Howard Dunham Barlow Collection

The Howard Dunham Barlow Collection consists of correspondence, newspaper and magazine clippings, recordings, original compositions, published choral arrangements, CBS program logs, scrapbooks, oral history, orchestral arrangements and works, prospective scripts, reviews of concerts, phonograph records, photographs, and writings.

The materials are organized into 13 series, each one arranged chronologically. 1. Activities (work related clippings, correspondence, ephemera). 2. Columbia Broadcasting System. 3. Compositions by HDB. Series 4: HDB Guest Conducted Orchestra Concerts (reviews). 5. Oral History. 6. Orchestral Arrangements by HDB. 7. Photographs.

8. Prospective Scripts. 9. Scrapbooks. 10. Writings. 11. Phonograph Records (78 rpm disks).

12. Miscellany. 13. Research Materials.

The bulk of this collection dates from Howard Barlow's years as conductor of the Columbia Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra (1927-1943) and as conductor for the Voice of Firestone radio broadcast (1943-1958). He was also appointed conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in the fall of 1939.

Among the materials are many orchestral arrangements produced by Mr. Barlow. In the inventory the use of asterisks denotes the following: If there are no asterisks, the arrangements are complete (orchestra parts and conductor score). One * asterisk denotes parts only, no conductor score. Two ** asterisks denotes a commercially printed score. Three *** asterisks denotes piano/vocal only (basis for a recording of lullabies). Barlow also composed many choral arrangements and orchestral works, some of which were commercially printed during the early 1920s (Series 3).

After Barlow left full-time radio conducting, he began to write short scripts around interesting musical personalities and events. These he hoped to record with his own voice and commercially distribute via Playback Productions of Mt. Kisco, New York. Prospective Scripts (box 7, folders 1-18), contains the variety of materials that he produced in drafts. Some were recorded as examples and brought/sent to radio stations. They All Made Music contains the vast majority (sequentially numbered to 146) of the short five-minute segments that Barlow was hoping to sell as a filler series. Music Notes appear to be similar in length to those for They All Made Music, but are more personal, i.e., Barlow's own experiences, or connections to persons he had known.

Barlow recorded one 50-minute program about Christmas (box 3). Otherwise there are no known extant records of any of the few that he may have taped. Apparently, many of the ideas for the short scripts came from articles in Keyboard Jr. and Young Keyboard Jr.

Scrapbooks of his career were maintained by his mother, Mrs. E. W. Barlow, of Portland, Oregon. An article about Mrs. Barlow is on page 52 of Scrapbook II (box 8).

In the summer of 1951, Columbia University's Oral History project interviewed Howard Barlow as part of their "Radio Pioneers" collection. The University provided Barlow with a bound copy of the transcription of the interviews, which can be found in Oversized Box 9.

The Research Materials and Sources (boxes 10-11) were compiled by James Pegolotti during his many years of research on the life of Howard Barlow. This resulted in the lengthy biographical article "Howard Barlow and The Rise and Fall of Classical Music on Commercial Radio" published in Connecticut Review, Volume XVII, No. 1, Spring, 1995. The research materials collected during his research supplement those already in the Barlow Collection initiated in 1999.