Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries. Knowledge presented by Oral History (OH) is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of the interviewee in its primary form.
Aaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later a conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as "the Dean of American Composers". The open, slowly changing harmonies in much of his music are typical of what many people consider to be the sound of American music, evoking the vast American landscape and pioneer spirit. He is best known for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in a deliberately accessible style often referred to as "populist" and which the composer labeled his "vernacular" style. Works in this vein include the ballets Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, his Fanfare for the Common Man and Third Symphony. In addition to his ballets and orchestral works, he produced music in many other genres, including chamber music, vocal works, opera and film scores.
Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer, one of the first American composers of international renown. His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Later in life, the quality of his music was publicly recognized through the efforts of contemporaries like Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, and he came to be regarded as an "American original". He was also among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements, and quarter tones. His experimentation foreshadowed many musical innovations that were later more widely adopted during the 20th century. Hence, he is often regarded as the leading American composer of art music of the 20th century.
The Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840–60 is a piano sonata by Charles Ives. It is one of the composer's best-known and most highly regarded pieces. A typical performance of the piece lasts around 45 minutes.
Fanfare for the Common Man is a musical work by the American composer Aaron Copland. It was written in 1942 for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under conductor Eugene Goossens and was inspired in part by a speech made earlier that year by then American Vice President Henry A. Wallace, in which Wallace proclaimed the dawning of the "Century of the Common Man".
Aaron Copland's Clarinet Concerto was written between 1947 and 1949, although a first version was available in 1948. The concerto was later choreographed by Jerome Robbins for the ballet Pied Piper (1951).
Dean Rosenthal is an American composer of instrumental and electronic music, sound installations, and field recordings. His pieces have included field recordings, text scores, digital pastiche, and instrumental works focussed on natural observations of properties in mathematics such as perfect tilings, combinations, graph theory, and permutations. He has conducted and performed internationally since 1996. He is the composer of the ongoing international community experimental music work Stones/Water/Time/Breath that is celebrated annually by Fête de la Musique in multiple cities across North America and Europe. He also serves as co-editor of The Open Space Web Magazine and is a contributing editor to The Open Space Magazine. He has worked closely with Guggenheim Fellow David Parker's dance company The Bang Group on several works, including their collaboration Turing Tests. Most recently, he was commissioned by the Oral History of American Music at Yale to compose a new work on the life of Vivian Perlis. This piece, There Was Only One of Her , was placed in the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Samuel Simons Sanford was an American pianist and educator.
The University of North Texas Libraries is an American academic research library system that serves the constituent colleges and schools of University of North Texas in Denton. The phrase "University of North Texas Libraries" encompasses three aspects: The library collections as a whole and its organizational structure; The physical facilities and digital platform that house the collections; and certain self-contained collections of substantial size that warrant the name "Library"—the Music Library and the Digital Libraries (collections), for example, are housed in Willis Library.
The Queens Memory Project is a community archiving program which aims to record and preserve contemporary history across the New York City borough of Queens. Community archives are created in response to needs defined by the members of a community, who may also exert control over how materials are used. The project is a collaborative effort between Queens College, City University of New York and Queens Public Library that was initially funded in 2010 through a grant from the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO). Materials in the archive are made accessible to the public through a website which contains oral history interviews and photographs documenting the lives of Queens residents. The stories and images are presented alongside digitized historical photographs, maps, news clippings and other archival records. The goal of the project is to allow visitors to the site to view otherwise scattered archival materials and personal stories in a searchable database of collective memory representing the borough of Queens.
John Kirkpatrick was an American classical pianist and music scholar, best known for championing the works of Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Carl Ruggles, and Roy Harris. He gave the first complete public performance of Ives's Concord Sonata in 1939, which became a turning point in the composer's public recognition. Kirkpatrick played an important role in Ives scholarship, and he was leader in the Charles Ives Society. One important example is his role in the editing of Memos, which is a collection of Ives's autobiographical writings. At the time of his death Kirkpatrick was a professor emeritus at Yale University, where he had also been the curator of the Charles Ives archives.
Lawrence Allen "Larry" Ruttman is an American lawyer and author. He is best known for his two books of biographical cultural history, Voices of Brookline and American Jews and America's Game, and for his memoir, My Eighty-Two Year Love Affair with Fenway Park: From Teddy Ballgame to Mookie Betts.
Vivian Perlis was an American musicologist and the founder and former director of Yale University's Oral History of American Music.
Libby Van Cleve is an American oboist and Director of Yale University's Oral History of American Music.
Jack Vees is an American composer and bassist from Camden, New Jersey.
Olive Thompson Cowell (1887–1984) was a patron of the arts and music, and a professor of International Relations.
Mary Shipman Howard (1911–1976) was one of the earliest female recording engineers and recording studio owners. She was owner of Mary Howard Recordings studio and MHR label in New York City. She worked with Glenn Miller, Arturo Toscanini, and Charles Ives. After leaving the studio business, she remarried as Mary Howard Pickhardt and was a well-known breeder of pugs. She was also a respected judge of dog shows across the US.
'Unlocking Our Sound Heritage' (UOSH) is a UK-wide project that aims to preserve, digitise and provide public access to a large part of the nation's sound heritage. The UOSH project forms part of the core programme 'Save Our Sounds' led by the British Library and involving a consortium of ten regional and national archival institutions. Between 2017 and 2022 the aim is to digitise and make available up to 500,000 rare and unique sounds recordings, not only from the British Library's collection but from across the UK, dating from the birth of recorded sound in the 1880s to the present time. The recordings include sounds such as local dialects and accents, oral histories, previously inaccessible musical performances and plays, and rare wildlife sounds. The consortium will also deliver various public engagement programmes, and a website where up to 100,000 recordings will be freely available to everyone for research, enjoyment and inspiration.
The Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz is located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States, and is one of the special collections of the Tulane University library. The archive specializes in Dixieland Jazz, gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, Creole songs, and related musical genres. Its collection includes: Oral histories, audio and video recordings, photos and other images, sheet music, personal papers, and teaching aids.
Arthur C. Logan was a surgeon. The year after he died, the 1862-founded Knickerbocker Hospital was renamed in his memory; he had been a member of New York City's Health and Hospitals Corporation and was also described as a civic leader. In 1970, he was honored, with attendees including the Governor, a future governor, an ambassador, and many others.
