Founded in 1938, the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America was one of the earliest organziation devoted to promoting barbershop harmony singing.
Mostly undated, the dozens of printed SPEBSQSA songbooks and sheet music in this collection appear to have been printed between the early 1950s and mid-1980s.
Forty-five 4×6 in. and 5×7 in. glass plate negatives of photos of buildings, homes, farms, animals, nature scenes in and around the Worcester, MA area. Locations include a children’s isolation ward, Jersey Stock Farm, Bordon Robertson’s farm, cold storage building, Bordon Robertson’s house, Baldwin Apple Blossoms Charlie Fosters (Corrs Reservoir), Oakdale Brook, Otis Davis house, Oakdale in West Boylston, Hadley Furniture Company Building in downtown Worcester, MA, and the Fogg Library in South Weymouth, MA.
The photos were discovered by the parents of Stuart Barlow in 1960 upon the acquisition of their home outside of Worcester. The photographers are unknown.
Ellsworth “Dutchy” Barnard attended Massachusetts Agricultural College, and received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1928. Barnard began teaching college English in 1930 at Massachusetts State College. In the fall of 1957 he took a position at Northern Michigan University (NMU). As chairman of the English department, Barnard presided over a selection committee which brought the first African-American faculty member to NMU. During the 1967-1968 academic year, he led the faculty and student body in protesting the dismissal of Bob McClellan, a history professor. Although the effort to reappoint McClellan was successful, Barnard had already tendered his resignation at NMU and returned to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for the 1968-1969 academic year. He ended his career at UMass as the Ombudsperson, the first to fill that office. Barnard retired in 1973 and lived in Amherst until his death in December 2003.
Barnard’s papers document his distinguished career as an English professor and author, as well as his social activism, particularly on behalf of the environment. They consist of course materials, personal and professional correspondence, drafts of essays, lectures and chapters, published works, a collection of political mailings, a number of artifacts both from the University of Massachusetts and other educational institutions and organizations, and a number of poems by Barnard and others.
Judith Barter is an art historian and curator of American art. She is currently the Field-McCormick Chair, American Art at The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), where she has worked since 1992. Born in 1951 in Chicago, IL, she earned degrees at Indiana University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before completing a PhD in Cultural and Social History at UMass Amherst in 1991. While earning her PhD, she worked as the curator of collections and associate director at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. She has written and contributed writing to a number of exhibition catalogs for exhibitions held across the United States; notable among these is Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, which originated at the AIC in 1998. She was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal at UMass in 1999.
The papers document Barter’s professional career as a celebrated scholar of American art. The collection includes documentation of her research, writing, and lectures on topics such as trompe l’oeil and photography. Also included are VHS and cassette tapes documenting exhibitions and lectures.
George W. Barton was born in Sudbury, Massachusetts in 1896. After attending Concord High School in Concord, Barton began his studies in horticulture and agriculture at Massachusetts Agricultural College.
The Barton collection includes diaries, scrapbooks, photographs, newspaper clippings, programs, announcements, and his herbarium, and relates primarily to his career at the Massachusetts Agricultural College where he studied horticulture and agriculture from 1914-1918.
When he was fifteen or sixteen, Eric Bascom’s life changed forever when he saw renowned jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery perform. Though Bascom had been playing guitar himself since he was young, seeing Montgomery opened his eyes to a completely new way of playing guitar and a completely new approach to music. Since that time, Bascom has been an avid listener, collector, and practitioner of jazz. He is currently performing as the Eric Bascom Trio with Ed Brainerd and Genevieve Rose.
The Eric Bascom Collection of Jazz Recordings consists of hundreds of jazz 78 rpm records from the 1940s and 1950s, including a number of 78 books with beautifully illustrated covers. In addition to the records are player piano rolls, several of which were punched by Fats Waller, and a portable Walters Conley Phonola 78 record player.
Frank Battisti began his teaching career as an instrumental teacher in the Ithaca (New York) Public Schools in 1953. He became Director of Bands at Ithaca High School in 1955 and remained there until 1967. Battisti was conductor of the Symphonic Wind Ensemble and a faculty member at Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory of Music from 1967-1969. In 1969, he was invited to join the New England Conservatory in Boston to start the wind ensemble. Under his 30 years of leadership the ensemble became recognized as one of the premiere ensembles of its kind in the United States and throughout the world. While at the Conservatory Battisti commissioned works from distinguished national and international composers such as Robert Ceely, John Harbison, Robin Holloway, Witold Lutoslawski, William Thomas McKinley, Michael Colgrass, Daniel Pinkham, Gunther Schuller, Robert Selig, and Sir Michael Tippett. When he retired from the Conservatory in 1999, Battisti was named Conductor Emeritus of the NEC Wind Ensemble. Throughout his career he guest conducted numerous university and college, military, professional, and high school bands and wind ensembles, and served as a visiting teacher/clinician throughout the United States and internationally. Battisti held numerous national offices in various wind band/ensemble associations including President of the U.S. College Band directors National Association (CBDNA). He contributed articles on wind band/ensemble literature, conducting and music education to professional journals and magazines and is considered one of the foremost authorities on wind music literature. Battisti was also Principal Guest Conductor of the Longy School of Music Chamber Winds from 2000-2008 and founder and Music Director of the Tanglewood Institute’s Young Artists Wind Ensemble from 2000-2004. Officially retired, Battisti maintains a very active guest conducting, teaching and writing career. He lives in Leverett, Massachusetts with Charlotte, his wife of over 59 years.
The Frank L. Battisti papers provides a comprehensive overview of his long and distinguished career as a teacher, director of bands, and conductor including his associations with the Ithaca High School Band, the New England Conservatory Wind Ensemble, and Young Artists Wind Ensemble (YAWE) at Tanglewood. Considered a foremost authority on wind music literature, his many publications—articles and books—are also featured in the collection.
A pioneer in war and documentary photography, the Anglo-Greek photographer Felice Beato was an important chronicler of late-Edo and early-Meiji era Japan. Between 1863 and 1877, Beato took a stunning array of views, portraits, ethnographic images, and genre scenes and helped train the first generation of Japanese photographers.
The Beato Collection includes ten images taken by Felice Beato in Japan between 1863 and 1871, including his famous view of Daibutsu, the Great Buddha at Kotokuin Temple, Kamakura; his view of one of the residences of the Shimabara clan; two very scarce views of a farmhouse and agricultural laborers, probably taken along the Tokaido Road; two views of Yokohama; and a fine view of a naval fleet at Nagasaki.
A screenwriter and visual artist, Tom Benedek majored in film as an undergraduate at UMass Amherst, earning the distinction of becoming the first graduate of the Bachelor’s Degree with Individual Concentration program in 1971. From early in his college career, Benedek worked as a photographer the newspaper, the Collegian, while studying with faculty such as Jerome Liebling (at Hampshire College) and Jerrold Maddox (at Amherst), and he spent his junior year in Paris studying at the Ecole du Louvre and l’Institut de Formation Cinematographique. In his career in Hollywood, he has written screenplays for the movies Cocoon, Zeus and Roxanne, and The Adventures of Pinocchio and worked with Robert Zemeckis, Lawrence Kasdan, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, Richard Rush, and Harold Ramis, among many others. He is a member of the Writers Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and teaches screenwriting at the University of Southern California and the University of Michigan.
The hundreds of images in the Benedek Collection document the development of a talented photographer. While some of the images stem from his work for the Collegian, most were taken on his own around campus and beyond, including trips to Boston and New Orleans, and his year studying abroad in Paris following shortly after the events of 1968. The collection consists entirely of 35mm black and white negatives and color slides.
Peter Benes might be called the father of the Association for Gravestone Studies (AGS). In 1976, he organized a meeting in Dublin, New Hampshire, of people interested in colonial gravestones, naming the group the Dublin Seminar. Following a committee meeting in December 1976, the group met again in the summer 1977 to organize as the AGS. Benes served as Treasurer in 1977 and Archives Officer in 1978. He received the Forbes Award of the AGS in 1979 for his role in founding the organization and in recognition of the contributions made to gravestone studies by his first book, The Masks of Orthodoxy: Folk Gravestone Carving in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1689-1805 (1977). He is currently (2009) Director of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife at Boston University.
The Benes Collection contains 2,826 black and white photographic prints documenting a majority of the eighteenth century grave markers in southeastern Massachusetts, taken for his book The Masks of Orthodoxy. The images were taken in Plymouth and surrounding counties.
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