Music Preserved – its history
Jon Tolansky outlines the history of Music Preserved from its origins as the Music Performance Research Centre, which he and others founded in 1987.
MUSIC PRESERVED – ITS HISTORY
The origins of Music Preserved go back to 1982 when a group of musicians, led by Jon Tolansky and Basil Tschaikov, recognised the need to create an archive that would preserve public performances of music that would otherwise be lost to posterity. Though some archives already housed ‘live’ performance recordings, mainly made off-air from broadcasts, Tolansky and Tschaikov conceived a new organisation solely devoted to the preservation of public performances, and they created the Music Performance Research Centre (MPRC). There were three aspirations: i) for the first time, the making of new archive-recordings of performances that were not being broadcast, to be recorded on location in concert halls, opera houses and other venues, with contractual consents agreements; ii) the saving, through donations, of historic archive-recordings of past performances that had been privately made mainly from radio broadcasts; iii) the preservation of future broadcast performances, to be taken down by the MPRC off-air. In all three cases new legal agreements were needed to enable these recorded performances to be heard by the public in premises that the MPRC would in due course open.
After five years of negotiations the MPRC was created in 1987. Performances recorded on location were made with the latest digital ‘state-of-the-art’ equipment and balanced by a team of highly accredited recording engineers culled from organisations such as the BBC and EMI. For the following 12 years performances by some of the most prestigious international artists and also by rising new young artists were preserved in this way. In 1989, public listening access to the recordings was opened at the MPRC Studio that was built within the Barbican Library at the Barbican Centre, underwritten by the Sony Corporation.
Meanwhile, after1990, historic performances from the past that had been privately recorded off-air on analogue formats from broadcasts began to be donated to the MPRC, which digitised them for preservation in its archive. The vast majority of these recordings were not housed elsewhere, not even in the archives of the broadcasting organisations that had originated the transmissions.
Later, video recording and video viewing facilities were added, and additionally an extensive library of interviews with performers built up.
When MPRC became Music Preserved, it began to attract many more substantial size donations of off-air performance recordings including the entire collections of celebrated figures such as the great conductor Sir Charles Mackerras and the distinguished author, impresario and administrator the Earl of Harewood. It now preserves over 18,000 performances of vital historic value, and it is expanding its archive of interviews into an extensive new Oral History project.
