Newly found songs from the Holocaust still haunt

[still_one]

The history of music is rich with sounds spurred by suffering. During the Holocaust, songs of defiance and belief helped captive Jews confront and temporarily alleviate their misery. Now, a long-lost recording from 1946 is providing a poignant new soundtrack for understanding life in the Nazi concentration camps and Jewish ghettos.

Just after World War II, David Boder, a Latvian-born trauma psychologist at the Illinois Institute of Technology, traveled to Europe to record interviews with Holocaust survivors. Boder, who was Jewish, wanted to understand the mindset of people who’d lived through the ordeal. To begin interviews, he would often ask people to sing. “That was one of his methodologies,” says Bret Werb, musicologist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “just to loosen people up.” And so they would sing songs carried them through their time behind barbed wire. Boder’s interviews were preserved after his death in 1961, leaving the world with an unintended treasure trove of Holocaust music.

In 1967, a portion of Boder’s archives were gifted to the Cumming Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron, in Ohio. Among the materials was a box of about 48 wire spools—those recordings of interviews with Holocaust survivors. The problem was that no one could play them. The wire recorders that Boder had used were obsolete and none of the wire recorders in the Cummings Center collection were compatible with his spools.

After David Baker arrived at the Cummings Center as executive director in 1999, he began inquiring about finding a way to play them. “We ran into a lot of dead ends,” he says. Then, about three years ago, some audio specialists at the Center decided to take on the task. They bought a nonfunctional wire recorder on eBay and used the chassis, which holds the wire reels, as a foundation for a new machine they built. James Newhall, senior multimedia producer at the University of Akron, replaced the original AC motor with a DC motor and the vacuum tube amplifiers with an integrated circuit amplifier.

http://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/newly-found-songs-from-the-holocaust-still-haunt/?comments=disqus

[frazzled]

1. This is as fascinating for ...

the issues of media preservation in our rapidly changing technological world as it is for the recovery of these haunting songs from the past.

The issue of media preservation really is a critical one today for many fields: audio, film, video, early television across the arts and journalism; as well as record-keeping from every imaginable field. (Hey, how many of us have thrown out those floppy discs we had stored in boxes for future reference?) How much will be lost if we fail to preserve the mechanisms with which to unlock decades and decades of information from the past and a record of our culture?

Many scholars and technical experts are working hard at trying to assess the issues and the possibilities for preserving yesterday's, today's, and even tomorrow's technologies. This was not so much a problem for thousands of years: for the most part, paintings and books and annal books can be preserved or restored. Today, even materials on technologies from ten years ago can be difficult to recuperate. Today's digital culture is no less at risk—and many experts think, even more so. (PS: repeated serial transference to new technologies is apparently not the complete answer, or even perhaps the answer at all)