Robert Fountain School of Music Recordings, Mills Music Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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 1971 to 1994. The archives are 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 purpose of the project was to remaster the 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, often suffered from a failure of the magnetic medium and had to be given special attention. This included baking the tapes 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 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:

Grant Proposal and Project Director
Geraldine Laudati

Project Coordinator
Steve Sundell

Implementation Plan
Nanako Kodaira

Sound Processing
     John Moraitis
     Anna Uremovich
     Ayako Yoshimura

Streaming Audio
Brandon Watson
John Solon

Web Design and Implementation
     Sarah Murray
     Mary Hitchcock
     Paul Friedman

A special thanks to Robert Fountain Jr., who supplied some recordings for the project that were otherwise unavailable.

August 6 , 2002