By Geri Laudati
Mills Music Library is pleased to announce the receipt of a $15,000 Brittingham Fund grant to remaster the recordings in the Robert Fountain Collection.
Robert Fountain served as Director of Choral Activities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1971 until his retirement in 1994. Under his leadership, eight choral groups, including the Concert Choir and the university- community Choral Union, achieved levels of professionalism rarely found in amateur groups. Fountain also established the university's graduate programs in Choral Conducting, which grew to become among the country's most respected.
Fountain came to the University after twenty-two years on the faculty and administration of the Oberlin Conservatory. During his tenure at the University of Wisconsin, he was one of the most venerated teachers on campus. As one student wrote: "He has a certain charisma ... he's able to make performers feel special—he has a special gift for pulling the best out of us. He makes you want to do your best."
And their best they did. Under Fountain's direction, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Concert Choir performed locally, nationally, and internationally to great acclaim. The graduate program attracted the country's finest young talents, many of whom now head their own programs at other universities. The Choral Union, the 100th anniversary of whose first performance coincided with Mr. Fountain's last concert in May 1994, gave community singers the opportunity to perform with orchestra the great choral masterpieces of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Haydn, Handel, Poulenc, Britten, and Mahler, to name a few. Its members still speak of Mr. Fountain with reverence.
Mills Music Library is honored to house the recorded archives of Robert Fountain. Recordings in open reel and cassette formats document the history of choral music at the University from 1971 to 1994. The collection is used heavily by diverse clientele including alumni who want to hear a performance in which they participated and composers who remember Fountain's interpretations of their works as the best they have heard.
The grant will enable Mills staff to remaster the recordings, converting them to digital format, and to create both preservation masters and working copies. The project will begin with the oldest and most vulnerable recordings. Open reel tapes, particularly those manufactured in the 1970s, often suffer from a failure of the magnetic medium and must be given special attention. This may include baking them to remove the moisture and restore the signals long enough to capture them onto another format.
Printed programs and accompanying materials will be copied onto acid free paper and included with the masters. An archives catalog record for the collection will be added to the public catalog and to OCLC, the international bibliographic utility. Throughout the project, attention will be given to identifying particular performances which might be commercially viable with the idea that a recording might be distributed in the School of Music recording series.
Remastering activities will be done in the Mills Music Library Preservation Studio and are scheduled to begin in the spring.