopter pad. …I was in bed. The helicopter came in and then another came in one and then another one came in. And I said to my wife, ‘I’ll be needed’, so I got up and got dressed. And interestingly, which was a bit unusual, I put on my clerical collar which identified me as the chaplain. The telephone rang, ‘Mr Swinton there has been a major civil accident and you’re needed.’ I said, ‘I’m on my way, I’ll be five minutes.’

“What time was that?

“Three something. 3.40 [in the morning]… I went up to the chapel. There were two women standing there… Now you must remember I knew nothing at all about what was happening. They expected me, of course, to have some information… I had none whatsoever… Two relatives became four, became six became ten, became twenty and suddenly the place was filled with people... So the relatives who were within let’s say 100 miles of Aberdeen, decided the best thing to do was to go to Aberdeen, so Aberdeen soon became a focus for people from all over the place… And the numbers of people who were now under the ‘so-called’ care of the chaplain were now at forty, fifty, sixty, but they were coming in asking questions… I became a kind of shuttle, because I knew my way around quickly around the hospital and how get to various bits quickly. Most of the admissions who were injured had burns, so the burns unit was cleared to receive causalities... Their injuries were horrendous…

“The first list of survivors was not given to me until 11am on the 7th [July] and I pinned it up outside the chapel. That caused some hurt because of course it was a first list, it was a limited list. I remember one man from Kilmarnock coming up to the list and looking down the list and taking out his handkerchief and wiping his eyes and reading down the list again and I remember going up to him and putting my arm around him and saying, ‘He’s not there is he?’ and he said, ‘No’... Much of the rest of the time was waiting, waiting for another helicopter, trying to get the names from the helicopters. Every time a helicopter came in, everybody rushed to the window… Then word came, no more helicopters… I called everybody into the chapel and I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have to say to you that there are no more helicopters.’ There was a kind of stunned silence. And then groups starting forming. Crying, crying, numb. ‘What do we do now?’”

This post by Mary Stewart, Oral History Curator, is the first of a series marking the thirtieth anniversary of National Life Stories (NLS) in 2017.

In a special collaboration between National Life Stories and Chelsea College of Arts, a group of MA Curating and Collections students have curated an exhibition featuring edited sound clips from the Artists’ Lives collection of recordings. The exhibition is divided into three zones, and this blogpost presents an outline of each section. This exhibition has been generously supported by the Rootstein Hopkins Foundation.

The fourth floor studio in Chelsea School of Art at Manresa Road, “Untitled” photograph, undated, Chelsea College of Arts Library, University of the Arts London

The first section contains interviews with former students and teachers at Chelsea, who provide an introduction to the history of the school. Jock McFadyen describes the architecture of the Manresa Road campus and the different art movements represented in the studios, such as Pop Art and Systems Art. David Nash and Flavia Irwin address the curriculum and learning experience, including lecture series with artists such as Claes Oldenburg, classes in the Life Room and the Fine Art programme schedule. Anthony Fry talks about teaching painting in art schools, and Bernard Meadows highlights Henry Moore’s tenure at Chelsea and his working process of creating sculptures. Finally, Barbara Steveni introduces a paper she wrote during her teaching stint at Chelsea, which led to the development of the Artist Placement Group with John Latham - addressing where artists would go once they graduated from art school. Photos showing images of the exteriors and interiors of the building, such as the studio departments and galleries, are presented in this section as well.

Chelsea School of Art Elevated Front and Side View, photographer unknown, undated © Donald Smith

In the second section, the friendship between John Hoyland and Patrick Caulfield is explored in the form of two interviews. Hoyland’s recording begins with a reading of the address that he gave at Caulfield’s funeral, and goes on to honour in greater detail his friend’s life and work. This is a composite clip edited together from the recording of John Hoyland (1934-2011) interviewed by Mel Gooding, 2005-2007, National Life Stories: Artists’ Lives, C466/205 © British Library Board. You can listen to the full tracks at British Library Sounds: Tape 4 side B/track 8, Tape 6 side B/track 12, Tape 11 side A/track 20, Tape 11 side B/track 21.

John Hoyland

Caulfield in his interview discusses his first encounter with Hoyland, as well as his own teaching experiences. This is a composite clip edited together from the recording of Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005) interviewed by Andrew Lambirth, 1996-1998, National Life Stories: Artists’ Lives, C466/64 © British Library Board. You can listen to the full tracks at British Library Sounds: Part 6, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14. Both recordings also provide reflections on Chelsea at the time they were both teaching. 

Patrick Caulfield

Finally, the last section features five excerpts from an interview with Clive Phillpot, exploring his eight-year tenure as librarian at Chelsea and his acquisitions of Artists’ Books. These recordings also reference his colleagues such as Frederick Brill, Anthony Hill, Norbert Lynton and Edward Wright who inspired and supported Clive Phillpot to produce critical reviews in magazines and exhibition catalogues. Phillpot’s influence on the development of artists’ books is reflected in two recordings by Jock McFadyen, a former student of Chelsea, and artist Telfer Stokes. Accompanying the recordings is a vitrine containing Telfer Stokes’ first book, ‘Passage’, published in 1972. Clive Phillpot wrote a review of the book in a monthly column of Studio International magazine in 1973. A series of black and white photographs documenting individuals in Chelsea, taken by Dick Hart in the early ‘70s, is also presented.

‘Passage’ and the review on Studio International, photographer: Yuen Yu Ho, 29 June 2017

Material from the exhibition comes from: the Artists’ Lives section of National Life Stories courtesy of the British Library, the Special Collections section of the Chelsea College of Arts Library courtesy of Gustavo Grandal Montero, and archival images courtesy of Donald Smith.

Special thanks to Cathy Courtney, Mary Stewart, Gustavo Grandal Montero, Donald Smith, Cherie Silver for their assistance in making this exhibition possible. This exhibition is generously supported by the Rootstein Hopkins Foundation.

The curators would like to thank the late Patrick Caulfield, the late Anthony Fry, the late John Hoyland, the late Flavia Irwin, Jock McFadyen, the late Bernard Meadows, David Nash, Clive Phillpot, Barbara Steveni and Telfer Stokes for sharing their experiences through the Artists’ Lives project. Listen online to these recordings at British Library Sounds.

The exhibition runs from 29 June to 28 July 2017, and is installed at Chelsea Landing, E-Block (first floor), Chelsea College of Arts, 16 John Islip Street, Westminster, London SW1P 4JU. It is curated by Yuen Yu Ho, Georgia Keeling, Deborah Lim and Xiaodeng Zhou.