Sound and vision blog

One of the Library’s audio engineers recently transferred a rare 1959 recording of a musical rehearsal of John Osborne’s play The World of Paul Slickey.

The play, subtitled A Comedy of Manners, was a satire on Fleet Street gossip columnists. The production was directed by Osborne himself, with music by Christopher Whelen, choreography by Kenneth MacMillan and set design by Hugh Casson.

Paul Slickey premiered at the Pavilion Theatre, Bournemouth, 14 April 1959, and moved to the Palace Theatre in London on 5 May. Both critics and public detested it. The reviews were a mixture of indignation and anger.

Milton Shulman from the Evening Standard wrote:

       The first night audience at The World of Paul Slickey, by John Osborne, at the Palace, seemed to be about equally divided between those who loathed it politely and those who hated it audibly....the most raucous note of displeasure heard in the West End since the war.

Janet Hamilton-Smith’s review headline for The Times was ‘Extraordinarily Dull World of Paul Slickey’.

Thirty years later, Osborne wrote in his memoirs, ‘I must be the only playwright this century to have been pursued up a London street by an angry mob’.

He also said that the only thing he regretted about the whole affair was rejecting Sean Connery for the role of Slickey:

        I made a monumental misjudgement by dismissing Sean Connery, who turned up one morning looking like my prejudiced idea of a Rank contract actor. It was a lamentable touch of Royal Court snobbery.

Listen to Dennis Lotis singing 'I'm just a guy called Paul Slickey' (excerpt)

If you wish to know more about the play and its reception, the British Library is your one-stop source, where you can access the recordings, and also consult the play’s manuscript, the autobiography of John Osborne and the press reviews of the play.

Audio recordings: BL ref. 1LS0003278-79, 1LL0014340

Manuscripts: Lord Chamberlain plays collection – play-script: BL ref. 1959/15 and Lord Chamberlain - correspondence BL ref. 1959/1836

John Osborne’s memoirs: Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography: volume II, 1955-196, Chapter 14 ‘A Night to Remember’: BL ref. YK.1993.a.1176.

Press reviews: British Library Newsroom (on microfilms) and onsite Electronic Resources & Journals

Find out more about the British Library's Sound Archive and our Save Our Sounds programme #SaveOurSounds

Stay tuned with the British Library's Drama and Literature Recordings on @BL_DramaSound

Africa Writes vox pops is a new collection of 32 video interviews made at the Africa Writes festival 4-5 June, 2015. See BL reference C1705.

Africa Writes is an annual literature and book festival organized by the Royal African Society in partnership with the British Library. 

The interviews were filmed by the British Library in collaboration with Afrikult to produce a short film now on show at the British Library's new exhibition West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song co-curated by Marion Wallace and Janet Topp Fargion.

The collection comprises the raw unedited footage of 32 five-to-ten minute interviews, including set-ups, tests for focus, cutaway shots etc. Highlights can be viewed in the exhibition. The videos capture Africa Writes’ international audience of readers discussing contemporary trends in West African literature.

Participants were asked what is new and exciting about West African literature; how West African literature has changed since Chinua Achebe’s generation of writers; how West African literature connects with people's experiences in Africa and the diaspora today; what role do women play in West African literature; and how could West African literature be described in just three words. The results of the final question are expressed in the word cloud shown below.

The interviewees agreed unanimously that West African literature has contributed to their lives by helping them to shape their identities and to make sense of their experiences of migration, diaspora and transculturation. Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie topped the list of recommended authors.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is seen as great empowerer of women and an inspiration for the young. Women are considered more prominent in West African literature than ever, not just as characters, but as writers too.

The value of this collection goes beyond the subject of West African literature, delving into what literature means, how it resonates with its readers and how it has helped Africans to reclaim their own history and to engage with the diaspora.

Several interviewees touched on how social media helps to connect writers, publishers and audiences, making African literature more visible and internationally accessible.

The digital space has also helped to circumvent restrictions on publishing in languages besides the hegemonic English and French, providing opportunities to authors who write in West African languages. Furthermore it has expanded the possibilities for online publishing in general and for multilingual and multimedia e-publications such as the Valentine's Day Anthology 2015  of short stories, published by Ankara Press, which includes audio readings by the authors and can be downloaded for free.

When asked what would they like to see more of in the future interviewees' thematic concerns were heterogeneous, including topics and genres such as queer, different gender dynamics and disability stories, thrillers, crime fiction, romance, pop culture, traditional stories, science fiction and non-fiction.

If you haven't read much West African literature and don't know where to start this vox pops collection will set you up. And if you were already into West African literature it will probably help you to expand your reading list until the next Africa Writes festival in 2016. 

A big thanks to the 33 interviewees and Afrikult members: Zaahida Nalumoso, Henry Brefo and Marcelle Akita. And please come to the exhibition which is on until 16 February 2015.

The British Library is home to the nation’s sound archive: a collection of more than 6.5 million recordings dating back to the birth of recorded sound in the late 19^th century and held on over 40 different types of discs, tapes and other formats.

Global professional consensus is that we have fifteen years in which to digitise these historic sound recordings before they risk disappearing, as the means of playing them disappear from production and some materials begin to decay naturally.

In January this year the British Library launched Save our Sounds, a major programme aiming to preserve the nation’s sound heritage, looking not only at sounds in the national collections, but at the wider picture across the UK.

To kick-start the programme, we set out to conduct a National Audit of the UK’s Sound Collections. Over a five-month period we asked libraries, archives, record companies, and individual collectors to come forward and tell us what kinds of material they had in their archives, their condition, which formats they were held on and the recordings they contained.

A snapshot of the results

Map showing collection locations

The results make up the largest ever snapshot of the UK’s sound heritage: we gathered information on over 1.8 million recordings held in over 3,000 collections and 400 different locations across the UK.

Mirroring the challenges facing the British Library’s sound archive, many of the sounds around the UK are held on formats which need to be digitised in the next 15 years. A staggering 78% of the recordings surveyed are held on formats which are vulnerable to technological obsolescence, such as shellac discs, DAT tape and some early digital formats. Over half of all the collections were reported as having no digital copies. 

The collections represent a wealth of cultural memory: over three quarters were reported to contain rare or unique recordings.

What kinds of sounds were identified?

An Edison Grand phonograph cylinder showing signs of deterioration

There is a wide variety in terms of the kind of collections identified in the audit, ranging from major collections to small focused collections of local significance.

400 institutions, societies, associations, trusts, companies and individual collectors took part in the National Audit. Examples include: 

• Doc Rowe Archive Collection: Internationally significant archive of British folk life, lore and cultural tradition featuring 12,000 recordings.
• Jem Finer Collection: The personal collection of the musician, sound artist and founding member of The Pogues, Jem Finer. Includes 9,000 items many of which are unique personal recordings or works in progress.
• Vaughan Williams Memorial Library Collection at Cecil Sharp House: An internationally significant collection containing 10,000 folk and traditional music recordings including rare and unique field recordings and private recordings by noted folk musicians and composers.
• Delia Derbyshire Archive: 267 tapes covering Derbyshire's time as a composer at the BBC's ground-breaking Radiophonic Workshop between 1962 and 1973.
• Essex Record Office Traditional Music Archive: 1,000 recordings of traditional and folk music played by Essex musicians or performed at Essex venues.
• The Rambert Archive: 800 recordings created by the Rambert Dance Company through the process of the work the company produce.
• Manchester Jewish Museum Archive: 716 recordings from the early 1970s onwards containing interviews providing unique anecdotal evidence of the mass migration of Eastern European Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• University of Reading Special Collections, James & Elizabeth Knowlson Collection: 290 recordings relating to the life and work of Samuel Beckett.
• Centre for Wildlife Conservation, University of Cumbria: Underwater hydrophone recordings made in the waters surrounding Shetland including recordings of killer whales (Orcinus orca) and Risso's dolphins (Grampus griseus).
• Canterbury Cathedral Archives: Recordings of events at Canterbury Cathedral from the 1950s onwards, including services for past Archbishops' enthronements, Lambeth conferences and choral evensong; performances of children's operas and choral music by J.S. Bach, Britten and others.

What next?

A British Library engineer conducting preservation work

We have been delighted by the range and volume of responses to the National Audit of the UK’s Sound Collections run by the British Library. While the results are not comprehensive, they provide the largest ever snapshot of the wealth of audio heritage materials held in archives across the country.

We will be working closely with the contributors to identify the most at-risk collections, to share preservation knowledge, and to grow a network of audio preservationists. The data and findings will also be used to inform the British Library’s Save our Sounds programme which, as well as drawing attention to at-risk sounds, aims to to celebrate the UK’s sound heritage and raise awareness of this treasure trove of living history held in archives across the country.

From 2017, thanks to £9.5 million of earmarked funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, we’ll digitise and publish online up to 500,000 rare and unique sounds from the Library’s own collections and those around the UK which are most at risk.

We’ll also work with partner institutions to develop a national preservation network via ten regional centres of archival excellence which will digitise, preserve and share the unique audio heritage found in their local area.

The Directory and a summary report on our findings are available on the Directory of UK Sound Collections project page. Please support us by tweeting #SaveOur Sounds and follow our own digitisation process on @SoundHeritage.

Seiber's own collection of recordings donated by his daughter Julia Seiber Boyd,  the Matyas Seiber collection, has been digitised and put on line on BL Sounds.

Mátyás György Seiber (1905-1960) was born in Budapest where he studied composition with Zoltan Kodály and cello with Adolf Shiffer at the Budapest Academy of Music. From the late 1920s he taught in Frankfurt where his classes in jazz were the first of its kind. He left Germany in 1933 and settled in England in 1935 where he worked as a freelance writer and did various jobs including writing music for films. In 1942 Michael Tippett offered him a teaching post at Morley College where during this decade he was a founder of the Society for New Music with Francis Chagrin, and the Dorian Singers.

Seiber wrote in many different forms including opera, ballet, songs and chamber music; he also wrote much incidental music for radio, television and film productions. Most of his finest works are represented in his collection of discs.

Some of these recordings are in poor condition being more than eighty years old, but they are unique and of great historical interest as Seiber recorded many of the broadcast first performances of his works.  Some important BBC talks from the early 1940s survive here including part of one on his teacher Zoltan Kodaly in 1943.  This is a glass disc coated with cellulose nitrate that was broken into three pieces.

A seven part series Composing With Twelve Notes was broadcast in 1952. Seiber’s Second String Quartet (1934-35) uses Schoenberg’s serial techniques and can be heard here in the first UK broadcast from 1957. The cantata Ulysses written in 1946-47 is given in a performance with Peter Pears as soloist while the incidental music for Faust, a radio play from 1949 by Louis MacNeice based on Goethe, comes from the recording session discs. The Cantata Secularis (1949-51) based on Virgil, survives here in the first broadcast performance from 1955 with Walter Goehr and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. 

In addition to incidental music for radio plays, Seiber also wrote film scores including A Town like Alice, the 1956 Rank film starring Peter Finch and Virginia McKenna.

Seiber’s interest in jazz and blues is evident as there are recordings (mostly copies of commercial discs) of the great blues singers Josh White and Leadbelly. Seiber probably used these in his research for writing incidental music as there are also recordings by folk song collectors Alan Lomax and A.L. Lloyd. One early disc from his time in Germany is of Seiber playing various forms of jazz-influenced dance styles – ragtime, Argentine tango, slow fox-trot and Charleston,while the earliest dated recordings come from South West German radio in 1932.

I have just returned from the ‘Performing the Archive’ conference at the National University of Ireland in Galway, 22-24 July.  

This was an international conference on performance archives attended by delegates from European countries and the United States: most of them archivists, academics, artists and/or PhD students working with archives.

The three-day programme contained six plenary panels and six concurrent sessions with papers on 25 different topics, which, multiplied by three speakers per session, made a total of 75 papers presented. See programme.

The venue was the Arts Millennium Building, with the evening receptions held at the James Hardiman Library, both modern spaces conveniently close to our student accommodation campus in Corrib Village.

I only have space to mention just a few highlights:

Lost Theatres and their Digital Remains

Various discussions were dedicated to two of the most prominent theatres in the history of Dublin: the Abbey Theatre, considered to be Ireland’s national theatre; and the (fourth) Theatre Royal, which had a capacity of 4000 seats and was reputedly the biggest theatre in Europe.

The Abbey Theatre has an ongoing archive online digitisation project consisting  so far of over a million items of audio, video, photographs, scripts, set designs, posters, documents, and oral history interviews with actors, writers, directors and staff from the Abbey.

In addition, both theatres are being digitally reconstructed with the use of 3D digital technologies by Hugh Denard and his team of Trinity College, Dublin.  Read more.

Complementing these two online resources is the ‘Playography Ireland’ site, which combines two comprehensive databases of new Irish plays produced professionally since 1904.

Holding a Mirror Up to Nature and Society

Next year Ireland celebrates the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising which has been described as ‘the foundational myth of the modern Irish state’ in ‘the war of independence against Britain (1919 - 1921) and the creation of the Irish Free State'. See, for example, Professor David Reynolds's recent article in New Statesman.

Much questioning has gone into the sources for building memory and historiography and in anticipation of the coming commemorations, part of the conference focused on voices absent from the archives, with an emphasis on women and queer histories.

Particularly relevant were two papers: one by Ciara Conway and the other by Miriam Haughton, both of National University of Ireland, Galway.

Professor Tracy Davis of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois  presented a paper on the manuscript diaries of Frederick Chesson, in her words ‘a diary of nobody’, to bring attention to ‘the matrix’ of Victorian diaries and their importance for the writing of history. 

Considering theatre as a mirror and microcosm of society, Professor Patrick Lonergan of National University of Ireland, Galway, presented a paper on gender and how theatres perform in society based on his research at the Abbey Theatre archives, including an interesting example of the imbalance in the number of toilets provided for men and women!

Creativity and Archives

There was also a focus on creative ways of seeing archived materials and conceiving dynamic alternatives of engagement.

For example Blake Morris spoke of The Walk Exchange a collaborative project which develops public educational and creative walks, in which the participants are invited to think about the urban as a text.

Theatre practitioners using archives who spoke included playwright and researcher Jenny Roggers; playwright and journalist Colin Murphy, who spoke about his 2010 play Guarantee; theatre director Louise Lowe of ANU Productions, who talked about PALS: The Irish at Gallipoli; Paula McFetridge, Artistic Director of Kabosh Productions, who has worked on several projects in Belfast; and Joan Sheehy of Limerick City of Culture, who talked about The Colleen Bawn Trials.

Tanya Dean of National University of Ireland, Galway, presented a paper on positive ways of seeing theatre which is not live but yet exclusive as ‘something other than performance', such as the NT Live initiative of London’s National Theatre.

Overall this was a very stimulating three days, efficiently organized by Charlotte McIvor and her colleagues. Conferences like this always give me lots of food for thought for many months to come. A big thank you to everybody who made this conference possible.

For his first appearance at the Proms, the twenty-four year old Benjamin Britten gave the premiere of his Piano Concerto Op. 13 on 11^th August 1938.  He was joined by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Henry Wood.  However, Britten was not happy with the third movement, originally titled Recitative and Aria, so he revised it in 1945 replacing it with an Impromptu.  The first performance of the new version was given by his friend Noel Mewton-Wood at the Cheltenham Festival in July 1946.

 Following the world premiere in 1938 at the Queen’s Hall the critic of the Times wrote:

 ‘This is the most important work the composer has written, though it still fails to fulfil entirely the promise of his obvious talent.  That Britten has a remarkable mastery of technical resources has been evident for some time, and this concerto fully confirms that impression.  The writing for both pianoforte and the orchestra is brilliant and effective.  The form, too, in which the work is cast is original without being obscure, even as the harmony is “contemporary” without being unintelligible at a first hearing.  Indeed, the clarity of both form and texture is the best feature of the work.’

The critic complained of satire breaking in too often leaving the listener to wonder when the composer was actually being serious.

‘It is the content that raises doubts concerning the real merit of the work that surely aspires to a higher status than a clever jeu d’esprit…..is the end of the third movement, which is rather commonplace in its romanticism, meant seriously, or is the composer’s tongue still in his cheek, as it is during the first part of the movement?’

The 1938 world premiere was broadcast by the BBC but no known recording of the performance was made at the time.  Recently however, the British Library was contacted by Alex Kersley and her brother John whose father was Leo Kersley, a friend of Britten and Pears.  He had discs of the live broadcast that were professionally made by New Marguerite Sound Studios of 99a Charing Cross Road.  The discs were transferred to digital files at the British Library Conservation Centre.  This important historical document of nearly 80 years ago can be heard complete in the Humanities reading rooms of the British Library though Soundserver.

End of third movement 1938

We are delighted to announce that the British Library has been earmarked funding of over £9.5m from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to help save the nation’s sound recordings and open them up online for everyone to hear.

For those of you familiar with our Save our Sounds project, this is very welcome news. According to the predictions of sound archivists the world over, we have fifteen years in which to digitise historic sound recordings before the equipment required to play some formats can no longer be used, and some formats such as wax cylinders and acetate discs start to naturally decay.

Examination of a damaged lacquer disc in our sound labs

This problem doesn’t just apply to the national sound archive of over 6.5m recordings held at the British Library; it applies to collections around the country.

As part of our ongoing UK Sound Directory project, we have identified over 1m sound collections on dozens of different formats across the UK which also risk disappearing, which range from recordings of killer whales made off the coast of Shetland (held by the Centre for Wildlife Conservation, University of Cumbria), to a collection of sounds held in the Canterbury Cathedral archives spanning 50 years of services, choral and opera performances and other recordings, many of which are thought to be unique.

Thanks to the £9.5m funding from the HLF, we will be able to digitise and publish online up to 500,000 rare and unique sounds from the Library’s own collections and those around the UK which are most at risk, including local dialects and accents, oral histories, previously unheard musical performances and plays, and vanishing wildlife sounds.

Some of the many rare recordings in the British Library's sound archive

From 2017-2022, we will work with partner institutions across the UK to develop a national preservation network via ten regional centres. Together we will digitise, preserve and share our unique audio heritage. We will also run a major outreach programme to schools and local communities to celebrate and raise awareness of UK sounds.

Our challenge, as outlined in our Living Knowledge vision published earlier this year, is to preserve as many as possible of the nation’s rare and unique sound recordings, and also to protect the future of our audio heritage, by improving the way in which we collect sounds digitally.

We are extremely grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund for answering that urgent need, and enabling us to take this first major step in our plans.

Find out more about our HLF funding on our Press site and join in the conversation on Twitter using #SaveOurSounds

A guest post by Rob Smith, post-graduate student in Library and Information Studies at UCL, who has recently been researching the Bishop Sound collection.

Recent activity in the British Library Sound Archive has involved digitising the Bishop Sound collection - a unique collection of lacquer disc records. The collection contains a broad range of material (some further examples are discussed in this earlier post) but the recorded performances of musical comedy hits from the 1930s and 1940s are of particular interest.

Lacquer disc technology was only introduced into the UK around 1934 and the earliest of these recordings made by the Bishop Sound and Electrical Company comes from 1937. Although no direct evidence exists, there appears to have been a strong working relationship between Jack Bishop of Bishop Sound and Firth Shephard - a popular impresario and theatre producer during that era. Bishop started working with Shephard on an early but hugely successful production called The Frog (1936) and their collaboration continued with productions of Going Greek (1937), Wild Oats (1938), and Running Riot (1938). Recordings for all but The Frog have been identified. 

Unfortunately none of these recorded performances are complete but they do contain excerpts that exemplify the style of popular performance from the time. This is an excerpt from Going Greek starring Leslie Henson - a comedy that follows the trials and tribulations of a group of bandits after they have taken an opera singer hostage. It gives you strong idea of the sort of humour found in these productions.

Listen to an excerpt from Going Greek

Bishop also formed associations with other celebrities of the day such as Ivor Novello. Discovered in the collection were recordings of Novello’s Arc de Triomphe (1943) and Perchance to Dream (1947). Incredibly both of these recordings have survived (mostly intact) and contain rare performances of songs such as 'Paris Reminds Me of You', 'Dark Music', and “We’ll Gather Lilacs'. 

One of the issues that arose out of the digitisation of the discs was identifying and sequencing the recordings. Little information came from the discs themselves so it was necessary to perform an investigation that drew on other significant resources found online and in the British Library. 

After identifying the plays from names or characters mentioned on the recordings, playscripts in the Lord Chamberlain's Plays collection were consulted in order to sequence the transfers, based on the dialogue and songs. 

The Lord Chamberlain’s Office issued the legal license necessary to perform plays in the United Kingdom between 1824 and 1968. To receive a license, a copy of the playscript had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's Office. The Office was the official censor of all performed material. 

What was also discovered while sequencing the recordings to the playscript was how much the comedians and actors ad-libbed and nuanced their performances. This final excerpt, while brief, was un-scripted and presents a comedic reaction to the regulations that restricted what a performance could present.

Listen to another excerpt from Going Greek

These recent transfers are yet another example of the importance of audio preservation. It gives researchers and enthusiasts alike a deeper understanding of their chosen subject and gives us a unique glimpse into a past that could otherwise be forgotten.

If these issues interest you, please follow the Library's Save our Sounds campaign.