At the risk of boring readers of this blog (if there are any), I’ve had the urge lately to delve back into an old passion of mine; violin history. This passion has consumed me on-an-off since I was in high school.
I started playing the violin when I was seven or so, and never gave up the blasted thing.
Anyhow, last couple of days, I’m listening to a lot of Mischa Elman.
What a unique style he had! Today, in our pop culture era, when every concert fiddler sounds pretty much the same, Elman’s style is considered anachronisitic and old-fashioned. I just call it style. That just doesn’t exist anymore today. Sorry kids, but it’s true.
For a taste of my collection, visit the web site www.greatviolinmusic.com. I started digitizing my 78 RPM record collection a while back and wanted to make everything from it, that is now in the public domain, available free of charge. It’s not the most comprehensive collection by any means, but is broad enough to give any student a good picture of the first era of violin recorded history in the first quarter of the 20th Century.
I decided my collection had to be reduced in size when I had to move it, yet again, to our current home. I did some strategic culling and reduced the collection by about one quarter, including many duplicates of inferior quality, and lots of junk people would leave at my doorstep. Though I still keep duplicates of some of the more valuable pieces because, as any 78 collector knows, there is the occasional and inevitable breakage.
I mostly got rid of the popular recordings of the ’40s, Sinatra, Benny Goodman stuff and the like. That stuff’s all been reissued, the 78s have no value, and that music has its own group of specially collectors. And, as I tell people, I’m not the Smithsonain of the Library of Congress!
Here is about 3/4 of the 78/LP classical recording collection (the rest still in boxes).
I made the mistake of committing many recordings to cassette tape years ago, and then getting rid of some of the originals, or never owning them but borrowing them from others, or libraries - many of which have by now discarded their record collections. Many of the cassettes I have are now deteriorated, and it’s even hard to find a good player these days - plus there is the hiss and the general inferiority of the medium. Not really suitable for tranfer to digital medium. Oh well.
You can also see in the photo, a small portion of my violin sheet music collection. That’s another whole project!
This online project, like so many others was put on the back burner for a while - the usual culprits are responsible; time and money. Hopefully 2008/2009 will see more of the collection up on the site. Somebody write me a check?!
These are the online elman recordings.
no comment until now