It's a huge day for PennSound! I'm thrilled to announce my edition of recordings of T.S. Eliot, available in PennSound for the first time. These are the master recordings from one of the earliest recording sessions of Eliot, made at Columbia University in the early-mid 1930s. Some of these recordings had subsequently been distributed through various releases later in the twentieth century, but this is the first time the master recordings are being made available, digitized from aluminum transcription discs.Mustazza discusses the sessions that yielded these historic recordings in greater detail in his liner notes on PennSound's Eliot author page: "These recordings were made in 1933, 1935, and at a later, unknown date at Columbia University, recorded by Barnard professors George W. Hibbitt and W. Cabell Greet, lexicologists and scholars of American dialects." He continues, tracing the provenance of these digitizations, straight back to the source recordings in an editor's note: "The recordings here were originally made on aluminum platters. They were subsequently dubbed to reel-to-reel tapes by the Library of Congress in the 1970s. These digitizations are made from the reels, which are stored at Columbia University."
In total, these recordings offer a very substantial (if incomplete) portrait of Eliot's most iconic works, including Ash Wednesday, two separate recordings of the entirety of The Waste Land, and Four Quartets, plus "The Hollow Men," "Sweeney Among the Nightinngales" (plus discussion of the poem), and three of the six Ariel Poems: "Marina," "The Journey of the Magi," and "Triumphal March." These original recordings are beautifully complemented by John Richetti's 2022 Wexler Studios session of twenty-nine key poems for PennSound Classics (which you can listen to here).
We wish to thank, above all, the T.S. Eliot Estate for their permission to share these recordings. We also send gratitude to the staff at Columbia's Rare Book & Manuscript Library, especially Thai Jones, Jennifer Lee, Devon Maeve Nevola, Jane Siegel, and Karla Nielsen, for helping us to make these recordings available. Finally we thank Leila Pearlman for doing the audio production for this collection.
