Museum rejects record donation...

[OrthoFan]

Click Here -- U of M rejects massive donation of recordings

I have to hand it to Mr. Charlebois. He doesn't mince words...

[Lenoirstreetguy]

I wonder where those records are? I've heard of Dr. Charlebois as a collector around town here, but I've never met him. He might as well save his breath. Canadian institutions have shown little interest in record archives. I shake my head about what I call the " record dungeon" in a sub basement of the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto. In an area that seems to be the size of Lichtenstein ...in the dark...there are shelves and shelves and SHELVES of 78's. They came from the Faculty of Music , the Royal Conservatory and years of donations. There are tens of thousands, mainly uncatalogued and unaccessible to either the public or most music students. I was down there a couple of times when I was a student at the Faculty of Music, in the days when the record librarian...Jim Creighton...was a bit more interested in 78's.

Jim

[bbphonoguy]

I want to visit the "family owned music hall that's been closed for 50 years"! That sounds like a great place to just poke around in.

I lived in Rochester, NY, when the Eastman School of Music apparently divested themselves of the 78 rpm portion of their music library. I picked up some nice red seal Victors for very little money. I can't figure why they did it. It was before cd's and such so I doubt they made copies for themselves. Were they just thinking "let's get rid of these irreplaceable recordings that George Eastman himself may have bought for us. They can't be valuable because they're old"?

[Henry]

Eastman divested its 78s in the latter '70s. I had a former trombone pupil attending the School then, and he thoughtfully obtained four Victor issues of Arthur Pryor's band for me: 35120 Rossini's William Tell Overture, 35212 Quaker Girl Waltzes b/b Lehar's Count of Luxembourg Selections, 31812 Lizst's Hungarian Rhapsody no. 12, and 31739 Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. I shudder to think of the fate of most of the collection: landfill somewhere, or maybe Lake Ontario.

At my own mental institution (oops, I mean institution of higher [hire?] education) where I served on the music faculty for 29 years, we were guilty of disposing of our entire classical anthology 78 series, dozens of records in the entire set which had been deposited by the Carnegie Foundation in colleges and universities throughout the nation back in the '30s, I believe, together with miniature scores of all the works and a neat little oak two-drawer card file index of all those holdings. We kept the scores and the oak card file. This all happened before I had developed any interest in old phonographs. Mea culpa! (hangs head in shame).

[Nat]

There was an enormous collection of 78's at Whitman College when I was there. A few years after I had left, I learned that they had simply trashed them. People like that should be boiled - it's like destroying old books, or paintings. What barbarians.

[Sidewinder]

And in this respect, not to forget Walter Legge.......who? Walter Legge was an EMI (HMV / Victor) Record executive, kind of the successor to the successor of Fred Gaisberg in the late 40's, 50's & 60's. Also married to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

He apparently had a superb record collection, started by his father around 1900. He offered it to a museum in the 70's or 80's and received a similar response, or even that he should donate some (a lot) of money for the upkeep of the collection.

It is said that in his fury he loaded up his collection into his boat, and over a few weekends, broke them 1 x 1 into the lake on which he lived.

Somewhat mean spirited, but perhaps understandable (with difficulty) that what he thought was a prize collection, was dismissed as junk by a (1 or more) leading museums.