The UCLA Library Special Collection’s acquisition of the
A&M Records Collection will enhance UCLA as a destination for
the study of American music and popular culture, scholars say.
Cofounders Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, whose label became
America’s largest independent record company, donated the
collection to UCLA last month. The legendary company featured
artists such as Cat Stevens, Janet Jackson, The Police, Sting, Herb
Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, The Carpenters, Joe Cocker, Peter
Frampton, Quincy Jones and many others.
The collection is housed in the UCLA Music Library Special
Collections, though cataloguing is still being done, set to be
completed next month. Individuals on campus and in the general
public will have full access by appointment to the collection,
which includes sound recordings, manuscript musical arrangements,
correspondence, photographs, promotional materials, posters, gold
albums, books and collectibles.
In addition, the UCLA Oral History Program plans to conduct
interviews with Alpert and Moss as part of its series on popular
music in Los Angeles, according to a press release.
Gordon Theil, head of the UCLA Music and Arts Libraries and
acting head of the UCLA Music Library Special Collections, said
Alpert and Moss’ decision to donate the collection to UCLA
indicated the university was an “appropriate
repository” for such collections.
“I think UCLA is a natural consideration for (those) who
want to donate collections,” he said. “(People) know
we’ll take good care of them and that we’ll provide
appropriate access to them.”
The collection was acquired partly through a contact in the UCLA
School of Arts and Architecture with the donors, Theil said, but
added that UCLA was appropriate to receive the donation because of
its reputation and location in the center of Los Angeles,
“one of the major cities for the development of popular
culture.”
He added that UCLA shares the responsibility of preserving
culture with other Los Angeles institutions.
The cataloguing and creation of “finding aids” or
inventory currently being undergone by UCLA librarians makes the
collection accessible to the world, he said.
Some academics say that UCLA and other academic institutions
should be protecting music history collections because the
corporations that own them do not.
“It’s very rare that a company thinks archivally
about its own history,” said Robert Fink, an associate
professor in the UCLA Department of Musicology.
Fink said while traditional musicology has most of its important
documents in Europe, the A&M Records Collection’s
documents could be the basis of a musicology collection in which
Los Angeles would take the same place as Vienna.
“These guys in their garage have the kind of documents
that you’d have to go to Europe to get,” Fink said.
The collection is revealing of both the culture of the company
and popular culture in general, Theil said.
“You realize in seeing the various memos and
correspondences and that sort of thing that these people were of
course interested in being a successful business, but they were
interested in much more than that,” he said.
“It would seem that on some level they were as intent on
getting good music out as they were on making money.”
The record company, founded in 1962 in Los Angeles, had
successes with pop, rock and jazz records, many of which went
gold.
The A&M collection complements the library’s holdings,
which include rare books and scores, manuscripts and archives of
various musical periods.