Yale's Oral History of American Music Receives GRAMMY Grant

The Oral History of American Music (OHAM) project at Yale has received a GRAMMY Foundation® Grant to support its ongoing efforts to preserve recorded interviews with legendary figures of American music.

The OHAM is a collection of audio- and video-tapes of interviews with such celebrated composers and titans of the music world as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Eubie Blake, John Cage and Frank Zappa. With more than 900 interviews recorded and transcribed, the project is a unique resource for scholars, musicians, documentary makers and producers in the entertainment and news media.

The core of the OHAM collections is the Major Figures in American Music series, which consists of more than 300 audio- and video-taped interviews with composers from John Adams to Ellen Taaffe Zwilich as well as testimonies from the family, friends and colleagues of George Gershwin, Harry Lawrence Freeman, Percy Grainger and Arnold Schoenberg. Composers Charles Ives, Paul Hindemith and Duke Ellington and the piano-maker dynasty Steinway & Sons are the subjects of four other collections initiated and held by OHAM. In addition to recordings of interviews conducted by OHAM, the project is a repository for oral histories of creative musicians acquired from diverse other sources.

Founded in the late 1960s by OHAM director Vivian Perlis, the project grew out of a series of interviews that Perlis conducted and taped for a book on Charles Ives. The same reel-to-reel technology Perlis used to record the interviews more than 35 years ago is ironically the best medium for archiving, despite the digital revolution in audio-taping. The $20,000 GRAMMY Foundation® Grant will largely be used for copying and preserving the recordings in analog reel-to-reel format.

The grant will go toward matching a federal government Save America’s Treasures Grant for $148,000 that OHAM received in 2004.

Yale’s OHAM was among 19 recipients of GRAMMY Foundation® Grants. In addition to collections like those of OHAM, Foundation grants went to preserve recordings of cultural events such as the first 10 years of the Monterey Jazz Festival, as well as collections at the Library of Congress, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Television and Radio and other colleges and universities.