By Steve Cleary, Lead Curator, Literary and Creative Recordings. The British Library launches a new web resource this week. It is called ‘Speaking Out’, and it seeks to explore the spoken word in its most forceful guise: that of the public address. Through historical archive recordings, together with new essays,…

Ken Essex (courtesy of Liz Golding) By Jonathan Summers, Curator of Classical Music The violist Ken Essex has died aged 101. Millions unwittingly heard him playing the music to the television series ‘Fawlty Towers’ and it is inevitable that obituaries have highlighted his recording of the Beatles song ‘Yesterday’ on…

This week’s selection comes from Catherine Smith, Audio Project Cataloguer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage. Last autumn, while cataloguing the Neil Stevenson Collection made in Peru in the early seventies, I gradually started to develop a mental image of Santiago de Chocorvos, a village in the central Peruvian highlands. A…

Carlisle and Wellmon (BL shelfmark 1SS0009976) By Jonathan Summers, Curator of Classical Music For Black History Month this year, I was delighted to find early recordings of two African American musicians made in London. The piano duo team of Carlisle and Wellmon made recordings for Columbia over one hundred years…

A new oral history collection looks at the role of women in the development of climbing and mountaineering