Sound and vision blog

An illustration of a person hanging from the gallows; a witch burning a sleeping couple while a demon carries off a child. Woodcut, 1790.

Death and murder are hardly rare events in British folksong, but there’s something uniquely disturbing about the implacable way in which the bogeyman Lamkin goes about his deadly business in this old ballad; sung here by Arthur ‘Hockey’ Feltwell of Southery, Norfolk to Russell Wortley on 22 April 1960 in the Nag’s Head, Southery.

Listen to False Lamkin

Download False Lamkin transcript

The song tells how the eponymous villain sneaks into a castle and murders the Lady inside, before being hanged by the returning Lord.

In some versions, Lamkin is a mason exacting revenge for unpaid work, helped by the false nurse inside the castle. There is also a theory that the name ‘Lamkin’ refers to a leper’s pallor (lambkin) and that the character seeks a cure by bathing in the blood of an innocent.

Whatever the origins of the song, my first encounter with the tale was in the form of Steeleye Span’s version - ‘Long Lankin’ - which appears on their 1975 album ‘Commoner’s Crown’. A sort of prog-folk  mini-epic with tempo changes galore, it begins with an eerie scene-setting vocal by Maddy Prior, building up to a rockingly melodramatic denouement.

Despite the anthemic climax of the Steeleye Span version, I’ve always been haunted by the song’s underlying bleakness: there’s not much in the way of redemption in this story and the hanging of the antagonist offers little in the way of catharsis.

When I came to catalogue Arthur ‘Hockey’ Feldwell’s version of the ballad (part of the Russell Wortley Collection (C777)), I was therefore struck by the compressed drama which Feldwell’s unaccompanied singing delivers and how his unadorned version shows that no embellishment is needed to convey the central horror of the story.

In Feldwell’s version, the details about Lamkin being a mason are omitted, heightening the sense of motiveless malignity behind the killing, while also removing any obvious moral lesson (always pay your builders). The nursemaid is mentioned, but her role as an accomplice is left ambiguous: she might just be too tired or frightened to go downstairs.

I did notice a possible silver lining: in this version it’s not clear whether Lamkin kills the baby with his ‘silver pin’, or just uses it to make the infant cry so that the lady comes to see what the matter is (or maybe that’s just my wishful thinking.)

More recent recordings prove that the song continues to exert its fascination.  Alasdair Roberts’ dramatic rendition of ‘Long Lankin’ on his 2010 album ‘Too long in this condition’, emphasises the macabre elements of the ballad, while Shirley Collins’ version, ‘Cruel Lincoln’, which appears on her 2016 album ‘Lodestar’, seems to get to the tragedy at the song’s core.

In the album’s notes, Collins describes how during the song’s recording, the sound of birds singing from the bank at the back of her garden outside was also captured on tape.  It was decided to leave the birdsong on the finished record, to act as a kind of hopeful counterweight to the grim events inside the castle walls.

In a similar way with Feldwell’s version, you feel that you need to hear the laughter and applause at the end. The listeners’ cheers and shouts of ‘Hockey!’ express not just an appreciation of the power and clarity of his singing but relief that the tale is over.

This week’s selection comes from Andrew Ormsby, Metadata Support Officer at the British Library.

A northern gannet, a seabird with a white body, beige head and blue eyes, sits on a pile of blue and red fishing rope and holds a clump of it in its beak. Photo credit: Thomas Haeusler. 

Today is World Environment Day 2023. This year, it is hosted by Côte d'Ivoire, and the theme is focussing on tackling plastic pollution. By now, we should all be aware of the dangers around plastics entering the environment. The 2017 series Blue Planet II, brought our attention to the plight of our oceans due to the amount of plastic being introduced. We saw disturbing footage of albatross chicks perishing after being fed small pieces of sharp plastic. Since then, hard hitting assessments have regularly been in the headlines like “more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050”, “humans ingest the equivalent of a credit card worth of plastic every week”, and “microplastics found in human blood”. World Environment Day in 2018 also had the same theme and tagline: “Beat Plastic Pollution”. Yet despite this awareness, frustratingly little progress has been made in reducing plastic production and consumption. Worse still, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge in plastic waste in the form of PPE.

Plastic affects all life on all parts of the planet, but some more than others. This recording of the week selection (British Library reference WA 1999/058/075 S1 C1) comes from a group of animals especially affected by human actions; seabirds. The northern gannet (Morus bassanus) is an iconic seabird, famous for their incredible fishing technique. As seen in the recent Wild Isles series, gannets catch their food by diving at high speed in to schools of fish, leaving trails of bubbles in their path like avian torpedoes.

Like most seabirds, gannets nest on cliff sides in large and often very noisy colonies, typically alongside other species such as kittiwakes, fulmars and guillemots. As such, getting a clean recording of an individual calling can be very challenging. The recordist responsible for this recording, Victor Lewis, used a long cable and careful field-craft to get his microphone as close as possible to the subject with minimal disturbance. The raucous calls of a pair at the nest is easily lost to our ears in the cacophony of other bird calls and sea sounds, but this is how they communicate with one another, so to hear it from the birds’ perspective gives better context to the sounds.

Listen to Gannets calling

A pair of northern gannets face each other with their necks extended and beaks touching. Photo credit: Marco Federmann.

Gannets mate for life, and they have a unique mating ritual which they perform each season to re-affirm their bonds. They face each other, extend their necks, touch bills and shake their heads. If you are lucky enough to see this display when watching a colony, you may just hear the subtle clattering of their bills.

Over half the world’s gannets nest around the UK coast, estimated at around 220,000 pairs. That sounds like a healthy number, but it is declining due to a complex array of man-made problems. Overfishing depletes their food source and even ends with gannets caught in trawler nets as bycatch. Bird flu has been devastating to gannets in recent years, spreading through colonies very quickly and leaving thousands of dead chicks and adults. While plastic continues to be a terrible threat. In 2019, the scientists in the British Ornithologists’ Union studied 7280 gannet nests across 29 colonies, and found 46% contained plastic. A gannet colony on the island of Alderney was found by the Wildlife Trust to contain plastic in almost every single nest. Most of this is in the form of fishing gear lost or abandoned at sea. Chicks and adults can get entangled in fishing ropes or even end up ingesting plastic, and this is often fatal.

Every year people visit seabird sites like Bempton Cliffs, the Farne Islands, and Bass Rock in Scotland to marvel at the spectacle of thousands of birds breeding and feeding on the UK shores. To lose this annual festival of nature would be so devastating it doesn’t bare thinking about. As well as addressing other threats, we must stop plastic entering the ocean. Large scale solutions like new laws and legislation must come from higher up, but, in case you need a reminder, we can all play our part. Be mindful of what you are buying and throwing away. If you can afford to, always choose reusable alternatives to single-use plastics. You can also do a lot of good by helping to clean up your local spaces or joining in with a beach clean. The future lives of these beautiful birds, like so many other species, depends on all of our actions now.

Several dozen Northern Gannets and their chicks sat at the top of a cliff with the sea in the background. Photo credit: Dr. Georg Wietschorke .

You can learn all about humans’ understanding and interpretation of animals in our exhibition Animals: Art, Science and Sound, open until 28^th August 2023.

Today’s post was written by Greg Green, Metadata Support Officer.

Publicity shot of Sun Ra, 1973. Distributed by Impulse! Records and ABC/Dunhill Records. Photographer uncredited. Public domain.
 
Throughout his long career the pianist, composer, bandleader and Afrofuturist pioneer Sun Ra (1914-1993) released over one hundred albums, many under his own record label Saturn Records. His sprawling recorded output is matched in extent only by the longevity of his band, the variously-named Arkestra, which formed in the 1950s and still performs to this day under the leadership of saxophonist Marshall Allen - surely one of the longest-running bands in existence.

This combination has served well to preserve the legacy of Sun Ra who passed away almost 30 years ago today on 30 May 1993. His death was mourned worldwide but not more so than by his devotees from within the Arkestra as captured by an all-day KPFA memorial programme which aired in the summer of 1993. This week’s highlighted recording is from this broadcast, which forms part of the Christ Trent Collection (C833). Chris Trent is a Sun Ra historian and founder of the archive-led, Ra-oriented record label Art Yard. The programme features interviews with several members of the Arkestra including saxophonist John Gilmore, trombonist Julian Priester and trumpeter Michael Ray as well as Evidence label founder Jerry Gordon and Jim Newman who produced the Afrofuturist sci-fi film Space is the Place (1974). Whilst the majority of the interviews are anecdotal and focus on Sun Ra’s history, saxophonist Ronald Wilson’s contribution stands apart in its pertinent reflections on the future of Sun Ra’s music.

Ronald Wilson interview excerpt

Download Ronald Wilson transcript

In this clip, soundtracked by the syncopated piano chords of ‘Somewhere in Space’, Wilson talks about the House of Ra in Philadelphia. The house functioned as a communal living & rehearsal space, the Arkestral headquarters and to this day is still lived in and used by the very same band. At the time of broadcast the house was overflowing with tapes which spilled out onto the kitchen sink, underneath tables and on top of cabinets and windowsills. According to Wilson, Sun Ra recorded everything that he did.

The Sun Ra Arkestra performing in Brecon, Wales in 1990. Photo by Peter Tea. Sourced from Flickr under CC BY-ND 2.0.

To me, it feels as if Ronald Wilson is not only addressing the KPFA listeners of 1993 but also those of us working in the British Library’s sound archive in 2023, as well as the musicologists and archivists of the future. Whilst it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the long-term importance of archives, Wilson’s clear-sighted appeal is a reminder of why audio preservation is needed in order to understand the lives of these artists as they unfolded and the music that came from them. Sun Ra must have shared this viewpoint himself. His explanation, as recounted by writer Robert Campbell, on how he chose which music to release on the Saturn label, says as much:

Whatever I think people are not going to listen to, I’ve always recorded it. When it’ll take them some time - maybe 20 years, 30 years - to really hear it.

Reference: Campbell, R. in  Omniverse: Sun Ra edited by Hartmut Geerken; Bernhard Hefele (Wartaweil: Waitawhile. 1994).

Today’s post was written by Gail Tasker, Metadata Support Officer.

Many of you will have seen a fictionalised version of comedian Lenny Bruce in the streamed comedy-drama The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Although the series has no pretensions to documentary accuracy, actor Luke Kirby has clearly done his research. He gives an impressively convincing and charismatic performance.

Working in the late 1950s to the mid-60s, the real Lenny Bruce was one of the most influential stand-up comedians in US history. His discursive style, based on semi-improvised routines, was a hip and exciting contrast to the tired format of traditional jokes with corny punchlines.

In the liner notes to the LP The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce, jazz critic Ralph Gleason drew parallels between Bruce’s approach to comedy, and jazz:

He is colossally irreverent - like a jazz musician. His stock in trade is to violate all the taboos out loud and to say things on stage which would get your nose bashed in at a party. But his outrage at society is not represented by shrill screams or loud protests. He does not pose. His is a moral outrage and has about it the air of a jazz man. It is strong stuff - like jazz, and it is akin to the point of view of Nelson Algren and Lawrence Ferlinghetti as well as to Charlie Parker and Lester Young.

But Bruce’s stance did not go unnoticed. In 1960s America, the establishment was in no mood to take a challenge lightly. If provoked, it would strike back. Bruce’s nightclub act, which dealt candidly with sex, drugs, politics, religion and race relations, began to attract police attention. Throughout the first half of the 1960s, up to his premature death in 1966, Bruce faced a relentless string of arrests and subsequent court proceedings, mainly for ‘obscenity’.

The first of these court appearances occurred in 1962, in San Francisco. In his defence, Bruce played a tape of his nightclub act, demonstrating the context surrounding his use of ‘obscene’ language. The judge was asked if those in the courtroom could be allowed to ‘respond naturally', i.e., to laugh, but the judge would allow no such thing, saying, ‘This is not a theatre and it is not a show’. Bruce was acquitted nonetheless.

Bruce subsequently issued the recording played in court as a 10” disc on his own label. The cover featured Bruce dressed as a policeman, and the following notice:  

WARNING

SALE OF THIS ALBUM MAY SUBJECT SELLER TO ARREST FOR VIOLATION OF THE ENDEMIC OBSCENITY LAWS; THE SOLE EXCEPTION BEING SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA (WHERE THE COMMUNITY STANDARDS MAY BE LOWER).

Here is a short excerpt from that recording, which was made at San Fransisco Jazz Workshop on 2 October 1961.

Listen to Lenny Bruce live in 1961

Download Lenny Bruce transcript

It is a measure of how times change that the sexual swearwords or expressions that saw Bruce arrested multiple times for obscenity would pass unremarked upon today, at least in a comedy context.

In contrast, Bruce’s use of various disparaging terms for ethnic minorities, disabled people and homosexuals would be highly likely to outrage many contemporary audiences. While it is an argument unlikely to persuade many today, Bruce maintained that the casual use of these terms could deprive them of their power to wound.

For those who would like to explore further we have digitised and made available online a number of Lenny Bruce shows recorded by Cecil Spiller in 1957-58. From available evidence, the venue for most of the recordings is thought to be the Peacock Lane nightclub, Los Angeles, USA. Please bear in mind that some of the language may offend.

Today’s post was written by Steve Cleary, Lead Curator, Literary and Creative Recordings.

With thanks to Kitty Bruce for granting permission to make these recordings available online.

Photograph of an actor on stage. Photograph by Antonio Molinari on Unsplash.

In this 2004 interview from British Library collection ‘Theatre Archive Project’ (C1142/350), sound designer Ross Brown describes the process of sound creation in theatre.

Listen to Ross Brown

Download Ross Brown transcript

Sound design is, among many things, an art of illusion. It serves a purpose to recreate familiar sounds and convey emotions. The role of the theatre sound designer is to create a sound that can fit a certain venue. The designer imagines how the sound will fill the ambient space and how the audience will receive it within that space. Sounds create another dimension to what happens on the stage.

Brown states that the role of the sound designer was not perceived as a separate entity until the modern day, when new equipment was introduced to create sounds in theatre. With the arrival of new technologies, playback became an integral part of the performance, almost similar to a cinematic experience. Naturalistic sounds could then be stretched and manipulated before being incorporated into the final products.

This new way of sampling sound needed to be marketed. In fact, this became a niche technical aspect of the staged performances. However, budget in theatre downplayed the sound designer as a professional role until very recently. Brown’s consideration made me think of the historic way of adding sound to a film as a separate track, with the final product merging two different mediums of communication (images and sounds).

Ross describes sound creation as a parallel narrative: an experimental discipline, which combines the ability to use these new technological tools with the final making of the performance or play. Some writers, Ross continues, raised objections to this new professional role of interpreting and shaping the musicality and rhythm of speech and interaction. Altogether, it was the whole experience of the audience that would be different with the sound actually abstracting from the script. Ideas could spark from attending rehearsals. An understanding of how the characters would interact with each other was an integral part of this new process of making sounds and creating the new pace of storytelling.

This week’s post comes from Giulia Baldorilli, Sound and Vision Reference Specialist.

The British Library recently launched a new online learning resource, Voices of the Holocaust, as part of Unlocking Our Sound Heritage. The new website features a curated selection of audio clips, pulled mainly from four collections of oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors held at the British Library’s sound archive. Alongside the interview extracts, the resource features biographies of the interviewees as well as historical context provided through themes and articles.

Many audio clips featured in the new Voices of the Holocaust learning resource speak to how difficult it was to escape Nazi-occupied countries and find a new home. In an interview with Herbert Levy, Peter Rickenback speaks about leaving Nazi Germany and spending several years travelling Europe and beyond, bouncing from job to job to evade immigration authorities returning him to Nazi Germany as an illegal immigrant.

Until 1941, official Nazi policy was to encourage Jewish people to emigrate, but they made it incredibly difficult and dangerous to do so. Throughout the 1930s, the Nazis enacted over 400 antisemitic laws that systematically impoverished and restricted the lives of Jewish people. The ‘Decree on the Registration of Jewish Property’ forced them to surrender their property to the state, and the ‘Reich Flight Tax’ taxed them heavily for attempting to emigrate. Numerous laws also prevented Jewish people from earning a living: in 1933 they were excluded from government roles, in 1936 Jewish teachers were banned from schools, and in 1938 the ‘Decree on the Exclusion of Jews from German Economic Life’ closed all Jewish-owned businesses. On top of this, other countries’ immigration policies were unforgiving. For a visa, some required immigrants to secure a sponsor, pay hefty fees, and queue up on a daily basis to retrieve multiple documents, all under threat of public harassment and abuse.

In the mid-1930s, Peter Rickenback’s family struggled financially under the conditions in Nazi Germany, and were not able to emigrate together. He was able to leave on his own after being offered a hotel catering job in Sweden on a training permit. After his permit expired, Peter and his family exhausted all of their resources keeping him out of Germany for several years. His father helped him to get a work permit for France where he had a series of hotel jobs. Whilst there, he met two English men who offered him a job and permanent residence in Britain. In this clip, he talks about his attempt to get to Britain and take up this opportunity.

Listen to Peter Rickenback discuss being a fugitive in Europe

Download Peter Rickenback transcript

Above: Peter Rickenback. Photo copyright © USC Shoah Foundation.

As he describes, the laws changed before he arrived in Folkestone, making his paperwork insufficient and requiring him to return and apply for a visa. This sent him back to Boulogne, where he was warned he would be in danger, and from there he fled to Paris and then to the Netherlands with a forged work permit. After police caught up with him, Peter got a job on a boat to West Africa, which eventually returned to Hamburg. Once there, it was too dangerous for Peter to get off the boat, but the Gestapo gave permission for Peter’s family to board for an hour, where he was able to meet with his parents one last time. He was forcibly returned to the Netherlands, and during his time there, his father helped him to get an affidavit for entry into the United States. Peter appealed to the Jewish Aid Committee to get a transit visa to Britain, and received some help from his employer to pay for it. He arrived in Britain two weeks before the start of the war, and settled there. His sister was able to get to Britain on a domestic work permit, but his parents stayed in Germany and did not survive.

Peter’s story is one of many that reveal just how difficult it was for Jewish people to escape the Nazi regime for good. This collection item is featured in the new Voices of the Holocaust online resource, which includes 87 clips from oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees, contextual articles, and biographies of the interviewees.

This week's post comes from Georgia Dack, Web Content Developer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage.

On 11 March 1946 Hanns Alexander arrested Rudolf Höss, a German SS officer who was the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz. Hanns, who was born in Berlin in 1917, fled Nazi persecution in the late 1930s because he was Jewish. He fled to England with his parents and siblings, and joined the British Army as soon as he could.

Image copyright: Courtesy of Alexander Family Archive.

In May 1945 Hanns was an interpreter at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he helped British army officials interrogate Nazis and their collaborators on their involvement in the Holocaust. Hanns then decided to become a Nazi hunter, using his skills to track down and arrest Nazis who had so far evaded capture.

Listen to Hanns Alexander

Download Hanns Alexander transcript

Audio copyright: British Library. Recorded and donated by Herbert Levy.

In this clip from an interview with Herbert Levy in 1996 (British Library reference: C958/03), Hanns describes how he and his colleagues searched for Rudolf for several months. They eventually found him by tracking letters that he and his wife were sending one another. Hanns recalls how Rudolf initially denied being the commandant of Auschwitz and instead claimed he was a gardener called Franz Lang. However, Rudolf’s wedding ring gave him away, because it had his and his wife’s initials, along with their wedding date.

Hanns tells Herbert that capturing Rudolf was one of his greatest victories. Learn more about Hanns and his life through the Voices of the Holocaust leaning resource.

This week’s post comes from Charlotte James, Web Content Developer for Unlocking Our Sound Heritage.

This week’s post comes from Tom Miles, Metadata Coordinator for Europeana Sounds.

August Wilhelmj (1845-1908) was a violinist and teacher. He was born in Usingen, Germany. Referred to by Liszt as ‘the future Paganini’, he gained a reputation as a child prodigy and was at the height of his career in the second half of the 19th century. He was a friend of Wagner and led the violins at the première of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth, 1876. Later, in 1894, he became Professor of Violin at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He died in London in 1908.

Image credit: Wien Museum, via Europeana / CC0.

This week’s recording is of Wilhelmj performing Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 6 (arranged for violin and piano) (British Library reference: C1210/1-4). The recording is from a series of brown wax cylinders privately made in the 1890s or early 1900s. The first cylinder is missing, but the remaining four contain most of the first movement of the work, beginning part-way through. The concerto is in D major, but there are some substantial pitch fluctuations in playback:

Listen to Paganini's Concerto No. 1 Op. 6 mov. 1 part 1

Listen to Paganini's Concerto No. 1 Op. 6 mov. 1 part 2

Listen to Paganini's Concerto No. 1 Op. 6 mov. 1 part 3

Listen to Paganini's Concerto No. 1 Op. 6 mov. 1 part 4

Although there is no mention of Wilhelmj on the cylinders themselves, all the evidence points to the violinist being him. The cylinders were in the possession of Charles Volkert, director of the London branch of Schott, which was Wilhelmj’s publisher, and Wilhelmj would have been working in London at the time. Volkert died in 1934. During an office clear-out in the 1960s, the cylinders – labelled ‘thought to be by Wilhelmj’ – were rescued and later donated to the British Library.

Europeana has more material about August Wilhelmj from other cultural heritage institutions, including this letter from Wilhelmj in 1889, stating that the addressee's wish is his command and Miss Wiborg will sing in his concert:

Image credit: Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig, via Europeana / CC BY-NC-SA.

Wilhelmj played a 1725 Stradivarius violin throughout his working life. This violin, the ‘Wilhelmj’, is now owned by the Nippon Music Foundation, on loan to the violinist Baiba Skride. You can see it and read more about it here: https://www.nmf.or.jp/english/instruments/post_287.html.