Collecting area: Performing arts

Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the National Endowment for the Arts has awarded more than $4 billion to support artistic excellence, creativity, and innovation for the benefit of individuals and communities. The NEA extends its work through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector.

In contributing to the National Arts Policy Archive and Library (NAPAAL), the NEA allowed SCUA to digitize publications on the arts and arts management since its inception. The collection reflects the impact of the arts (including music, literature, and the performing arts) on everyday lives of Americans and include materials intended to support individual and classroom education, information on arts management, reports on the status of the arts, histories of the organization, and much more. All items are cataloged in the UMass Amherst Libraries online catalog and are included in the Internet Archive, where they are available for full-text searching.

Visit the NEA Publications online

Undated photograph of Bobby Naughton playing the vibraphone in a recording studio

Robert Joseph “Bobby” Naughton was an American vibraphonist, pianist, and composer in the avant-garde/21st Century modern/improv tradition of jazz that evolved in the 1960s and early 1970s. Originally a pianist, Naughton became known as a vibraphonist. Besides writing and recording his own compositions, he collaborated with other artists including trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and his New Dalta Ahkri Ensemble, Sheila Jordan, Perry Robinson, Anthony Braxton and the Creative Music Orchestra. Naughton was an integral member of the Connecticut creative music network of the 1970’s.

Born in Boston on June 25, 1944 to William and Rose Mary Naughton, Bobby studied piano from the age of seven through his teens and played in several rock, blues, and lounge bands. He served in the U.S. Army and studied painting in art school. In the late 1960s, he began playing vibraphone, accompanying Sheila Jordan and clarinetist Perry Robinson where he participated in New York’s legendary loft jazz scene. In 1969, Naughton recorded for the first time. His debut album, Nature’s Consort, was released on his own Otic record label, where he continued to release music throughout his career. In 1976, along with Wadada Leo Smith, he became involved with the non-profit Creative Musicians’ Improviser’s Forum (CMIF), a collective that supported musicians, presented concerts, and was loosely based on Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Some of Naughton’s other credits include composing music for the silent film Everyday by German artist Hans Richter, playing in the Jazz Composers Orchestra in 1972, and touring Europe with Anthony Braxton and the Creative Music Orchestra in 1978 and 1982.

In the 1980s, seeking a steady income and health insurance, Naughton moved to Providence, RI and began working as a locksmith. He recorded again in 2008, with drummer Laurence Cook and bassist Joe Fonda, leading to the album Pawtucket. Naughton died at the age of 78 in 2022.

The centerpiece of Naughton’s collection is a trove of live recordings recorded on 7″ and 5″ reel to reel tapes, cassettes, and CDs made between 1967-2018. These recordings document every period of Naughton’s career and his various collaborations. The recordings are supplemented with sheet music, posters, clippings, administrative paperwork, some photos, 1/4″ and 1/2″ reel masters of Naughton’s albums, and copies of his released albums on vinyl and CD.

New Song Library letterhead

Founded by Johanna Halbeisen in 1974, the New Song Library was a collaborative resource for sharing music with performers, teachers and community activists, who in turn shared with a wide variety of audiences. Based initially in Boston, the Library was devoted to the music of social change and particularly music that reflected the lives and aspirations of workers, women and men, elders and young people, gays and lesbians, other minorities, and Third World people.

This collection contains over forty years of organizational and operational records of the New Song Library along with hundreds of sound recordings, primarily audiocassettes made at concerts, music festivals, song swaps, and gatherings of the People’s Music Network. The Library also collected newsletters and magazines on folk music, and most importantly dozens of privately produced songbooks and song indexes.

New WORLD Theater was founded at UMass Amherst in 1979 by Roberta Uno with the mission of presenting innovative works of theater by contemporary artists of color, with the goal of fostering creative communities, promoting cultural equity, and embracing diverse cultural backgrounds, social engagement, and a commitment to justice. For more than thirty years New WORLD Theater produced many dozens of plays and other dramatic works representing new voices in the theater, as well as plays from the traditional multicultural repertory, and they have supported the arts through performance residencies, conferences and colloquia, and a variety of initiatives aimed at the diverse communities they serve, youth, and theater professionals. New WORLD Theater has contributed significantly to national conversations on cultural equity. After more than three decades of acclaim and recognition, New WORLD Theater was closed by UMass Amherst in summer 2010.
The bulk of the New WORLD Theater collection consists of administrative records documenting the day-to-day activities of the theater, however, it also contains an extensive and exceptionally rich archive of taped interviews, conferences, and theatrical productions. Taken together, the audiovisual material traces the history of New WORLD through the words and performances of artists who both contributed to and benefited from the theater.

A Professor of Speech in the English Department at UMass Amherst, Arthur Ellsworth Niedeck was born in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1910, and educated at Ithaca College (BS) and Cornell University (MA). He began his career teaching theater in Ithaca schools prior to the Second World War, and after a stint working with the USO, joined the Speech Department at UMass in about 1947. An advisor to the Roister Doisters, the UMass theatre troupe, Niedeck became Professor and Head of Speech Department by the late 1950s and was involved in producing and supporting theater on campus for nearly four decades. Niedeck died in Amherst in June 1984.

Joining a small quantity of memorabilia, handbills, and fliers, the Niedeck collection consists primarily of audio recordings of theatrical productions he oversaw at UMass Amherst. Copyright was retained by Niedeck.

Established in 1983 and published twice a year at UMass Amherst with the support of Five Colleges, Inc., Nineteenth Century Theatre offered scholarly, critical, and documentary coverage of a broad range of subjects. Issues of the journal contained essays, documents, book reviews, bibliographical studies, and analyses of archival holdings.

The records of the journal include essays and reviews submitted for publication, correspondence, and published issues.

Ranked amongst the great violinists of his generation, Julian Olevsky served as Professor of Violin at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1967-1985. The collection consists of annotated scores belonging to Julian Olevsky, the bulk of which contain parts for the violin and piano.

Founded by Heneage Mandell in 1884, the London Playgoers Club met regularly “to afford members facilities for Critical Theatrical Discussions… in the form of… debate[s].” Playgoers in Victorian England did not generally enjoy a favorable reputation, stereotyped as abrasive at best and dangerous at worst. Mandell and his colleagues sought to promote a more genteel image of playgoers while nurturing a relationship between the players and audience.

The core of the Playgoers Club collection consists of a series of meeting minutes from 1884 to 1892, a list of all members who ran in club elections, and a brief, handwritten history of the club.

An East German screenwriter and playwright, Ulrich Plenzdorf was born into a Communist family in the working-class Kreuzberg district of Berlin in 1934, settling in East Germany after the war. Abandoning his undergraduate studies in philosophy at the University of Leipzig, Plenzdorf worked as a stagehand at the DEFA film studio while studying at the film academy in Babelsberg. His breakthrough as a writer came with the play Die neuen Leiden des jungen W (1972), which enjoyed enormous success internationally, selling more than four million copies in 30 languages. A year later, he followed up with the popular film, Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973), and his popularity as a writer continued through unification. Plenzdorf died in Berlin on Aug. 9, 2007, at the age of 72.

This small collection includes research files on the screenwriter Ulrich Plenzdorf assembled by Albert R. Schmitt, a professor of German at Brown University. In addition to an early edition of Die neuen Leiden and a mimeograph copy of an English translation by Herbert Lederer, the collection includes a handful of letters and a few pieces of ephemera from early productions of Die neuen Leiden, along with reviews and scholarly articles of Plenzdorf’s work.

Judy Polan, ca. 1984

Judy Polan was a folk musician who performed primarily throughout Western Mass and New England in the 1980s and 1990s. Born in 1948 in Albany, New York, she graduated from Barnard College in 1970 with a degree in Russian. She worked as a translator in Cambridge, Massachusetts and taught guitar lessons part-time before eventually moving to teaching and performing full time. She married Michael Schonbach in 1975 and moved to Western Mass two years later, living first in Northampton and then Chesterfield. During this period, her music career blossomed. She quickly became a favorite at local coffeehouses and other venues such as the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton the Sounding Board Coffeehouse in West Hartford, and Passim in Cambridge, playing both original songs and covers from a wide variety of genres. She was a four-time recipient of the “favorite musician” award in the Valley Advocate Reader’s Poll in 1985, 1993, 1994, and 1995. She was frequently played on radio stations throughout New England and Upstate New York. Polan also performed at weddings and children’s events. Her husband, Michael Schonbach often accompanied her on violin.

She released her first album, Judy, Judy, Judy in 1984 on her own record label, Ruby Slippers Records. The name was an homage to her love of the Wizard of Oz, songs from which would often feature in her shows. She was known by her fans as the “Folk Glitter Queen of New England”, due to her eclectic style of both music and costume, which often featured glittery red high heels fashioned after Dorothy’s ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz. Over the course of her career she released two more full-length albums and one EP, Look to the Starsin 1986, Dream Dances in 1992 and Daffodils in 1996. Also in 1996, she released a musical interpretation of the poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth, which was used in a tourism campaign for the Lake District in Northwest England. During the early 2000s, Polan’s career shifted to writing, and she worked as an editor and writer for magazines such as Style 1900, Modernism and Jewish Ledger. She mainly wrote about design and travel and maintained a website and blog, Mad for Mod, throughout the 2010s. She also wrote humorous audio memoir essays that were featured on the Albany, NY NPR affiliate, WAMC. She also published a book of poetry, Glasgow Colours at a Decorative Arts Programme at the University of Glasgow. Her husband Michael passed away on June 16, 2022.

The Judy Polan Papers contain material from throughout Polan’s career as a working musician. This includes promotional materials such as concert flyers, profiles in local publications, business and personal correspondence, sheet music, and lyrics. It also contains several dozen recordings contained on different formats such as reels, cassette tapes, records and CDs. These consist of commercial releases, live shows, radio appearances, demo recordings, and master tapes. Polan’s ruby slippers, that she wore during performances, are also part of the collection.