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Over the past five plus years the BSO Archives has undertaken several projects to facilitate access to vital information and resources that document the history of the BSO and its facets – Festival , , and the Boston Pops .

We started off in 2012 with a project that gave birth to HENRY, the BSO’s online performance history search module (named after the BSO’s founder Henry Lee Higginson) that enabled visitors to search more than 17,000 performances given by the BSO from 1881 to the present. The project also enabled us to scan all existing BSO program books dating back to 1881 and to create a digital collection of pdfs of these program books that can be accessed via HENRY. This project was generously funded by the NEH and the Sloan Foundation.

We went back to NEH in 2015 and received another grant (now in its second extension) to add performance history details for all Boston Pops and Esplanade concert programs to HENRY and to scan all of the existing Pops program books. We’ve made great progress and I am happy to report that Boston Pops programs through about 1947 can be searched in HENRY. Again, Boston Pops programs were scanned and pdfs of these programs are linked to the performance history search results.

About the same time , we submitted a grant proposal to NHPRC in order to do something a little different --- to create a streaming collection of audio files and to make those audio files accessible via HENRY via a link --- in much the same way that we facilitate access to the pdfs of the program books.

The 75th anniversary of the Tanglewood Music Center in 2015 provided a perfect opportunity. The TMC was founded in 1940 by who convinced the BSO’s board of trustees that a summer school connected to the Tanglewood Festival would fulfill a vital musical need for America and bring the orchestra new importance and prestige. Students at Tanglewood for its inaugural season included and --- both who later joined the faculty.

There was a lot of attention thrown towards the TMC’s 75th anniversary – for example, a special exhibit and a series of historical audio downloads available for free throughout the summer of 2015, curated by the BSO’s artistic administrator Tony Fogg and the TMC office’s Ellen Highstein and Michael Nock.

All this focus on the TMC’s anniversary provided an opportunity for the Archives to bring attention to our vast collection of live concert recordings of TMC performances dating back to the mid-1960s and to highlight the pressing need to preserve the recordings through a reformatting project. It also turned out to provide a perfect opportunity to experiment with streaming audio via HENRY. A combination of grants and private donations funded the project. The project was funded by the NHPRC, the Sloan Foundation, The Grammy Foundation, and private individuals who supported other TMC 75 anniversary events. • • •

For this project we decided to include: Recordings of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra concerts in our collection dating back to the mid 1960s, with the bulk of the collection from the mid 1970s onward; recordings of the Festival of Contemporary Music, an annual festival within a festival that is sponsored by the Tanglewood Music Center -- because of the high research value. We had already reformatted a great number of FCM concert recordings as part of an earlier Grammy Foundation grant. This new project provided an opportunity to complete the preservation reformatting of our FCM collection and to work towards making all of the performances accessible.

In addition some spoken events like the annual opening exercises for the Tanglewood Music Center that include speeches by the likes of , Leonard Bernstein, , and and some recordings of composer forums held at Tanglewood for the students.

We decided that at this junction we wouldn’t include all of the TMC chamber concert performances or vocal recitals ---- just too many of them --- unless they were part of the FCM or vocal recitals. – –

The greatest challenge of the project was how to navigate copyright – specifically performers rights and the rights of composers and publishers.

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We did not present a finished solution to the copyright issue at the time we submitted our grant proposal. Instead, we identified all the potential rights holders and offered a few different scenarios. Part of the grant project was to dip our toes into the copyright waters and to see if we could come up with a solution. A project deliverable would be a report on the process we followed and the “rights policy” document that was tailor made for the content.

More about that later --- The first necessary ingredient for a project of this scope is a team ----

Project staff included myself, Sarah Funke Donovan ---- since the grant full-time member of the Archives staff in a newly created position – Associate Director of Digital Assets, and a project assistant Alison Fulmer.

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