Overview of the Collections: C1680 and MS Mus. 1894

Like many musicians’ archives, Maiden’s comprises a mix of material types and formats. At the British Library, sound and moving-image material is managed separately from paper-based collections in order to meet distinct, format-based requirements for preservation, cataloguing, storage, retrieval, and reader access — a division which can complicate the holistic appreciation of an archive for both staff and readers. The Cullen Maiden Papers (MS Mus. 1894) is the responsibility of Music Collections, while the audio-visual Cullen Maiden Collection (C1680) is managed by Sound and Vision. The acquisition of the Cullen Maiden archive was handled by Jonathan Summers (Curator of Classical Music Recordings, Sound and Vision), who transferred the papers to Music Collections. This reflects the fact that the largest component of Maiden’s archive is audio-visual, comprising 594 open-reel tapes, twenty-five VHS cassettes, ten lacquer discs, four 8 mm film reels, and four CD-Rs. Of this, at the time of writing, the open-reel tapes and CD-Rs have been digitized and catalogued, as they fell within the scope of the National Lottery Heritage Fund digitization project ‘Unlocking our Sound Heritage’ and were selected as a priority collection for preservation and cataloguing.Footnote ⁷ Maiden’s tapes can be divided into two main types of recorded content: around 120 of the 594 tapes contain original recordings of him performing, rehearsing, and teaching. The rest comprises Maiden’s personal collection of dubbed commercial recordings and his extensive collection of ‘off-air’ recordings captured from European radio broadcasts, including some very rare broadcasts of performances by Black musicians, especially classical and opera singers (a point to which we return later). While cataloguing of the tapes was ongoing in 2022, we were given access to the eight boxes of uncatalogued papers, and drew up an initial box-list of the papers to facilitate cross-referencing across the divided collection.Footnote ⁸

The Cullen Maiden Papers (hereafter ‘Papers’) were then fully catalogued in 2024–25 to a high level of detail for enhanced discoverability, because material relating to an African American singer’s career and experiences in late twentieth-century Germany is, we believe, unique within the Library and it was considered to be of high research value. The cataloguing process involved creating an arrangement of the papers that balanced preserving elements of the ‘original order’ in which the material arrived at the Library with practical questions of collection navigability and coherence; identifying names for indexing; and producing detailed summaries of the contents of each file.Footnote ⁹ The final extent of the Papers — that is, everything which is not audio-visual media — post-cataloguing is sixty-eight files, which provide the factual information necessary to understand Maiden’s career and to contexualize the audio-visual archive. These papers, like the tapes, span Maiden’s professional trajectory from his childhood to work created during his retirement, and the material types include concert programmes, photographs, press cuttings, posters, magazines, drafts and fair copies of poems, autograph scores, and drafts of compositions, together with professional papers including working notes, contracts, and a small amount of correspondence. Especially noticeable across Maiden’s papers is his lifelong commitment to programming, writing about, and otherwise advocating for Black music, literature, and history. We will return to these after first considering some milestones of Maiden’s career as an opera singer.

Operatic Milestones: Komische Oper, Porgy and Bess, Opera/South

The material relating to Maiden’s opera career mostly comprises performance ephemera along with small quantities of professional correspondence and other papers. The programmes, posters, newspaper reviews, and photographs provide useful geographical and chronological data points, as well as shedding significant light on Maiden’s experiences of race and racism. In the late 1960s, following two spells of study with Luigi Ricci in Rome, Maiden relocated to Munich as a base from which to audition for opera ensembles across West and East Germany. In one of many candid later newspaper interviews and profiles held in the collection, he commented: ‘The idea of fitting a black man into a German ensemble seemed to be a great hurdle. That caused a lot of problems. My blackness prevented me from getting a job.’Footnote ¹⁰ Maiden persevered, and successfully auditioned for a place in the ensemble of the Komische Oper, East Berlin — the ‘premiere opera house in East Germany’Footnote ¹¹ — under the famous hyperrealist director Walter Felsenstein. In Maiden’s words, ‘this was my very first time not to hear anything about race or color’.Footnote ¹² According to Hall-Maiden, Maiden felt it was significant that he found work in the German Democratic Republic, which espoused antiracism as part of its political policy.Footnote ¹³ On a day-to-day basis, however, Hall-Maiden recalled to us that Maiden experienced everyday racism in a similar way on both sides of the Wall.Footnote ¹⁴

The collection’s photographs provide visual documentation of racialized practices within some Komische Oper productions. For instance, photographs from Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges (1968) and Henze’s The Young Lord (1968–69) show Maiden performing in white make-up and wigs. When asked to comment on his feelings about this in a later interview, he said:

This statement displays a certain ambivalence: Maiden tacitly accepted the use of make-up as a tool to fulfil the realist visions of directors such as Felsenstein, where every detail of a production was tightly controlled.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, in the same interview Maiden comments on the topic of make-up: ‘theatre is theatre’. This does not mean that he was happy about it; while make-up enabled him to work, it also emphasized the ‘problem’ status of his Blackness. Thurman has pointed to examples of Grace Bumbry and Jessye Norman refusing to wear white make-up at major German opera houses, in 1961 and 1969 respectively.Footnote ¹⁷ It is worth remembering that while Maiden was a successful singer, he never achieved the star status of the likes of Bumbry and Norman, and would have had less leverage than they did to alter the conditions of his work. The archive of an ensemble singer and guest soloist — rather than a major soloist — has the opportunity to provide quite a different perspective on the history of Black opera performance.

The suppression of Maiden’s identity in order to assimilate into Felsenstein’s artistic visions had a flip side in the way Maiden’s Blackness launched him to fame when he took the lead role in the Komische Oper’s 1970 production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. This is the opera about which the archive contains the largest body of material, including Maiden’s annotated vocal score, many photographs, wide media coverage, and assorted performance ephemera.Footnote ¹⁸ While the production has already been considered briefly by both Thurman and Elaine Kelly in their discussions of music and race in the GDR, future scholars’ engagements with this landmark staging should benefit from the collation of material and the extensive personal testimony within Maiden’s archive. The production was directed by Götz Friedrich — a Felsenstein prodigy who would later succeed him at the Komische Oper — and, typically for the house, it was sung in German. Friedrich’s version was the first European Porgy and Bess not sponsored by the US State Department, and it received wide media attention.Footnote ¹⁹ At the time, critical reception was very positive: Friedrich was praised for creating a thoughtful production that sought to reject the opera’s negative stereotyping of a Black community, the cast were commended for their dedicated performances, and the lead soloists were praised for their ‘authentic’ portrayals of the title characters. Thurman cites it as an example of a wider ‘practice of Black casting to visibly authenticate a production’.Footnote ²⁰ Friedrich aimed to sidestep the questions of race usually so central to the opera by focusing instead on wider issues of social and economic inequality and oppression, following the GDR’s line that racism was an outcome of capitalism.Footnote ²¹

The production employed the majority-white ensemble of the Komische Oper, and while it was claimed that they did not use blackface, they did in fact use light bronzing make-up, which is evident in photographs.Footnote ²² For the lead roles, Maiden was double-cast as Porgy with the white baritone Fritz Hübner, while the Black soprano Carolyn Smith-Meyer was cast as Bess. It is almost always Maiden and Smith-Meyer shown in publicity and media photos of the production, including on the covers of several magazines held in the collection. In Thurman’s brief analysis, she identifies the attempt to bypass the question of race as a fundamental flaw: as Black musicians were cast only in the main roles, a lot of the press reception focused on their performances and their portrayal of Black ‘authenticity’, which hinged upon the same stereotypes within the opera itself that Friedrich had hoped to avoid.Footnote ²³ Maiden said repeatedly in interviews that while he was initially reluctant to perform Porgy because of his problems with the opera’s portrayal of Blackness, he was convinced by Friedrich’s vision, believed in the good of the production, and was proud to be part of it — views which deserve to be part of ongoing evaluations of the Komische Oper Porgy and Bess. However, while playing Porgy made Maiden recognizable to Berlin audiences, he found that this came at the price of a loss of his own identity, with, as Thurman writes, listeners ‘conflat[ing] Black singers with their operatic repertoire’.Footnote ²⁴ In a 1974 profile, Maiden draws attention to this depersonalization directly: ‘No one accepts me as Cullen Maiden. They accept me as Every Black Man […] When Robert Merrill is offstage, no one greets him as Rigoletto. But when I am offstage, people call me Porgy.’Footnote ²⁵

For Maiden, then, Porgy was a defining role for the best and the worst reasons. On the one hand, it gave him near-instant visibility within European operatic circles, and led to a steady stream of further engagements to perform the role in English- and German-language productions — ‘Europeans cannot get enough of it’, he claimed of the opera’s popularity on the continent.Footnote ²⁶ Notably, he was soon invited to sing Porgy at opera houses around West Germany, having previously struggled to find work on that side of the divided nation. Programmes and contracts in the Papers document Maiden’s travels with the opera around European houses, and tapes spanning 1969–82 provide fuller and shorter excerpts of rehearsals, performances, and broadcasts. On the other hand, Maiden’s success in the role resulted in a long-term struggle to escape from his close association with Porgy and to be cast in other parts. The pervasiveness of his association with Porgy resonates with many testimonies from other Black male singers of the twentieth century.Footnote ²⁷ Naomi André has spoken of singers ‘getting stuck on Catfish Row’, noting that many ‘found they are no longer cast for traditional mainstream roles […] after they are known to sing Porgy and Bess’.Footnote ²⁸ By 1974, Maiden thought he had performed Porgy over 250 times, and was trialling a policy of only accepting engagements if the company hired him for a major role in another opera as well — a strategy which had apparently worked for others.Footnote ²⁹ Yet for Maiden, it led only to occasional engagements for roles in Aida and a couple of smaller parts. For the rest of the 1970s and into the 1980s, the role of Porgy was a mainstay of his working life.

Without existing accounts of Maiden’s life and career to guide our understanding of his papers, our impression of his professional trajectory was largely pieced together through the primary material. The sheer quantity of material relating to Porgy and Bess, and the paucity of programmes or recordings for roles in other operas in Europe after the early 1970s, speaks for itself. In the same 1974 interview, Maiden spoke of his wish to move back to the US.Footnote ³⁰ While this did not happen, he did visit professionally for a series of opera engagements beginning in 1979, and was able to perform other roles in a company where he felt welcomed: the pioneering Black-led Opera/South, based in Mississippi.Footnote ³¹ The Papers hold material relating to Maiden’s 1979 performance as Osmin in Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, and as Father Lestant in the company’s made-for-television production of William Grant Still’s A Bayou Legend, which was the first opera by a Black composer to be televised in the country (recorded in 1979, televised in 1981). There is further material relating to an Aida with Baton Rouge Opera in 1982. The tape collection includes rehearsal and workshop recordings that shed light on Maiden’s interpretation of the roles — notably a witty rendition of Osmin; in the Papers, the material spans contracts and letters of invitation, a press pack (for Father Lestant), production documents, photographs, and newspaper cuttings. These types of material are often found in performers’ archives, but historically, archives and libraries have under-listed printed performance ephemera.Footnote ³² Motivated by the possibilities of inclusive description and equity-based cataloguing, one of our aims in writing detailed catalogue records for the Papers has been to list and index names of further key singers, directors, accompanists, and other contributors where possible,Footnote ³³ in order to capture the names of contributors from minoritized demographics which are otherwise unlikely to be present in the British Library’s catalogues.Footnote ³⁴ This data will aid further discovery of these diverse performance contexts and their creative networks and, on the Library side, provide points for future data linking and access.

Beyond Opera: Singing and Writing Black History

Maiden’s creative work beyond the operatic establishment illustrates the breadth of his intellectual and political interests and achievements, as is evident in the development of his performance practice as a recitalist that culminated in a series of concerts on the theme of Black history in the 1980s and 1990s. Throughout his life, Maiden maintained multiple artistic practices in addition to singing: he was a poet, actor, composer, and arranger, and there is even evidence of his aptitude for drawing in a pencil portrait of the boxer Joe Louis, dating from Maiden’s own teenage boxing years.Footnote ³⁵ Maiden felt all these creative strands to be rooted in the African American cultures that he grew up learning and participating in, which formed the basis of his artistic vision. Among the most extensive public-facing narratives of the social and political backdrop to his work is the 1965 book Black America, which he co-wrote with the white writer Donald Molin based on a series of ten programmes made for Swedish radio.Footnote ³⁶ Both the broadcasts and the book aimed to provide an informative dialogue aimed at a white, European audience, covering the differences between the two authors’ respective experiences of growing up in the US at a time of increasing international awareness of the civil rights movement. In Black America, Maiden highlights literary and political movements and names successful Black singers and artists, while also providing damning accounts of structural racism and oppression. He was in his early thirties at this point, and his testimony in the book took stock of his journey so far and articulated challenges likely still to come. In much later interviews, he emphasized the decisive force of his upbringing and early influences in shaping his whole career. In a 1991 interview in the journal Isivivane, the interviewer begins with an open prompt: ‘We are trying to trace some important stations in your career as an opera singer.’ Maiden’s response begins, ‘I’m named after the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen’, and in the next sentence he notes that he attended the same high school as Langston Hughes.Footnote ³⁷ Further situating his professional and personal experiences against the wider achievements and struggles of Black individuals and communities, in a 1992 interview Maiden names Paul Robeson, Muhammad Ali, and Jesse Jackson among the role models of his teenage years.Footnote ³⁸

Significantly, the earliest recording of Maiden’s voice contains non-classical Black repertoire. In his prizewinning participation in Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour talent show, at the age of 17, the song he chose to best showcase his low bass range was ‘Waterboy’, a folk song which by the 1940s was well circulated in famous versions by Robeson, Roland Hayes, Fats Waller, and others.Footnote ³⁹ In various printed and spoken accounts, Maiden emphasizes that he grew up listening to American popular genres and had early exposure to spirituals and work songs at church and at home; this was music which, he wrote in Black America, ‘has always had a direct emotional relationship to my own experience, my own roots’.Footnote ⁴⁰ He sang in a vocal harmony group at school, and was only introduced to classical music and opera in his late teens when his high-school teacher Josephine Walker used Robeson’s recordings as the point of introduction; Maiden would later refer to Robeson as one of the ‘idols of my life’.Footnote ⁴¹ Evidence of Robeson’s continued influence upon Maiden’s singing, spoken word performance, and concert programming is found throughout his tapes and papers.

As he progressed to university, Maiden honed his classical technique but never stopped including spirituals and folk songs on his recital programmes — a practice which had become well associated by the 1950s with singers including Robeson, Hayes, and Marian Anderson, and was being continued by a younger generation of Black singers.Footnote ⁴² An Ohio Wesleyan University scholarship recital from 1953 includes several songs closely associated with Robeson’s voice, including ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’ and ‘Oh, No! John’. Individual English and German songs that formed part of Robeson’s repertoire — especially those which encourage dramatic storytelling, such as John Ireland’s ‘Sea Fever’ and Robert Schumann’s ‘Die beiden Grenadiere’ — also became staples of Maiden’s recitals, as did spoken monologues and poetry readings, which again were associated with Robeson’s practice.Footnote ⁴³ As a fellow low bass, his selection of repertoire casts Robeson as a model through which Maiden developed his own distinctive concert programming practice, which increasingly incorporated wide-reaching references across Black musical history.

In recitals given during his time as a Private First Class in the Entertainment Forces of the United States Army in Busan, Korea, in 1956–58, Maiden expanded his incorporation of spirituals within mixed programmes that also contained (variously) operatic arias, classical songs, arrangements of Korean folk songs, and recitations of scenes from plays and poems, including his own original poetry.Footnote ⁴⁴ That Maiden included spirituals in recitals sponsored by the Army may also be contextualized by the state-sponsored tours of Japan and Korea undertaken by Anderson in the 1950s, which formed part of a diplomatic strategy to promote a vision of democracy and inclusivity, and to counteract negative international perceptions of the racism of the United States.Footnote ⁴⁵ (One of Maiden’s many tapes recorded from radio broadcasts captures a documentary about Anderson’s visits to Korea.)Footnote ⁴⁶ Following his national service, Maiden lived in New York and from there was recruited for tours with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company and the Belafonte Folk Singers, both of which drew upon his background of singing in popular music harmony groups. The small, visually vibrant group of Katherine Dunham posters and programmes provides one example of how the material in Maiden’s collection enriches the British Library’s holdings beyond music.Footnote ⁴⁷

From material relating to Maiden’s performances as a part of companies, we see some evidence of a recurring practice by which he sought to nuance perceptions of his work: he would lightly annotate or amend media descriptions of himself, seemingly in order to correct what he felt to be misrepresentations of his identity as a musician. In 1962, Maiden was employed in Stockholm for a summer, singing in the interval of Lia Schubert’s Jazz Balett -62 — he primarily sang jazz, African American folk songs, and excerpts from musicals and Porgy and Bess. Footnote ⁴⁸ The two cuttings from an article about this appearance shown in Figure 1 are identical apart from the careful cutting out, in one, of part of the title: ‘Bluessångare’ (‘blues singer’) is changed to ‘Sångare’ (‘singer’). The amended copy is kept in the file alongside other materials relating to the Jazz Balett; the copy with the full title was found elsewhere, among a set of miscellaneous newspaper cuttings. The collection’s cumulated newspaper cuttings display several other instances of similar practices, including selectively omitted underlining where racist and otherwise racialized terminology is found or, in a couple of cases, heavy crossing out. Some of this terminology is attached specifically to Maiden’s voice, and follows Nina Sun Eidsheim’s observation that descriptions of ‘Black’ vocal timbre remained prominent even as descriptors relating to opera singers’ visual appearances reduced during the mid- and later twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁹ This type of careful, proactive resistance against racialized fashionings of himself in the press must have been important for Maiden as he navigated different spheres of classical and non-classical work (he could, for instance, selectively quote from newspaper reviews for publicity purposes, and some documents containing publicity quotes attest to this practice), but it also exemplifies the centrality of issues of identity to Maiden’s life, career, and archive.Footnote ⁵⁰

Figure 1.

Two excerpts from a Swedish promotional article about Maiden’s interval performance at Jazz Balett -62, one of which is altered.

The inclusion of spirituals, work songs, and readings from poems and plays remained a hallmark of Maiden’s recital programmes after he settled in Berlin. He sometimes performed these unaccompanied, but more often used voice and piano arrangements, including ones by Harry T. Burleigh, Hall Johnson, and others that were made famous by singers such as Robeson, Hayes, and Anderson. Maiden also performed his own arrangements for several songs, variously with piano or guitar accompaniment; some of these are original, while others adapt or allude to existing versions. His arrangement of ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ has clear harmonic and textural affinities with the arrangement by Burleigh, but makes selective use of the higher range of the piano, perhaps to contrast with the low range of his voice. The personal dimension of Maiden’s programming is woven through the recitals’ narratives as well as their music; in the spoken introduction to the above rendition of ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’, Maiden tells the story of his grandmother, who had been born into enslavement. Elsewhere, he prefaces readings from Othello with spoken tributes to Robeson. While handwritten and typed notes and semi-scripts drawn up by Maiden for the recitals survive, much is gained by hearing them. Maiden was committed to recording and preserving his recitals from the 1950s onwards: he created multiple copies and transferred these onto various audio formats.Footnote ⁵¹

From the 1980s, Maiden’s programmes began to include art songs by African American composers. While his library of sheet music was not kept along with his recordings and professional papers, programming clusters suggest that he owned certain important publications. For instance, several pieces programmed by Maiden overlap with those present in the Anthology of Art Songs by Black American Composers, which was compiled by Willis C. Patterson and published in 1977. While it is possible Maiden encountered some of these songs through separate prior publications, ‘Compensation’ by Charles Lloyd Jr appears to have been published for the first time in the anthology, and it seems unlikely that Maiden had independently selected the same individual song (‘Genius Child’) from Robert Owens’s previously published cycle.Footnote ⁵² Not unlike his association of certain speeches and spirituals with Robeson’s voice, Maiden forges connections between classical songs and particular singers. He gave the following spoken introduction to a rendition of Florence Price’s ‘Song to the Dark Virgin’, which had become well known through its performances by Anderson:Footnote ⁵³

Maiden’s words recall a passage in the Black America chapter titled ‘Professional Man and Woman’, where he emphasizes the ‘multiplied’ challenges facing aspiring Black singers: he lists nine singers and writes, ‘I know what they’ve gone through, and I respect them as artists and am proud of them as Negroes’.Footnote ⁵⁵

These threads of referentiality, pride, and tribute — so overt and abundant in Maiden’s recitals and writing — invoke longstanding rhetorical strategies of ‘anthologizing and documenting Black achievement’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the 1980s and 1990s, several of the programming elements present in Maiden’s recitals since the 1950s coalesced, with a set of concerts themed explicitly around Black history. These recitals seem to fit within a much longer tradition of ‘Black music history narrative’ that flourished during the early twentieth century and the Harlem Renaissance — when, Lucy Caplan writes, ‘African American authors and artists […] aspired to teach their audiences about both Black history in general and Black music in particular’ — and which reverberated through the work of later generations of musicians and writers.Footnote ⁵⁷ The following titles of recital programmes, for which the Library holds both paper documentation and a sound recording, are indicative: ‘My Soul Is a Witness: Black History in Song, Poetry and Prose’ (1982, Amerika Haus Berlin, repeated a week later at the Amerika Haus Hannover); ‘Aspects of Black History and the Black Experience in Songs, Poetry, Prose, Black Drama and Black Humor’ (1992, Otto Braun Saal of the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin); ‘The Souls of Black Folk: The Black Experience in a White World’ (1993, Amerika Haus Berlin).Footnote ⁵⁸ (A selection of these programmes are shown in Figure 2.) Maiden’s use of the title ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ for one of his programmes makes an explicit connection to W. E. B. DuBois’s landmark 1903 book of the same name, which includes a chapter about the history of spirituals.Footnote ⁵⁹

Figure 2.

A selection of Maiden’s recital programmes.

In his specific historical moment and location — that is, Berlin in the 1980s and 1990s — Maiden’s recitals also align with Black community-building and growing political movements in the city. Two of the concerts were given as part of the city’s Black History Month (BHM), the first of which was launched by the Black German Initiative in 1990. The tapes of his BHM recitals demonstrate a careful balance of tone: he presents (music) historical information in an accessible, educational manner — Tiffany Florvil has noted the aim of the BHM to ‘share different African diasporic cultures and histories’ — while the programmes follow narratives based around lived experience, complex feeling, and passion about music and justice.Footnote ⁶⁰ Maiden’s recitals incorporated both earlier histories of Black music and more recent contexts of Black art and activism, as shown in his note for the 1993 BHM recital:

Such framings also contextualize Maiden’s incorporation of his own poetry within his recitals, poems in which themes relating to African American experience, suffering, and joy interweave with more general topics of love and loss.Footnote ⁶² In Berlin, Maiden’s community and activist interests intersected with those of Audre Lorde, who contributed extensively to the Afro-German movement during her spells in Berlin between 1984 and her death in 1992.Footnote ⁶³ Maiden’s Papers include copies of many of his poems with detailed notes from Lorde — suggestions, praise, and critique — with comments ranging from ‘Evoke — don’t describe!’ to ‘This reminds me of Langston’; another comment begins, ‘I have heard you sing so I know you are well acquainted with beauty and power and feeling.’ The twenty-six folios containing annotations in Lorde’s hand are themselves a valuable addition to the Library’s twentieth-century archival collections, while Lorde’s comments on Maiden’s poetry demonstrate resonances between their respective aesthetics and politics that found a receptive audience in Berlin in the later 1980s and early 1990s.

Capturing Fragile Sonic History: Maiden’s ‘Off-Air’ Recordings

Of the 594 tapes in Maiden’s collection, only 120 of them contain original recordings of Maiden singing, speaking, teaching, or rehearsing.Footnote ⁶⁴ A large portion of the remaining tapes are predominately copies of radio broadcasts and commercial recordings, and are occasionally of live events — amounting, essentially, to Maiden’s own DIY, low-budget music library.Footnote ⁶⁵ In our conversations with Chris Hall-Maiden, she recalled Maiden setting up his tape machine to record music from the radio (‘off-air’) at all hours of the day and night, and frequenting libraries to borrow and copy operas. When preserved long term, the collections resulting from such personal recording practices can be very useful in filling gaps left by radio stations’ own patchy historical archiving.Footnote ⁶⁶ Maiden captured many European opera and song broadcasts, some of which are unlikely to be available elsewhere in the UK and may only exist, if at all, in the respective broadcasters’ archives or in similar personal off-air collections.

Maiden’s collecting priorities were both professional and personal: there are many tapes that compile bass and baritone arias sung by various singers, presumably as a resource for practising and teaching. There are also many copies of whole operas, especially those with bass roles that would fit his voice. It is clear that Maiden made a concerted effort to capture broadcasts relating to prominent Black artists, as well as documentaries and features about Black culture and history. Among the classical singers captured in the dubbed and off-air recordings are Martina Arroyo, Kathleen Battle, Annabelle Bernard, Grace Bumbry, Vinson Cole, Simon Estes, Barbara Hendricks, Esther Hinds, Eugene Holmes, Leona Mitchell, Jessye Norman, Irene Oliver, Leontyne Price, William Pearson, Florence Quivar, Carolyn Smith-Meyer, Shirley Verrett, Felicia Weathers, Willard White, and Lawrence Winters. Some of these are among the most famous singers of the twentieth century; some are Maiden’s colleagues and friends from Berlin. Many, however, are little represented in the Library’s Sound Archive beyond better-known commercial recordings. While the quality of the recordings is variable — apart from some expected distortion and degradation, Maiden used his quarter-track machine and available tape length economically, usually recording at lower speeds, which reduces the sound quality but allows for more recording to be fitted onto the tape — the simple presence of these voices contributes considerably to the representation of Black singers in the Library’s classical music collections. Examples of the type of rare recording captured include relays of William Pearson’s recital with Wilhelm Neuhaus at the Avignon Festival (1971), Jessye Norman’s recital with pianist Geoffrey Parsons at the Ludwigsburg Festival (1985), Esther Hinds’s debut as a soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, with Klaus Tennstedt (1982), and Annabelle Bernard singing orchestrated Schubert songs and Webern with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Hartmut Haenchen (1983). Beyond classical music, Maiden captured recordings of the likes of Roland Kirk and The Vibration Society, Bob Marley, Harry Belafonte, Odetta, and others in the mid-1970s, including some which appear to have been recorded from the audience at live tour performances; broadcasts of documentaries and portraits about individual musicians and companies; and several dozen compilation discs with titles along the lines of ‘Soul & pop 1985’ and ‘Soul / Jazz / Disco’.

Cataloguing these off-air and dubbed commercial tapes was often challenging, because Maiden generally labelled tape boxes and inserted pieces of paper only with brief or partial descriptors, as his collection was meant primarily for his own personal use and only needed to be legible to him.Footnote ⁶⁷ While further information was often provided in inserted cuttings from radio listings, with the items recorded and names underlined, this was not always the case, and the aforementioned recordings of Pearson and Bernard were marked only ‘Wm Pearson Ives’ and ‘RIAS-2 Annabelle Phil Schubert Webern’. While some further data was provided in broadcast announcements, these were sometimes fully or partially cut off, with some detective work required to identify dates, occasions, and repertoire. Sometimes there was too little information, sometimes there was an unwieldy quantity: for tapes containing many recordings, a box could contain a large number of heavily annotated newspaper cuttings for the cataloguer to decipher, which were often folded, disintegrating, and difficult to handle. Where a tape box contained such inserts, these were photographed and stored in a separate local drive in order to enable future readers to consult the images if desired.Footnote ⁶⁸

Battling with these scraps of paper drew attention to their importance as material traces of Maiden’s priorities for listening and collecting. The way he underlines, circles, and otherwise marks names on loose newspaper cuttings is striking — and seems especially prominent when he is earmarking broadcasts of Black musicians to record. For instance, in the newspaper listing for a broadcast (date unknown) of Roger Sessions’s Requiem for Abraham Lincoln, the names of the soprano and mezzo soloists, Hinds and Quivar, are underlined, while baritone Dominic Cossa and other contributors are not; likewise, an advertisement for a 1982 broadcast of Mahler 8 underlines the names only of Hinds and bass-baritone Simon Estes among seven listed soloists, including Júlia Várady and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. The example in Figure 3 shows annotated radio listings from one of several compilation tapes of Estes’s recordings, which together date from 1966 to around 1986; Estes’s name is the only one highlighted for the broadcast of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman. Footnote ⁶⁹

Figure 3.

Newspaper cuttings for a Simon Estes compilation tape made by Maiden in the mid-1980s (C1680/27).

These are vivid material traces of Maiden’s commitment to collecting and preserving the work of performers with whom he felt a personal and musical affinity. Other ephemera found with the tapes provides further insight into the sense of community and network that is present throughout the archive. The box of another off-air recording of Estes (C1680/325) contained a scrap of paper with a draft of a letter to Estes written in blue biro:

The date of this note coincides with Estes’s landmark performance of the Dutchman at Bayreuth in July 1978, as the first Black male singer to take a leading role there.Footnote ⁷⁰ It is not clear whether such a letter was eventually sent, or indeed whether Maiden knew Estes personally, but the note further emphasizes the pride and enthusiasm that Maiden felt and shared when hearing of the successes of fellow Black singers — a point which is articulated in his published writing in Black America, in speeches given during his recitals, and here in a piece of tape box ephemera. Underneath the draft letter, Maiden writes ‘Leroi Jones/Imamu Baraka “Dutchman”’, referencing Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman (1964). It is unclear if this reference was intended to accompany the note to Estes or was a separate note-to-self, but it underscores Maiden’s interest in literature associated with the Black Arts Movement and its politics of pride and power, and his linking of this pride and power to the achievements of Black singers.