The following message has been posted by the Outreach Committee of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC).
---- THE FIRST ARSC PRESERVATION GRANTS AWARDS ---- The ARSC Preservation Grants Committee is pleased to announce the first recipients of the Grants for Preservation of Classical Music Historical Recordings. The program for these grants was founded in 2004 by Al Schlachtmeyer and the ARSC Board of Directors, to encourage and support the preservation of historically significant sound recordings of Western Art Music by individuals and organizations. -- The Boston Symphony Orchestra -- The Boston Symphony Orchestra was awarded $10,000 to preserve and make accessible the earliest recordings from its Festival of Contemporary Music. The annual series consists of six to eight concerts performed by pre-professional musicians who are Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, at Tanglewood, the orchestra's summer music festival site in western Massachusetts. This project will preserve 49 programs of the Festival of Contemporary Music, from 1965 through 1981. This group comprises the earliest and only known recordings of these concerts, which were not broadcast. -- H. W. Marston and Company -- H. W. Marston and Company was awarded $7,000 to preserve, document, and disseminate recordings in the Julius Block Collection, made on Edison phonograph cylinders between 1891 and 1910, and thought to have been destroyed during World War II. Block, a German businessman, lived in St. Petersburg and conceived of the phonograph as a device for music and the arts and as a chronicler of history. He attracted influential musicians, poets, and actors to his home to see the phonograph, and persuaded most of them to make recordings and enter comments in his log. Anton Arensky, Eddy Brown, Nicolai Figner, Jascha Heifetz, Josef Hofmann, Arthur Nikisch, Sergey Taneyev, Peter I. Tchaikovsky, and Count Leo Tolstoy were among the notables who recorded for Block. The recordings were found in a museum in St. Petersburg. For more information about the Grants for Preservation of Classical Music Historical Recordings, visit http://www.arsc-audio.org/preservationgrants.html . The deadline for receipt of applications for the next grant cycle is April 30, 2007.