Sounds from beyond the Iron Curtain: Soviet classical recordings at the British Library Sound Archive

HMV SEOM 20 (BL Collections 1LP0144447) Guest blog by British Library Edison Fellow Evgeniya Kondrashina What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear of ‘Soviet music’? Is it the Red Army Choir with their military band songs, or the enigmatic symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich? The…

Recording of the week: "We regret to inform you" – bad news from the sound archives

This week’s selection comes from David Govier, Oral History Archivist. An Oral History of the Post Office includes memories of telegram delivery boys who delivered telegrams by hand with news of war casualties during the Second World War, and their reflections on what it was like delivering the bad news….

50 years since the Ronan Point disaster

50 years since the Ronan Point disaster explored through the Architects’ Lives oral history collection

Recording of the week: the Moken – seafarers of the Andaman Sea

This week’s selection comes from Dr Janet Topp Fargion, Lead Curator of World and Traditional Music. Ko Surin is a group of five small islands in the Andaman Sea, sixty kilometres off the Thai coast. They are entirely covered in primary rain forests, with two small villages inhabited by Moken…

Trauma, narrative and theatre

In his role as the 2019-2019 National Life Stories Goodison Fellow Rib Davis will be looking at Holocaust survivors in the oral history collection who have been interviewed on more than one occasion.