By Matt Appleby
Mills Music Library has begun to digitize a collection of recordings of performances by students and faculty of the University of Wisconsin School of Music dating from the 1930s and 1940s. The project involves reconstructing complete performances from the original discs to create archival master tapes and compact discs. Many of the discs' labels are either missing or have incomplete information on them. As the performances are being identified and digitized, we are creating a finding aid which documents information about the performances and musicians. Over half of the collection has been digitized and documented in the finding aid so far and should be completed by December of this year. The finding aid is updated as the discs are digitized and in the near future we will make it available through the library's web site.
The performances are of School of Music concerts at the old Music Hall or recitals recorded at the WHA studios. Many complete concert performances have been reconstructed, including performances by pianist Gunnar Johansen, the Pro Arte Quartet, the UW Symphony Orchestra, the UW Women's Chorus and the UW A Cappella Choir. Some of the works performed by Johansen include two of his own: Toccatta in Phrygian Mode and Pearl Harbor Sonata (1942). Johansen also performs Beethoven's Violoncello Sonata in F Major, op.5 no.1 with Warwick Evans (1941), and Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no.1 (1941) with the UW Symphony Orchestra. The Symphony Orchestra performs Bach's Brandenburg Concertos 1,2 and 4 (1943), and the A Cappella Choir performs Wisconsin composer Reuel Lahmer's Choral Suite.
The quality of the recordings varies from poor to excellent. Originally produced for broadcast on WHA Radio, the performances were recorded directly on 16" glass-based discs which had been coated with a layer of acetate. With a rotation speed of 33 1/3 rpm, each disc contains about 15 minutes of music per side. Most of the discs have aged very well and the sound quality is generally very good. A small number of the discs have not fared so well; the acetate coat is either drying and flaking off, or is slowly eroding because of oxidation.
User listening copies of these performances are also being made as part of the preservation process.