Collections : [Yale University -Irving S. Gilmore Music Library]

The Aaron Copland Oral History comprises approximately 75 interviews with colleagues, friends, and family of Aaron Copland (note: for interviews with Copland himself, see the Major Figures in American Music collection). Oral History of American Music (OHAM) founder Vivian Perlis first became friends with Copland while working on the Charles Ives Oral History. Copland later wrote the preface for her book, Charles Ives Remembered. As the Ives project finished, Perlis focused on Copland as her new subject. From 1975 to 1976, she conducted many hours of interviews with Copland and those closest to him. Finally, in 1984 and 1989, their efforts culminated in the autobiographies, Copland: 1900 through 1942 and Copland: Since 1943, co-authored by Perlis.

An series of Zoom interviews with composers and musicians, focusing on their personal and creative lives while isolating during the COVID-19 outbreak.

The earliest commercial sound recordings used Thomas Edison's phonograph technology - wax cylinders. In the late 19th Century, Emil Berliner (1851-1929) developed the gramophone, which employed flat discs instead of cylinders. Cylinders and discs co-existed for a few years, but eventually Berliner's discs won out and became the dominant technology. The discs in this collection represent some of the earliest published disc recordings, and offer a unique insight into the earliest years of music and spoken word recording.

The Charles Ives Oral History was the first documentary oral history of an American composer. Interviews with sixty people who knew and worked with Charles Ives were conducted between 1968 and 1971, and this project was the impetus for the founding of Oral History of American Music (OHAM). Family, friends, neighbors, business associates, and musicians reminisce about one of the most significant artistic figures of the century. The project formed the basis of the award-winning book by Vivian Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974, and subsequently reprinted). Excerpts from the taped interviews were used in a five record package, "Charles Ives 100th Anniversary" (1974) and in a film documentary, "A Good Dissonance Like a Man" (1977).

This is an artificial collection of rare and unpublished recordings featuring music by Charles Ives, created as part of a project funded by the Grammy Museum in 2017 to digitize and preserve these recordings.