Do you think the beeb will make more of COTW archive available?......

[cmr_for3]

say from the 70s or 80s? even just highlights editions?

[pastoralguy]

I hope that, one day, ALL BBC material will be available online. The stuff the Beeb must have in their archives must be incredible!

However, I suspect it won't be in my lifetime...

[Bryn]

I hope that, one day, ALL BBC material will be available online. The stuff the Beeb must have in their archives must be incredible!

However, I suspect it won't be in my lifetime...

Unfortunately there is rather less than one might hope. Take the Boult performance of Brian's 'Gothic', for instance. Testament has to resort to a 'home recording' of one the two broadcasts for their CD release. The 19kHz stereo pilot tone peak is there as clear evidence of the source. Many other recordings have been hived off to the British Library Sound Archive, and far too many have simply been wiped or lost.

[pastoralguy]

Unfortunately there is rather less than one might hope. Take the Boult performance of Brian's 'Gothic', for instance. Testament has to resort to a 'home recording' of one the two broadcasts for their CD release. The 19kHz stereo pilot tone peak is there as clear evidence of the source. Many other recordings have been hived off to the British Library Sound Archive, and far too many have simply been wiped or lost.

That's a real shame and I suppose reflects a time when the sheer physical challenge of storing a colossal amount of tape must have resulted in 'choices' being made. Perhaps it's not too much to ask that other broadcasters around the world will have lots of treasures in their archives. (I'd love to hear a recording of David Oistrakh playing the Elgar violin concerto!)

[pastoralguy]

When Jeffrey Tait died a few weeks ago, Andrew McGregor said something about looking through the archives for an interview he'd done with him from the early noughties. I texted him and said that if the Beeb didn't have the interview then I certainly did and would be happy to supply it! It turned out the Beeb DID have it so my offer was redundant but I wonder how much stuff we, as listeners, have archived!

Only for personal use, of course.

[Bryn]

When Jeffrey Tait died a few weeks ago, Andrew McGregor said something about looking through the archives for an interview he'd done with him from the early noughties. I texted him and said that if the Beeb didn't have the interview then I certainly did and would be happy to supply it! It turned out the Beeb DID have it so my offer was redundant but I wonder how much stuff we, as listeners, have archived!

Only for personal use, of course.

Regrettably, in my case the quality of the equipment I had available to me in the era before digital recording was not up to the standard that might be hoped for. Damn it, I can't even play back the reel-to-reel recordings I made on my old Tandberg machines, though even if I could, the FM reception I got in those days was far too multiplex-hiss and 'birdy' ridden.

[pastoralguy]

Oddly enough, Mrs. PG and I popped into our local (extremely!) high end Hi-Fi shop recently to be told by the owner that he had some vintage BBC recordings on reel to reel that had been passed on to him by a friend. Alas, even with absolutely top quality equipment, they sounded pretty low-fi. Perhaps, if they were re-mastered etc, etc they could be made to sound half decent but it seems pointless unless the music making is of sufficient high quality/rarity value.

Most of the stuff I have, (for personal use only!), is on mini-disc so it's pretty good. This includes the Beethoven Experience which was the first time Radio3 presented a week of one composer. I have it complete, apart from approximately 10 minutes when I was off work sick. It resides in a shoe box with a copy of that week's Radio Times.

[Dave2002]

My father used to record a lot of material onto cassettes. His recorder was very good, so they should have been OK. I remember some years back going to an LPO concert and there was a plea in the programme for recordings - no questions asked - as obviously the orchestra hadn't been able to maintain a complete set of copies of broadcast recordings. I was going to scan through the tapes and offer any which were of the particular orchestra, but unfortunately they were disposed of before I had a chance to. C'est la vie - but it was a shame. I may still have some of my old cassettes of recordings going back 40 or so years, but the advantage of my dad's collection was that he had fanatically indexed them, and linked them to fragments of the Radio Times. My own would need to be sampled carefully, and checking who played what could be a real labour of love for somebody.

Needless to say, that's a project I thought I might have time for when I retired, but so far it hasn't happened, and I haven't been to work for years now.

[Thropplenoggin]

I hope so. I'd also be very interested in having access to old editions of Building A Library; R4 have managed it with Desert Island Discs, why can't R3 do it?

[pastoralguy]

I hope so. I'd also be very interested in having access to old editions of Building A Library; R4 have managed it with Desert Island Discs, why can't R3 do it?

I have shoe boxes full of them! (*)

* For personal use only...

[johnb]

I keep hoping that one of the old Discovering Music programmes will resurface: the two programmes by Gerard McBurney on The Rite of Spring. They were fascinating and a total revelation, at least to me. I deeply regret not having recorded them.

[Quarky]

say from the 70s or 80s? even just highlights editions?

You have made me break my resolution not to post here unless absolutely necessary!

COTW has been going in different guises since 1942 I gather, at which time tape recording was still a war-time secret of AEG.

Why should any organisation burden itself with a huge workload of maintaining a database of all broadcast items going back to the year dot? It is only in recent years that digital recording has made the task very simple.

However the BBC Genome project http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/ maintains a list of all programmes broadcast since 1929. There is also a list available - as long as your arm- of all composers the subject of COTW.

May I suggest if you might locate a COTW of particular interest, and you ask Donald Mcleod nicely, he might be able to help?

[Serial_Apologist]

I was donated cassettes including BBC broadcasts of Barbara Thompson's Paraphernalia dating from the 1970s. They were in reasonably good condition, so I handed them to Barbara, suggesting that Jon Hiseman might want to issue them on their label, Temple Music. Jon told me that he might eventually think of some way of releasing them, but that the Beeb always charged exorbitant duties from anyone releasing broadcasts they had done under the BBC's own copyright and management - that would have been in pre-subcontracting days - and that he was not prepared to pay said sums. Since when I've come across a few independent releases of BBC programmes on CD, and not heard anything about the BBC being paid. I'm wondering if in fact the BBC would insist on demanding such payments, had the recordings in question been amateur takes from broadcasts subsequently wiped by the Corporation.

[pastoralguy]

I was donated cassettes including BBC broadcasts of Barbara Thompson's Paraphernalia dating from the 1970s. They were in reasonably good condition, so I handed them to Barbara, suggesting that Jon Hiseman might want to issue them on their label, Temple Music. Jon told me that he might eventually think of some way of releasing them, but that the Beeb always charged exorbitant duties from anyone releasing broadcasts they had done under the BBC's own copyright and management - that would have been in pre-subcontracting days - and that he was not prepared to pay said sums. Since when I've come across a few independent releases of BBC programmes on CD, and not heard anything about the BBC being paid. I'm wondering if in fact the BBC would insist on demanding such payments, had the recordings in question been amateur takes from broadcasts subsequently wiped by the Corporation.

These big salaries need to be funded somehow...

[Serial_Apologist]

These big salaries need to be funded somehow...

That seems likely! What I was wondering was, does the Beeb retain copyright over broadcasts it has wiped from is own archives? If not, I would have thought they would have difficulty stopping anybody who wanted to releasing them, since it would be difficult to establish who broke the original copyright.