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    Patti Smith Sings for the Morgan Library & Museum’s 100th Anniversary

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    The Morgan Library & Museum drew devotees out for a party celebrating its centennial, including Peter Marino, Vito Schnabel and Walton Ford.Over a century ago, J.P. Morgan built a majestic library for his opulent mansion in Midtown Manhattan. After his death, his son, the financier Jack Morgan, opened it to the public in 1924, and it eventually became the Morgan Library & Museum. Last night, crowds of art patrons and well-heeled bibliophiles gathered in that grand library to attend the Morgan’s centennial celebration.Beneath stained glass windows and murals of Dante and Socrates, guests wearing tuxedos sipped martinis while a violinist performed classical covers of pop songs by Keane and Taylor Swift. Servers wended through the crowd, carrying hors d’oeuvres trays of crescent duck and caviar as they passed shelves lined with rare editions of works by Rousseau and Voltaire.Devotees of the Morgan like the architect Peter Marino, the art dealer Vito Schnabel and the artist Walton Ford were in attendance. Patti Smith and her daughter, Jesse Paris Smith, who would soon perform a song together at the evening’s dinner, pulled away from the cocktail hour to stroll through the exhibit “Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature,” which displays the manuscripts and picture letters of the creator of Peter Rabbit and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.“Through her ephemera, you can feel Potter looking at her paint brushes,” Patti Smith said. “The Morgan’s collection honors the hand that writes the book. You get a sense of what an artist or writer was thinking as they were creating. You can see the energy lifting off Beethoven’s ink-splotched pages.”The Morgan Library & Museum’s director, Colin B. Bailey, slices into a cake made to look like a stack of books. The soprano Latonia Moore.The media and automotive heiress Katharine Rayner.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Roberta Pereira to Lead New York Performing Arts Library

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      Roberta Pereira, the director of the Playwrights Realm, will lead the library, which is home to more than eight million items relating to music, theater and dance.Roberta Pereira has had a career-long goal to make the performing arts accessible for all.So when she saw a posting for an executive director position at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, one of the country’s leading repositories relating to music, theater and dance, she had an immediate thought: dream job.“I believe the arts are stronger when more people can participate,” said Pereira, 43, who will become the first Latino person to lead the institution, which is home to more than eight million items. “And the library’s mission is free access and knowledge for all.”Pereira, currently the executive director of the Playwrights Realm, an Off Broadway theater company devoted to early-career playwrights, will start the position in January. She succeeds Jennifer Schantz, who left the library in 2022 after two years. (Linda Murray, the curator of the Performing Arts Library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division and the associate director of its collections and research services, filled in as interim director.)Brent Reidy, the New York Public Library’s director for the research libraries who led the search for Schantz’s replacement, said that the library had received dozens of applications, but that Pereira stood “head and shoulders” above the other candidates.She had a track record, he said, of innovation. During her eight years at the Playwrights Realm, the organization became a leader in the field of offering caretaker support to audiences and theater workers, which included matinees with free child care and stipends for employees with caretaking responsibilities of both children and adult dependents. She has produced nine Off Broadway premieres, including Sarah DeLappe’s play “The Wolves,” which was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for drama.In 2017, Pereira co-founded the Artists’ Anti-Racist Coalition, a grass-roots group working to make the theater industry more diverse.“It’s clear that she has dedicated her career in the performing arts to engaging the public, increasing access and focusing on how to make more people part of the theater community,” Reidy said.The performing arts library, located in Lincoln Center, is one of the New York Public Library’s four research divisions, with a collection that includes not only books, but also manuscripts, photographs, scores, sheet music, stage designs, costume designs, video and film.Among its collections are its expansive archive of recorded sound, which includes symphonic recordings, radio plays, political speeches, and its Theater on Film and Tape Archive, which includes more than 8,000 recordings of Broadway, Off Broadway and regional theater productions, such as a filmed performance by the original Broadway cast of “The Phantom of the Opera.” (The archive, which has led to similar efforts at other institutions, received a special Tony Award in 2001.)Pereira, who was born in Brazil, was a classmate of Lin-Manuel Miranda at Wesleyan University, a liberal arts college in Connecticut, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in theater. She later earned a master’s degree in theater management from the Yale School of Drama. She previously worked as a commercial theater producer, including on the Broadway premiere of “Grace,” which starred Paul Rudd, Michael Shannon and Ed Asner, in 2012, and the Olivier Award-winning revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” in the West End in 2013.She said she had made frequent use of the library’s holdings over the years. And now, she said, her goal is to tell others about the “undiscovered jewel” on the Upper West Side.“I want to show people that this incredible archive is open to all, not just researchers,” she said. More

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      in Music

      How a Jay-Z Exhibit Took Over the Brooklyn Public Library

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      “The Book of Hov,” an elaborate summer exhibition at the borough’s main branch, was quietly conceived by his team as a surprise tribute that opens Friday.Earlier this week, when passages of Jay-Z lyrics from songs like “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” and “Justify My Thug” appeared on the Art Deco-style, curved limestone facade of the Brooklyn Public Library’s main branch, fans and passers-by could only speculate on the occasion for the building’s sudden makeover. A surprise concert for the rapper’s home borough? A tribute to the 50th anniversary of hip-hop this summer?The answer, it turned out, was neither — and also a secret even from the man himself.On Thursday evening, when Jay-Z entered the library for a private event surrounded by an inner circle of family, friends and business associates, he was greeted by his live band playing instrumental versions of his hits out front, and a career-spanning archival exhibition that he never asked for inside.Jay-Z learned about the exhibition at a private event held at the library on Thursday night.Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times“I know he wouldn’t let us do this,” said Desiree Perez, the chief executive of Jay-Z’s entertainment empire Roc Nation, about keeping such elaborate plans from the boss. “This could never happen if he was involved.”Featuring artwork, music, memorabilia, ephemera and large-scale recreations of touchstones from a sprawling career, “The Book of Hov,” which will run through the summer, might seem more at home at the Brooklyn Museum down the block. But by installing the showcase across eight zones of a functioning library, its architects are aiming to bring aspirational celebrity extravagance to a free public haven just a few miles from the Marcy Houses where Jay-Z grew up.“Jay belongs to the people,” Perez said. “It’s a place that feels comfortable. It’s not intimidating. A lot of people go to the museum, but a lot of people don’t.”Nicola Yeoman and Dan Tobin Smith’s mash-up of instruments that was photographed for the “Blueprint 3” cover.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesA Gucci jacket tied to the release of Jay-Z’s 2010 memoir, “Decoded.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesA mural by Jazz Grant made of hand-cut and scanned imagery from Jay-Z’s archives.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesOnly the debut on Thursday was meant to be exclusive. Following a private tour through his own memories, Jay-Z made himself scarce when the tightly controlled doors opened, content to leave the V.I.P. guests among representations of his many likenesses, from Mafioso M.C. to boardroom mogul to social justice string-puller.Even his elusive wife, Beyoncé, mingled more, at least momentarily, as crowds gathered outside to catch glimpses of the Jay-Z extended universe — athletes like Jayson Tatum and Robinson Cano; the musicians Lil Uzi Vert, DJ Khaled and Questlove; the director Josh Safdie and the businessman Michael Rubin.By Friday, when the exhibit opens to the masses, the hors d’oeuvres and passed drinks — Jay-Z’s brands, naturally — would be gone. But remaining among the stacks are statues, sneakers, paintings, platinum plaques, trophies and news clippings tied to Jay-Z’s 13 albums and the companies he founded, including Rocawear and Tidal.The library had initially pitched Jay-Z as an honoree for its annual fund-raising gala. But when its chief executive, Linda E. Johnson — the wife of another Jay-Z ally, the developer Bruce Ratner — floated the idea to Perez of Roc Nation, the pair pivoted.One area of the library features playable turntables and vinyl representing the samples used across Jay-Z’s catalog.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“I just asked her, ‘How big is the library?’” Perez recalled. “And when she said 350,000 square feet, I couldn’t believe it.”Throughout the pandemic, Perez and Roc Nation had been plotting to display artifacts that conveyed Jay-Z’s influence across music, business and broader culture, including the pallets’ worth of master recordings he had regained ownership of over the years.“That archive belongs in Brooklyn,” said Johnson, who oversaw the merger of the Brooklyn Public Library and Brooklyn Historical Society.Together, the teams began planning “The Book of Hov” in January, tapping the production designers Bruce and Shelley Rodgers, Emmy-winning veterans of the Super Bowl halftime show, as well as the creative agency General Idea to conceive and execute the elaborate project.It wasn’t just displaying memorabilia. Beyond the library’s main atrium, beneath an enormous Jay-Z collage, now sits a full-scale replica of the main room from Baseline Recording Studios, where Jay-Z created some of his best-known songs. Every detail had to be correct, down to the TV size and the tub of Dum Dums on the counter.A full-scale recreation of the main room from Baseline Recording Studios, where Jay-Z created some of his most famous songs.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesA reel-to-reel machine in the replica of Baseline Studios.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesA Betacam master tape of the song “99 Problems.”Amir Hamja/The New York Times“They had the wrong couch, the wrong soundboard,” said Juan Perez, a Roc Nation executive and longtime friend of Jay-Z’s, who designed the original studio and gave plenty of notes for the recreation.Another area of the library features playable turntables and vinyl representing the samples used across Jay-Z’s catalog, surrounded by the encased tape reels, floppy disks and CDs containing his original music.Bruce Rodgers, the production designer now working on his 18th Super Bowl halftime show, called the project “probably the most intense installation I’ve ever been involved in,” adding: “We didn’t want to interrupt the normal workings of the library, but we wanted to make a statement.” That included flying in “ninjas” from the West Coast who could rappel up and down the building to install the lyrical facade in time.An area of the exhibition designed for children to make paper planes.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe paper plane is a Roc Nation logo attached to an inspirational motto.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesPart of the exhibition is dedicated to Jay-Z’s philanthropy and social justice work, as well as his various businesses.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“People thought I was a little out of my mind,” Johnson, the library executive, said. “I don’t think I’d be going out on a limb to say that this is the biggest exhibition we’ve ever done.”While the valuables will require additional security, Brooklyn Public Library was not paying for any of the production for the show, she added. “Roc Nation is doing a lot for us financially,” Johnson said, including a substantial donation tied to the gala in October, when Jay-Z and his mother, Gloria Carter, will be honored.In the meantime, Jay-Z will also be helping, perhaps unwittingly, with sign-ups. In addition to the draw of the exhibition itself, the library is producing 13 limited-edition library card variations featuring its homegrown star — one for each album.“I’m concerned about crowds,” Johnson said, conveying equal parts trepidation and excitement. “We’ll run out, I suspect.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Umberto Eco’ Review: Remembering a Literary Explorer

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      A new documentary delves into the infectious curiosity and passions of the Italian scholar and author of “The Name of the Rose.”“To be intellectually curious is to be alive,” Umberto Eco once said. The Italian thinker, who died in 2016, was a professor, a novelist — who wrote, most notably and at one time inescapably, “The Name of the Rose” — a semiotician, a columnist and a connoisseur of arcana. He also conveyed a twinkling sense of fun around reading and thinking about the world and literature, a notion that erudition could be not just edifying but entertaining.“Umberto Eco: A Library of the World” celebrates the man and his many bookshelves, but it’s his symbolic appeal that comes across above all. Davide Ferrario’s documentary front-loads the physicality of books, with drooling pans of libraries from Turin, Italy, to Tianjin, China, before easing into Eco’s eclectic interests, with clips of him dispensing aperçus and quips about memory and the noise of modernity.Eco’s passion for the literary canon is clear, but we hear more about his wanderings through his favorite oddities, such as Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scholar who wrote sprawling and sometimes wrongheaded treatises. Well-intentioned dramatic readings from Eco’s writings are punctuated with fond anecdotes from his children and a grandson that burnish the image of Eco as the extravagant scholar. His love of arcana supplies an outward eccentricity that seems to interest the film more than his semiotic work or political commentary (in which he was a critic of Silvio Berlusconi since the 1990s).Eco’s 1980 debut novel, “The Name of the Rose,” a murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery, became a surprise runaway success. Eco neatly describes the appeal of such detective-style investigation as being essentially spiritual, asking, who is behind all this?; he’d continue with more esoteric adventures like “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1988). Throughout his work, the frisson of fiction and its assorted deceptions attracted Eco, from speculative travelogues to the phenomenon of lying.Viewers (and readers) of a certain age may come away wondering whether Eco’s profile has faded somewhat. Ferrario’s documentary presents a figure who feels more firmly European than international, not to mention old-fashioned. (He was definitely a guy who liked to explain his scorn for his cellphone.) But exploring fictional worlds with Eco for a guide remains a diverting and often enlightening pursuit.Umberto Eco: A Library of the WorldNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Music

      Super Mario Bros. and Daddy Yankee Added to Recording Registry

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      The Library of Congress has designated 25 recordings, including Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” as “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time.”Super Mario Bros. are currently ruling the box office. Now, they have also been designated an unlikely national treasure by no less than the Library of Congress.The composer Koji Kondo’s 1985 theme for the video game is among the 25 recordings just added to the National Recording Registry, joining Madonna’s 1984 album “Like a Virgin,” Daddy Yankee’s 2004 hit “Gasolina” and some of the earliest known mariachi recordings as “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time.”The registry, created in 2000, designates recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” and are at least 10 years old. This year’s entries were selected from more than 1,100 nominees submitted by the public. They bring the total number of titles on the registry to 625 — a tiny but elite slice of the nearly 4 million songs, speeches, radio broadcasts, podcasts and other recorded sounds in the library’s collection.This is the first time a video game soundtrack has been selected, according to the library. In the decades since the game’s release, Kondo’s “jaunty, Latin-influenced melody” (as the library describes it, calling it “the perfect accompaniment to Mario and Luigi’s side scrolling hijinks”) may have been driven permanently, or perhaps annoyingly, into the collective brain.But its creator remains relatively unknown. Kondo, who was born and raised in Japan, wrote the ditty — officially known as “Ground Theme” — in the 1980s, after seeing a recruiting flyer from Nintendo on a university bulletin board in Osaka.In a statement, Kondo, 61, who still works for Nintendo, said he was delighted by the designation. “Having this music preserved alongside so many other classic songs is such a great honor,” he said. “It’s actually a little difficult to believe.”And its significance, according to the library, goes far beyond the song itself, which was inspired in part by the music of the Japanese jazz fusion band T-Square. According to the library, Kondo’s soundtrack “helped establish the game’s legendary status and proved that the five-channel Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) sound chip was capable of a vast musical complexity and creativity.”This year’s list is heavy on familiar pop hits, including Madonna’s 1984 album, “Like a Virgin.”Library of CongressThis year’s list is heavy on familiar pop hits, including Led Zeppelin’s single “Stairway to Heaven,” Queen Latifah’s album “All Hail the Queen,” Mariah Carey’s single “All I Want for Christmas is You,” Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville,” and John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”Many are deemed significant not just for their musical contribution, but for the broader cultural shifts they exemplify. With “Gasolina,” the first reggaeton recording on the registry, the library notes that its “aural dominance” ushered in “a full reggaeton explosion and even saw various radio stations switching their formats,” including some from English to Spanish.The earliest item added to the registry is “The Very First Mariachi Recordings,” a compilation of recordings (including “The Parakeet”) made in 1907-9 by a group from the rural state of Jalisco, Mexico. The four musicians, led by the vihuela player Justo Villa, are credited with having introduced the style of music to the capital city — and eventually the world — a few years earlier.The most recent is the Northwest Chamber Orchestra’s recording, released in 2012, of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s “Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra,” which was inspired by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.The registry also includes some spoken-word recordings. The journalist Dorothy Thompson’s radio commentaries on “the European situation,” made between Aug. 23 and Sept. 6, 1939, are cited as a “unique broadcast record” of the period right before the outbreak of World War II.The library’s list also recognizes Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot,” a short 1994 recording of him explaining the ideas behind his book of the same title. It was inspired by a famous photograph of the Earth taken by the space probe Voyager 1 during its final mission, which Sagan describes as revealing how the Earth was “a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos.” More

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      in Music

      Joni Mitchell to Be Honored With Gershwin Prize and Tribute Concert

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      The award from the Library of Congress comes amid a wave of recognition for the singer-songwriter, who performed in public last year for the first time since a 2015 health scare.Joni Mitchell, the revered singer-songwriter who has recently begun tiptoeing back into the public eye, has been named this year’s recipient of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, an award delivered by the Library of Congress, the institution announced Thursday.Mitchell, 79, has received a wave of accolades over the past few years, including recognition at the Kennedy Center Honors; a tribute from MusiCares, a Grammy-affiliated charity; and an honorary doctorate from the Berklee College of Music. The commendations have made once-rare public appearances by Mitchell not so rare. In July, she performed in public for the first time since she suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015, stunning attendees at the Newport Folk Festival — and viewers of the viral videos filmed there.As part of the Gershwin Prize, Mitchell will be honored with a tribute concert on March 1 in Washington, D.C., that will air on PBS on March 31. Typically, honorees perform at least one song at the event.Mitchell, who was one of the defining singer-songwriters of the 1960s and ’70s, was already expected to return to performing later this year. The musician Brandi Carlile, whom Mitchell has referred to as her “ambassador,” announced last year that Mitchell would headline a concert at the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington State in June, a day after Carlile anchors her own show there.Recognition for Mitchell’s creative achievements has surged in recent years, as her 1971 album “Blue” was widely celebrated for its 50th anniversary and the musician started an ongoing project called the Joni Mitchell Archives, which unearths rich collections of previously unheard music.Performing alongside Carlile at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, Mitchell sang some of her most beloved songs, including “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Both Sides Now” and “A Case of You.” Writing in The New York Times, the critic Lindsay Zoladz called Mitchell’s resurgence “heartening,” noting that “it allows a beloved if somewhat underappreciated artist to receive her laurels while she’s still living.”“Younger artists got the chance to pay earnest homage to their elder; a mature woman who was not yet finished reinterpreting her life’s work reclaimed the stage,” Zoladz wrote.The Gershwin Prize was established in 2007 to honor living musical artists whose contributions to popular music “exemplify the standard of excellence associated with George and Ira Gershwin.” The recipient is chosen by the librarian of Congress — currently Carla Hayden — who receives advice from scholars, producers, songwriters and other music specialists. Previous recipients include Tony Bennett, Emilio and Gloria Estefan, Carole King, Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder. More

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      in Music

      Wax Cylinders Hold Audio From a Century Ago. The Library Is Listening.

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      The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts acquired a machine that transfers recordings from the fragile format. Then a batch of cylinders from a Met Opera librarian arrived.The first recording, swathed in sheets of distortion, was nonetheless recognizable as a child’s voice — small, nervous, encouraged by his father — wishing a very Merry Christmas to whoever was listening.The second recording, though still noisy, adequately captured the finale of the second act of “Aida,” performed by the German singer Johanna Gadski at the Metropolitan Opera House in the spring of 1903.And the third recording was the clearest yet: the waltz from “Romeo and Juliet,” also from the Met, sung by the Australian soprano Nellie Melba.Accessed by laptop in a conference room at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the recordings had been excavated and digitized from a much older source: wax cylinders, an audio format popularized in the late 19th century as the first commercial means of recording sound. These particular documentations originated with Lionel Mapleson, an English-born librarian for the Metropolitan Opera, who made hundreds of wax cylinder recordings, capturing both the turn-of-the-century opera performances he saw as part of his job and the minutiae of family life.For decades, the Mapleson Cylinders, as they’re called by archivists and audiologists, have been a valuable but fragile resource. Wax cylinders were not made for long-term use — the earliest models wore out after a few dozen plays — and are especially vulnerable to poor storage conditions. But with the innovation of the Endpoint Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine, a custom-built piece of equipment made specifically for safely transferring audio from the cylinders, the library is embarking on an ambitious preservation project: to digitize not just the Mapleson Cylinders, but roughly 2,500 others in the library’s possession.Mapleson’s diaries studiously chronicled both his daily life and the Metropolitan Opera’s calendar.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe machine will also allow the library to play a handful of broken Mapleson cylinders that nobody alive has ever heard. “I have no idea what they’re going to sound like, but the fact that they were shattered a long time ago saved them from being played too often,” said Jessica Wood, the library’s assistant curator for music and recorded sound. “It’s possible that the sound quality of those will let us hear something totally new from the earliest moments in recording history.”Some of the Mapleson Cylinders had already been in the library’s collection, but another batch was recently provided by Alfred Mapleson, the Met librarian’s great-grandson. This donation was accompanied by another valuable resource: a collection of diaries, written by Lionel Mapleson, that studiously chronicled both his daily life and the Metropolitan Opera’s calendar. The diaries provide extra context to both Mapleson’s audio recordings and the broader world of New York opera. One entry from New Year’s Day in 1908 noted the “tremendous reception” for a performance by Gustav Mahler. Another described the time that the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, “in rage,” dismissed his orchestra because of noise on the roof.“The consistent keeping of this diary is much more important than just for music,” said Bob Kosovsky, a librarian in the New York Public Library’s music division. “It’s such an amazing insight into life in New York and England, since he went back every summer to the family.”The library acquired the Endpoint machine from its creator, Nicholas Bergh, last spring, as NPR reported then. “The Western music at that time was being recorded in the studios, so it’s very unique to have someone that was documenting what was actually going on there at the theater,” said Bergh, who developed the machine as part of his work in audio preservation.Wax cylinders were traditionally played on a phonograph.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAlfred Mapleson soon reached out to the library about the diaries, and the collection of his great-grandfather’s cylinders that had, for years, awaited rediscovery in his mother’s Long Island basement. In November, they were packed into coolers and transported by climate-controlled truck to the library, where they’re now stored in acid-free cardboard boxes meant to mitigate the risk of future degradation. (On Long Island, they’d been kept in Tuborg Gold beer caddies.)These particular cylinders were previously available to the library in the 1980s, when they were transferred to magnetic tape and released as part of a six-volume LP set compiling the Mapleson recordings. After that, they were returned to the Mapleson family, while the greater collection stayed with the library. But, Wood said, “there’s people all over the world that are convinced that a new transfer of those cylinders would reveal more audio details than the previous ones.”Wax cylinders were traditionally played on a phonograph, where, similar to a modern record player, a stylus followed grooves in the wax and translated the information into sound. The Endpoint machine uses a laser that places less stress on the cylinders, allowing it to take a detailed imprint without sacrificing physical integrity, and to adjust for how some cylinders have warped over time. The machine can retrieve information from broken cylinder shards that are incapable of being traditionally played, which can then be digitally reconstituted into a complete recording.Within the next few years, the library hopes to digitize both the cylinders and the diaries, and make them available to the public. The non-Mapleson cylinders in the library’s collection are also eligible to be digitized, though Wood said that process will be determined based on requests for certain cylinders. The library’s engineers are shared across departments, and with a backlog of thousands, she said, “We have to wait our turn.”The wax cylinders comprise just one aspect of the library’s ongoing audiovisual archival projects. Its archives of magnetic tape were recently digitized thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. And curators are in talks with Bergh about a new machine he’s developing that can play back wire recording, a midcentury format that captured audio on a thin steel wire. Wood estimated that about 32,000 lacquer discs — a predecessor to the vinyl record — at “very high risk of deterioration” are also in the digitization queue. These discs contain all types of audio, including radio excerpts, early jazz music and recordings made at amusement parks.The Endpoint Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine can retrieve information from broken cylinder shards that are incapable of being traditionally played.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“Libraries, in general, are very focused on books and paper formats,” Wood said. “We’re getting to a point where we’ve had to argue less hard for the importance of sound recordings, and that’s allowing us to get some more traction to invest resources in digitizing these.”Alfred Mapleson said he was simply happy to put his family inheritance to good use. The cylinders were previously part of the Mapleson Music Library, a family-owned business that rented sheet music, among other things, to performers. But the business liquidated in the mid-1990s, and the cylinders had sat untouched in his mother’s basement ever since.“There’s an important obligation to history that needs to be maintained,” he said. “We don’t want them sitting in our possession, where they could get lost or damaged.” He waved off the possibility of selling them to a private collector, where they might find no public utility: “That’s not something that would sit well with my family.”His great-grandfather’s archives had offered him plenty to reflect on. His wife had gone through the diaries, he said, and pointed out the behavioral similarities between living family members and their ancestors. He noted, with some awe, how his grandfather’s voice — the one wishing a Merry Christmas — resembled his own children’s voices. But it was time to pass everything on, and he said he had no interest in repossessing the materials once the library had finished digitizing everything.“It’s in better hands at the New York Public Library,” he said. The recordings had originated at the Metropolitan Opera; now, they would reside nearby forever. “Let’s keep it in New York, because this is where it all happened. I like that idea.” More

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      in Music

      A Music Historian Takes a Top Job at the New York Public Library

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      Brent Reidy, the new director of Research Libraries, said he hoped to help democratize the 127-year-old library by reaching a younger generation.The New York Public Library on Thursday named Brent Reidy as director of its Research Libraries, putting the 40-year-old music historian at the helm of four vast public research centers whose holdings encompass 17th-century Shakespeare folios and sheet music belonging to Bob Dylan, Dizzy Gillespie and Mozart.Reidy, who has been serving as interim director since William P. Kelly retired in April, will preside over the collection, acquisition and preservation strategies at the Research Libraries, which have a budget of $145 million and welcome four million visitors a year. The position gives him an outsized voice on the direction of national humanities research.An amateur jazz pianist who unwinds by playing John Coltrane, Reidy said he hoped to help democratize the 127-year-old institution by appealing to a new generation of library goers. Among his priorities, he said, is the continued digitization of the Research Libraries’ holdings, which has become even more imperative during the coronavirus pandemic as users gravitated online. Attendance at the Research Libraries was 30 percent below the average attendance before the pandemic and had not yet returned to prepandemic levels, he added, a challenge facing cultural institutions across the country.“I want people to realize that you don’t need to be a tenured professor with a Ph.D. to have access to our collections — you just need a library card,” he said in an interview.Reidy has been an ardent supporter of federal funding for the arts. During the Trump administration, he criticized its attempt to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, citing former President John F. Kennedy’s assertion that artistic freedom was essential to nourish American culture.Reidy will be responsible for four public research centers — the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building; the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Yoseloff Business Center — which collectively have 47 million items in their collections. Among their treasures are Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence; an original Gutenberg Bible from 1455; an unpublished chapter from Malcolm X’s autobiography and an extensive James Baldwin archive.Among the treasures at the library’s research centers is Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence.Robert Kato/New York Public LibraryReidy studied music at Dartmouth College before earning a Ph.D. in Musicology from Indiana University, where he explored national cultural policy under the Kennedy administration, the subject of an upcoming book. Every week, he makes a pilgrimage to the library’s collection of manuscripts and scores belonging to John Cage, the eminent American composer of Minimalist music. “It helps me to de-stress,” he said.A native of Scotia, a village in Schenectady County, N.Y., Reidy said his passion for libraries and books was first ignited as a boy when he would go to the Schenectady County Public Library. With the encouragement of his father, he recalled that he bought about 1,200 LPs from the library, including classical and jazz albums, which he cataloged in the basement of his childhood home. More

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      in Music

      Lizzo Plays New Notes on James Madison’s Crystal Flute from 1813

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      A classically trained flutist, the singer, rapper and songwriter spent more than three hours admiring the flute collection at the Library of Congress. Madison’s instrument was made for the second inauguration by a Parisian craftsman.Lizzo looked uncharacteristically nervous as she crossed the stage in a glittering mesh leotard with tights and sequined combat boots.A classically trained flutist who began playing when she was in fifth grade and considered studying at the Paris Conservatory, she has woven flute into many of her songs, has played virtually with the New York Philharmonic, and her flute, named Sasha Flute, even has its own Instagram page.But waiting for her on Tuesday night was an exquisite (and highly breakable) musical instrument that had arrived at her concert in Washington under heavy security: a crystal flute that a French craftsman and clockmaker had made for President James Madison in 1813.“I’m scared,” Lizzo said, as she took the sparkling instrument from Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, a curator at the Library of Congress, who had carefully removed the flute from its customized protective case. “It’s crystal. It’s like playing out of a wine glass.”As the crowd roared, Lizzo played a note, stuck out her tongue in amazement, and then played another note, trilling it as she twerked in front of thousands of cheering fans. She then carried the flute over her head, giving the crowd at Capital One Arena one last look, before handing it back to Ms. Ward-Bamford.“I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s,” Lizzo proclaimed. “We just made history tonight.”It was a symbolic moment as Lizzo, a hugely popular Black singer, rapper and songwriter, played a priceless instrument that had once belonged to a founder whose Virginia plantation was built by enslaved Black workers. And the flute had been lent to her by Carla D. Hayden, the first African American and first woman to lead the Library of Congress.The moment came together after Dr. Hayden asked Lizzo on Friday to visit the library’s flute collection, the largest in the world, with about 1,700 of the instruments.Dr. Hayden wrote on Twitter: “@lizzo we would love for you to come see it and even play a couple when you are in DC next week. Like your song they are ‘Good as hell.’”Lizzo responded without much hesitation.“IM COMING CARLA! AND IM PLAYIN THAT CRYSTAL FLUTE!!!!!” she wrote.Lizzo arrived on Monday, with her mother and members of her band. Dr. Hayden and staff members ushered her into the “flute vault,” and gave her a tour of the collection, which includes fifes, piccolos and a flute shaped like a walking stick, which Lizzo said she might want as a Christmas present.Lizzo spent more than three hours at the library, trying out several instruments, staff members said.She played a piccolo from John Philip Sousa’s band that was used to play the solo at the premiere of his song, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” And she played a plexiglass flute, made in 1937, filling the ornate Main Reading Room and marble Great Hall with music, to the delight of library workers and a handful of researchers who happened to be there.“Just the enthusiasm that Lizzo brought to seeing the flute collection and how curious she was about it,” Ms. Ward-Bamford said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s been wonderful.”Most of the collection — including Madison’s crystal flute — was donated in 1941 by Dayton C. Miller, a physicist, astronomer and ardent collector of flutes.The flute’s silver joint is engraved with Madison’s name, title and the year 1813.Library of CongressMadison’s flute had been made for his second inauguration by Claude Laurent, a Parisian craftsman who believed that glass flutes would hold their pitch and tone better than flutes made of wood or ivory, which were common at the time.The flute’s silver joint is engraved with Madison’s name, title and the year 1813. “It’s not clear if Madison did much with the flute other than admire it, but it became a family heirloom and an artifact of the era,” the library said.The library believes that the first lady, Dolley Madison, might have rescued the flute from the White House in 1814, when the British entered Washington during the War of 1812, although it has not found documentation to confirm the theory.Only 185 of Mr. Laurent’s glass flutes remain, the library said, and his crystal flutes are especially rare. The Library of Congress has 17 Laurent flutes, it said.When Lizzo asked if she could play Madison’s crystal flute at her concert on Tuesday, the library’s collection, preservation and security teams swung into action, ensuring the instrument could be safely delivered to her onstage.“It was a lot thrilling and a little bit scary,” Ms. Ward-Bamford said.Or as Lizzo told her cheering fans after she played the instrument: “Thank you to the Library of Congress for preserving our history and making history freaking cool. History is freaking cool, you guys.” More