The following message has been posted by the Outreach Committee of the
Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC).

---- THE FIRST ARSC PRESERVATION GRANTS AWARDS ----

The ARSC Preservation Grants Committee is pleased to announce the first
recipients of the Grants for Preservation of Classical Music Historical
Recordings. The program for these grants was founded in 2004 by Al
Schlachtmeyer and the ARSC Board of Directors, to encourage and support the
preservation of historically significant sound recordings of Western Art
Music by individuals and organizations.

-- The Boston Symphony Orchestra --

The Boston Symphony Orchestra was awarded $10,000 to preserve and make
accessible the earliest recordings from its Festival of Contemporary Music.
The annual series consists of six to eight concerts performed by
pre-professional musicians who are Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center,
at Tanglewood, the orchestra'! s summe r music festival site in western
Massachusetts. This project will preserve 49 programs of the Festival of
Contemporary Music, from 1965 through 1981. This group comprises the
earliest and only known recordings of these concerts, which were not
broadcast.

-- H. W. Marston and Company --

H. W. Marston and Company was awarded $7,000 to preserve, document, and
disseminate recordings in the Julius Block Collection, made on Edison
phonograph cylinders between 1891 and 1910, and thought to have been
destroyed during World War II. Block, a German businessman, lived in St.
Petersburg and conceived of the phonograph as a device for music and the
arts and as a chronicler of history. He attracted influential musicians,
poets, and actors to his home to see the phonograph, and persuaded most of
them to make recordings and enter comments in his log. Anton Arensky, Eddy
Brown, Nicolai Figner, Jascha Heifetz, Josef Hofmann, Arthur Nikisch, Se! rgey
Taneyev, Peter I. Tchaikovsky, and Count Leo Tolstoy were among the notables
who recorded for Block. The recordings were found in a museum in St.
Petersburg.

For more information about the Grants for Preservation of Classical Music
Historical Recordings, visit
http://www.arsc-audio.org/preservationgrants.html . The deadline for receipt
of applications for the next grant cycle is April 30, 2007.