Mills Music Library is pleased to present a new online collection guide to the Robert Fountain School of Music Recordings. The collection comprises UW-Madison School of Music recordings of performances conducted by Fountain between 1972 and 1994, primarily of the UW Concert Choir and Choral Union, and also includes programs, newspaper clippings, and other documents. Sound clips for a small number of performances are currently available on the collection's web pages along with a detailed inventory of all performances. You can access the pages through the Robert Fountain Collection Home:
http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/Music/fountain/collection_home.htm.
About the Robert Fountain Recordings Project
Mills Music Library is honored to house the recorded archives of Robert Fountain. Some 350 recordings in open reel and cassette formats document the history of choral music at the University from 1972 to 1994. The purpose of the project was to remaster these recordings, convert them to digital format, and create both preservation masters and working copies. The project began with the oldest and most vulnerable recordings. Open reel tapes, particularly those manufactured in the 1970s and '80s, often suffered from a failure of the magnetic medium and had to be given special attention. This remastering process included baking the tapes in a convection oven to restore the signals long enough to capture them onto another format. All recordings were converted from analog to digital data, given minimal editorial treatment, and recorded onto preservation masters in both compact disc and digital audio tape (DAT) formats. A second compact disc was burned to serve as a working copy. Remastering activities were done in the Mills Music Library Audio Preservation Studio according to national standards and processes. The project was funded by a Brittingham Grant.
The following individuals contributed to the success of this project: Geraldine Laudati, Grant Proposal and Project Director; Steve Sundell, Project Coordinator; Nanako Kodaira, Implementation Plan; John Moraitis, Anna Uremovich, and Ayako Yoshimura, Sound Processing; Brandon Watson, John Solon, Streaming Audio; Sarah Murray, Mary Hitchcock, Paul Friedman, Web Design and Implementation.
Robert Fountain Jr. supplied some recordings for the project that were otherwise unavailable