Blog topic: Music

Rare Music Materials at Stanford is a Spotlight instance that presents materials from the Stanford University Libraries' collections that have been digitized in response to research requests, or were produced for small projects. Items and their downloadable images may also be found in SearchWorks, Stanford's library catalog.

Part of audio preservation work includes working with media that has peculiar characteristics. Sometimes the atypical qualities are a byproduct of how the recording was made by the recordist. An example of this type of problem that we occasionally see at the Stanford Media Preservation Lab is when an open reel tape is recorded over and there is remaining content hidden in certain spots of the tape. This presents specific problems in capture since tape heads are built for use with specific physical configurations of tracks and thus capturing the hidden spots outside of the normal range of track configuration is near impossible. With this in mind SMPL recently worked on obtaining equipment to address this challenging scenario.

“There was war in heaven: and Satan was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. Rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them: woe to the inhabiters of the earth.” – Revelation 12:7-12

So opens The Fallen Angel, an oratorio by Sir Henry Rowley Bishop. The manuscript score, in Bishop’s hand, has recently been reunited with a full set of manuscript orchestral and choral parts, as item MLM 87 in Stanford’s Memorial Library of Music.