This week's selection comes from Sarah Coggrave, Rights Clearance Officer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage.
Tomorrow (May 4) is Star Wars Day, and what better way to celebrate than with a recording from the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project?
Shortly after the first Star Wars film Episode IV – A New Hope was released in 1977, some of the cast members were recorded speaking about their roles in the film for BBC Radio London. Audio recordings featuring actors Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Alec Guinness and Anthony Daniels are now part of the Mike Sparrow Collection (C1248), one of the British Library’s radio collections, which has been recently digitized and made accessible as part of the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project.
Mike Sparrow (1948 – 2005) was a producer and presenter for BBC Radio London (U.K.) and his collection includes a range of recordings from his time working there, including music, interviews and topical shows.
A C3PO figurine from the Hasbro line of Star Wars toys, posed against a black background. Image credit: Brendan Hunter, iStock Unreleased, Getty Images.
The recording in this blog post features actor Anthony Daniels (who played C3PO in the Star Wars films) talking about his famous character. Based on the information available, this interview was probably recorded either in late 1977 or 1978. In the recording, Anthony Daniels discusses his unique interpretation of the character, which differed considerably from what George Lucas (creator and director of the Star Wars films) originally had in mind. He also talks about how difficult it was to convey emotions while wearing a gold plated fibreglass suit, and about receiving fan mail addressed to C3PO!
It would not have been possible to share this recording within the kind permission of Anthony Daniels, the executor of Mike Sparrow’s estate and the BBC.
For Star Wars fans there are plenty of relevant resources in British Library collections including books, films and even musical scores, all of which can be searched for on the Library's main catalogues.
First Consul Bonaparte by Antoine-Jean Gros c. 1802
By Jonathan Summers, Curator of Classical Music
In May of this year I wrote a blog on the 250th anniversary of the birth of Arthur Wellesley, Field Marshall His Grace the Duke of Wellington.
His enemy at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Napoléon Bonaparte, was also born in 1769, on 15 August, 250 years ago today.
Napoléon crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David 1800
Finding a recording that provides a direct link to Napoléon Bonaparte is not easy, but there is one. Napoléon raised the fortunes of his family so that his youngest brother, Jérôme-Napoléon Bonaparte (1784-1860) became Jerome I, King of Westphalia and later Prince of Montfort.
Jérôme’s second son was Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte known as Napoléon-Jérôme Bonaparte (1822-1891). His cousin Emperor Napoléon III, to whom he was a close adviser, gave him the title of Prince Napoléon in 1852 (as well as third Prince of Montfort amongst other appellations).
Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte by Hippolyte Flandrin 1860
Plon-Plon, as Prince Napoléon was known, was pretender to the throne, and upon the death of the Prince Imperial, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (1856-1879) he became the most senior member of the large and confusingly named Napoléon family. However, the Prince Imperial’s will decreed that Plon-Plon should not succeed, but that his son Victor be the next head of the family causing a rift between father and son.
Photograph of Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte by Roger Fenton 1855
It was this first nephew of Napoléon that was recorded shortly before his death by Edison’s agent Colonel Gouraud in 1890. Gouraud introduces the Prince who speaks in French. Then some ladies of the court are introduced, the last probably being La Marquise de Saint-Paul, who was Marie Charlotte Diane Feydeau de Brou (1848-1943) a noted pianist who played Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 at a charity concert in the Salle Erard in 1884 and who counted Saint-Saëns, Widor and Massenet among her friends. Only the voice of the Marquise de St Paul seems to have survived on the cylinder.
While we can hear the actual voice of Napoléon Bonaparte’s nephew recorded 130 years ago, Abel Gance’s epic five and a half hour film about the great Frenchman from 1927 is silent. Silent as far a dialogue is concerned, but Carl Davis skillfully uses the music of Beethoven and others to bring the film to life.
The connection between Napoléon and Beethoven is well known – as the original dedicatee of the Eroica Symphony, the composer captured the spirit of Napoléon’s forceful personality in his music. You can read more about it in a blog I wrote on Felix Weingartner’s recording of the work.
Recording from the Alan Cooban collection digitised with funds from the Saga Trust
Guest blog by Edison Fellow Chas Helge who is currently writing his dissertation on Beatrice Harrison
Suddenly, the door opened and the King came in. He was quite alone. He came up to me… saying, 'Nightingale, nightingale,' he said, 'you have done what I have not yet been able to do. You have encircled the empire with the song of the nightingale with your cello.'
These are the words spoken by the cello virtuoso Beatrice Harrison (1892-1965) in 1955 for the BBC Home Service programme Scrapbook for 1924. Harrison, who was once a household name at the height of Great Britain’s colonial empire, lent her first-hand account to help create an historical snapshot of 1924. The monarch she is referencing is King George V. This interview is just one of the rare resources found in the Sound and Moving Image collection at the British Library. My Edison Fellowship facilitated travel to London to access this and many more primary sources for my dissertation exploring the career, life, and recordings of this outstanding early 20th century performer.
Beatrice Harrison’s development was meteoric. She was second of four prodigiously talented sisters: May, Beatrice, Margaret, and Monica. Their early musical studies were supervised by their firebrand of a mother, Annie Harrison. Annie was a talented amateur singer and pianist, and perhaps because she was not able to pursue a musical career herself, mobilized all of her family’s resources to the careers of her children as professional musicians. One of the most fascinating windows into the Harrison family’s lives are their practice journals. The girls were expected to keep meticulous records to document every hour of every day’s productivity. Annie’s devotion and tenacity paid off. Beatrice received exceptional training at the Royal College of Music, the Frankfurt Hoch Conservatory, and the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. While studying with the famous German cello pedagogue Hugo Becker (1863-1941), she won the Mendelssohn Prize at age seventeen.
In their early 20s, Beatrice and her elder sister May Harrison toured Europe and Russia performing the Brahms Concerto for Violin and Cello some fifty-nine times. During their travels, they met Gabriel Fauré, Sergei Rachmaninov, Alexander Glazunov, Gustav Holst, and David Popper. The Harrison sisters also brushed shoulders with the world’s political elite including European royalty, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and in England, King George V and his sister Princess Victoria.
Beatrice and May Harrison (BL Collections)
Beatrice became close friends with Princess Victoria, so close, that it was Princess Victoria who paid for Harrison’s beloved cello, the great ‘Pietro Guarnieri’. In August 1928 HMV made some private recordings for the Princess. Here is one of the third movement of Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor featuring Beatrice on the cello and Princess Victoria accompanying her on the piano.
Another recording, which can be heard at the British Library, is an interview conducted in 1986 with Margaret Harrison (1899-1995), Beatrice’s younger sister. Margaret herself was a prodigy as the youngest pupil of the Royal College of Music (age 4) and her piano skills were extensive enough that she toured with Beatrice in the United States (they even made it to Texas). Here, we can listen to Margaret create a portal, not only into the life of the Harrison family, but also into the private life of Princess Victoria.
Harrison’s greatest claims to fame straddle two different sides of the music world during the 1920s. Today, Harrison’s legacy endures for her recordings of the Elgar Cello Concerto recorded under the baton of Sir Edward Elgar himself. She was his preferred cellist for the concerto and he credited her for popularizing it after its disastrous premiere. They first recorded it together in 1919 and 1920 by the old acoustic process.
Elgar and Beatrice Harrison recording for HMV in 1920
A new recording was made by the electric process on 23rd March 1928 where two turntables were recording simultaneously. Using modern digital technology, these two recordings made at the same session have been combined to create a new stereo version. It also stands as the most accurate representation of what Elgar intended his famous concerto to express.
The second contribution Harrison made was as an international radio superstar. In 1924, she had a 'hard tussle' (her words) to convince managing director of the BBC Sir John Reith to have sound engineers go to her garden near Oxted in Surrey. Her vision was to recreate on live radio what she had successfully accomplished herself many times: marry the rich sound of her cello with the song of the nightingale. In the dark, positioned under an oak tree, surrounded by rabbits, microphones, and wires, Harrison performed Rimsky-Korsakov’s Chant Hindu accompanied by the sound of nightingales to a radio audience of a million people. Four years later she recreated this for the HMV microphone.
Meanwhile, the live broadcast was a hit. It was the first time the BBC had broadcast the sound of birds in their natural habitat. Harrison received more than fifty thousand fan letters and welcomed hundreds of visitors to her estate from every corner of the British Empire. They all hoped to meet ‘The Lady of the Nightingales.’ Harrison and the BBC recreated their broadcast every springtime for twelve consecutive years and later, in the 1955 Scrapbook programme mentioned above. Here is an excerpt from that broadcast describing what happened in 1924 and ending with her recollection of the King's comments mentioned above.
Harrison’s success even led to her appearing as herself in the 1943 British propaganda film The Demi-Paradise, and extraordinary scene where she plays in a garden with nightingales during an air raid for a radio broadcast.
Harrison embraced her status as an international British cultural icon and thus named her memoir The Cello and the Nightingales.
As an American, the Edison Fellowship was my ticket to accessing not only the British Library’s resources, but many institutions and individuals in London. The Harrison Sisters’ scores at the Royal College of Music and Harrison’s correspondence (contracts, internal memos, and letters) with the BBC at their archives in Caversham. Both the RCM and the BBC Archives were so very kind and helpful, especially the RCM librarians who made dozens of trips into the basement to pull up heavy boxes of music, I thank you for helping this helpless American.
While in London, I was privileged to meet the two leading Beatrice Harrison historians, David Candlin, Chairman of the Harrison Sisters Trust and Patricia Cleveland-Peck, author of many beloved children’s books and the annotator/editor of Beatrice’s autobiography, The Cello and the Nightingales. David was kind enough to invite me into his home and show me the Harrisons' church and graves and the Music House in Surrey. He also provided access to documents and countless photos I had never seen before.
Special thanks to Jonathan Summers at the British Library Sound Archive who manages the Edison Fellowships for help and guidance during my stay in London, and for accompanying me in Anton Rubinstein’s Cello Sonata and a Beatrice Harrison manuscript! Finally, thanks to Cheryl Tipp, curator of Wildlife & Environmental Sounds, for the use of a recording studio to finish the transcriptions of the recorded interviews.
Thanks to Somm Recordings for permission to use the Elgar recordings
Michel Legrand, who died a few weeks ago, was a prolific composer for the screen. He won Academy Awards for Summer of '42 and music for Barbra Streisand's Yentl and penned the great hit Windmills of your mind for the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair. One of my all-time favourite film scores is his baroque inspired theme and variations for two pianos and orchestra that he wrote for Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between in 1971. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and coupled with the Symphonic Suite from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg this 1979 LP has long been a collector’s item. Two copies reside in the British Library’s Sound Archive as does the CD version which was only released in Japan.
Legrand earned his first Academy Award nomination in 1964 for his score to Les Parapluies de Cherbourg notable for the dialogue being entirely sung throughout the film. The film was extremely popular and won the Palm d’Or at Cannes so writer/director Jacques Demy teamed up again with Legrand in 1967 and tried the same formula with Les Demoiselles de Rochefort starring real life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac.
In 2015 I acquired a small collection from choreographer Domy Reiter-Soffer who had worked on the film Les Demoiselles de Rochefort and had been given a tape of the studio recording. Students of film scores may be interested to know that it includes the count-offs of the musicians and spoken cue numbers. Some backing tracks also appear without the vocals.
The piano solos are probably Legrand himself and it is good to hear them without the overlaid vocals. This one has a click track introduction as it appears that Legrand is overdubbing the piano to give a fuller sound.
The soundtrack issue of the time (also donated by Mr Reiter-Soffer) was on two LPs and lists the singers whose voices were used on the recording to which the actors mimed on film. One of them is Legrand's sister, Christiane singing the role of Judith. While certainly not the LP master, the tape is more of a working product giving an insight into the process that went into making a musical film in France in the 1960s.
Anwar Brett (1966-2013) was a freelance film critic and the author of the book Dorset in Film (Dorset Books, 2011). For around 25 years, from his early 20s onward, he wrote for a broad range of different national and regional newspapers and magazines. He also contributed to The International Directory of Film & Filmmakers and the 1995 edition of Children’s Britannica.
It is clear he was passionately interested in film and also devoted to his home county of Dorset (he lived in Wimborne). His other interests included boxing and football.
Anwar Brett's wife Tracey donated his massive archive of tapes of interviews and press conferences to the British Library in 2016. The collection numbers approximately 1500 tape cassettes, covering the period 1989-2006; and approximately 900 CD-Rs, covering 2007-2013. This unique set of recordings features film actors and directors, mainly in a press conference setting but also sometimes in more informal settings - on-set or in telephone conversations (a 2001 telephone interview with Rita Tushingham is almost wholly concerned with the fortunes of Liverpool Football Club!).
Speakers include major international and British stars such as Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Russell Crowe, Johnny Depp, Whoopi Goldberg, Samuel L. Jackson and Helen Mirren; and directors Kathryn Bigelow, Beeban Kidron, Spike Lee, Mike Leigh, Barbet Schroeder, Martin Scorsese and Wim Wenders - to give a more-or-less random sample from this hugely varied collection.
The tapes are currently being catalogued by my colleague Trevor Hoskins. Trevor is about a quarter of the way through at the moment but it will be a long while yet before the end is in sight.
To whet your appetite, here is a short clip of the then 23-year-old Danny Dyer, recorded on-set by Anwar Brett in June 2001, during the filming of the The Mean Machine.
Please note that this recording was made outdoors on a windy day, with consequent very noticeable wind noise. Contains strong language.
The legendary Jack Johnson (1878-1946) is remembered as the first African-American world heavyweight boxing champion, a title he held from 1908 to 1915. At a time when race relations were extremely volatile in the United States, Johnson caused a sensation not only by beating all white challengers in the ring, but by consorting with white women and marrying three of them.
Johnson was arrested in 1912 for violating the Mann Act, a 1910 Federal law criminalizing the transport of any girl or woman across the state line for ‘immoral purposes’. He was convicted a year later by an all-white jury, sentenced to a year in prison, but fled the country for seven years before returning to serve his time in 1920. For some years, Mike Tyson and John McCain campaigned to get him pardoned and recognised as one of the United States greatest sports legends, but it was not until last week that President Donald Trump gave Johnson a posthumous pardon.
Fight with Tommy Burns 26th December 1908, Sydney, Australia
For those of us who have a fascination with the earliest recordings, Johnson’s heyday fortunately coincided with the invention and development of film and sound recording. Because he was a superstar and his fights were so popular they were filmed as early as 1908 (albeit silent) to be shown at a later date to fee paying audiences in theatres. Indeed, the fight that took place on Boxing Day 1908 in Sydney Australia where he gained the title is extant. His status meant that record companies requested his services for discs of him speaking on training, his views on physical culture, and descriptions of his most famous fights. The discs are rare today. Indeed, only two of three parts of the recording he made for Columbia in the United States in 1910, My own story of the big fight, have turned up.
When Johnson visited England in October 1911 for a fight at Earl’s Court he also toured the music halls where crowds flocked to see him. A film, preserved by the BFI, was taken of him visiting the Manchester docks and leaving the Regent Theatre in Salford.
Jack Johnson and wife Lucille at the Edison Bell Studio in Peckham (Sound Wave August 1914, BL collections)
Johnson defeated Frank Moran on 27th June 1914 at the Velodrome d'Hiver in Paris then traveled to England to record for Edison Bell’s popular Winner label on the 30th June. The two sides, titled Physical Culture, were recorded at their studio in Glengall Road, Peckham. In his exemplary book Lost Sounds: Blacks and the birth of the recording industry 1890-1919, Tim Brooks devotes a chapter to Jackson and his handful of recordings and illustrates it with photos acquired from the British Library. The main message of the lecture is that we should all drink more water – Johnson could hardly have imagined that a hundred years later nearly everyone could be seen with a plastic bottle of water in their hand or bag.
Disc loaned by Mr Gray
The Edison Bell recording is also an extremely rare disc, but in 1993 a Mr Gray brought his copy of it to what was then the National Sound Archive for a dubbing to be made. Mr Gray had found it in a junk shop in Edinburgh in 1986. I remembered seeing this on the Sound and Moving Image catalogue and years ago discovered a photograph of the disc labels in a drawer at the Sound Archive’s previous premises in Exhibition Road. Today, after a little searching, I have discovered that photo so the disc can be seen and heard again more than one hundred years after it was recorded.
Johnson’s career from the beginning of the twentieth century is documented for us in a way that is given to few from that period. His was also an important chapter in social history, one still resonating today with the President’s pardon.
This week's selection comes from Stephen Cleary, Lead Curator of Literary & Creative Recordings.
Film-maker Mike Leigh in conversation with novelist William Boyd, 22 March 1991, at the ICA, London, around the time of the release of Life is Sweet, Leigh's critically acclaimed comedy-drama about the trials of an ordinary North London family. Leigh talks about his filmic influences, who include Ozu, Woody Allen and Satyajit Ray, and his rehearsal-based working methods. Life is Sweet currently holds a 100% rating on the critics' tomatometer at rottentomatoes.com, as does his earlier feature High Hopes.
Muktir Gaan (Song of Freedom) - winner - International Folk Music Film festival 2016
This year marks the 6th successive year that the International Folk Music Film Festival in Nepal has gathered together a collection of filmmakers from across the globe whose films of musical traditions reveal the true vitality of the medium in the documentation of music and performance. Despite the impact of natural disasters and political embargoes, Ram Prasad (the Director of the festival) has been determined to continue to keep the festival going. With the support of his dedicated collaborators and an international field of inspiring filmmakers, the festival has continued and his determination has paid off. Copies of selected films from the festival are held in the British Library (with the collection reference C1516) which has now developed into a very interesting archive of films that record ‘traditional’ or folk music and the role of music in traditional cultures around the world.
In the six years since its inception the festival has screened over 180 films submitted by a wide range of filmmakers from a variety of disciplines. The advisory board for the film festival includes ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, musicians and filmmakers whose diverse perspectives on the role of music in culture ensure the content remains multi-faceted and wide in focus. Like music itself, the films cannot be defined through words alone and they continue to expand the concept of what a folk music film really is.
Muktir Gaan
There are several categories of awards including: short film; Best Nepali film; Best instructional film; Music therapy award; Intangible Heritage documentation award and a Lifetime achievement award. The winner of the long film category in 2016 was Muktir Gaan (Song of Freedom), a film by Tareque Masud and Catherine Masud. The film follows a music troupe, singing to inspire the freedom fighters, during the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971.
The Folk Music film festival differs from many of the more well-known ethnographic film festivals by the breadth of film styles included in the programme. The film committee selects record footage and films from very low budget productions to screen alongside big budget and crowd funded productions and archive films. Alongside the competition films there are a number of invited films which allow the viewer to reflect on the work of a filmmaker whose work demonstrates the power of documenting music through film; an international filmmaker or ethnomusicologist who has created significant documents of Nepali culture; an artist or significant figure from within the Nepalese musical community who has contributed to Nepalese musical heritage.
Prev Dem discussing Arnold Bake film
The inclusion of archive footage of Nepalese traditions sourced from international filmmakers and archives and locally made films about Nepalese culture is not an accident. Rather it is one of the stimuli for the founders of the film festival, Ram Prasad and Norma Blackstock, who are both on the board of the Music Museum of Nepal.
The museum is home not only to a large collection of traditional instruments but also to a growing archive of audio and film recordings of Nepali musical traditions made by the museums founders and local filmmakers. Norma and Ram have been slowly bringing together digital copies of archive footage of Nepali music and culture found in archives and personal collections around the world to add to the collection including copies of ethnomusicologist, Arnold Bake's, material from British Library collection C52 (see music blog 2012).
Film festival audience
The film festival therefore serves as a vehicle for reconnecting communities with their cultural heritage through screening historic footage of these traditions. The invitations to attend the festival are extended throughout the Nepalese community across generations. The success of the festival in extending the legacy of documenting music on film is exemplary.
The festival is also a key part of the Music Museum of Nepal's cultural engagement programme. This year they hosted filmmaker Karen Boswall as they extended their training opportunities to local filmmakers interested in documenting their own traditions. Encouraging and developing local filmmakers and students to engage with documentation of their own cultural traditions in film adds to the ever growing collection of contemporary footage of the wide range of musical traditions found throughout the many culture groups of Nepal.
The documentation of cultural traditions and the communication of knowledge about these traditions is one of the main aims of the festival. The results from this workshop will be included in the final batch of films to be received from the festival. Many of these films have now been added to the videoserver which is available in the reading rooms at the British Library.
Videoserver
For anyone wanting to access videoserver in the British Library Reading rooms please contact the Listening and Viewing Service for more information.
Find out more about the work of the British Library's Sound Archive and the new Save our Sounds programme online.
Follow the British Library Sound Archive @soundarchive and the British Library's World and Traditional Music activities @BL_WorldTrad on Twitter.