Beyond 'Rent,' Tunes Awaiting Their Star Turn

Michael Paulson, "Beyond 'Rent,' Tunes Awaiting Their Star Turn: Bringing New Life to Unknown Songs by Jonathan Larson," New York Times, October 7, 2018, p. AR7.

     The concert is a passion project for Jennifer Ashley Tepper, the club's creative and programming director and a longtime fan of Larson's work-- her bat mitzvah sign-in board depicted her dressed as Mimi, popping out of a pile of "Rent" playbills.  She dived into his archives at the Library of Congress, listening to hours of recordings and sifting through boxes of documents to reconstruct his catalog.
     Larson wrote about 200 songs over 18 years, starting when he was in college.  They were for unproduced musicals, workshops and benefits; there were pop songs, political songs and songs cut from his to posthumously produced musicals, "Rent" and "Tick, Tick...Boom!"
     Many are about being a struggling artist in New York. Few of the songs existed in written form, so the producers of the "Jonathan Larson Project," as the 54 Below concerts are being titled, had to transcribe and orchestrate them from recordings. 

COMMENT

     As far as research projects go, this one is high profile. After Larson died in 1996, Mark Horowitz, an archivist at the Library of Congress, contacted his family to ask if they would consider donating his papers.[1] The songs were on audio cassettes (remember those?) and computer data files. The archivists registered copyright protection and made back-up copies of the media files. [2]  Preserving historic media is a big problem for libraries. Plastic materials used for recordings are generally not chemically stable. Computer technology keeps changing and it's hard to keep up. You either have to save the device that plays the media or you have or continually migrate it to some new-fangled media platform. All of this is expensive and time-consuming so librarians have to pick and choose what to save.

     Transcription is also an issue for researchers using multi-media sources. Transcription software exists, but none of it is totally automatic.  It's still a time-consuming, nitpicky process to listen and transcribe recordings.

     Nonetheless, in a blog post she wrote for the Library of Congress, Tepper describes her research as "the adventure of a theatre historian's wildest dreams."[3]  The photo accompanying the New York Times article shows singers using sheet music on music stands.  Essentially, Tepper's transcriptions made Larson's music accessible by migrating it from digital formats to paper, and then from paper into live performance.

[1] Jonathon Larson Papers 1978-1996

[2] Amy Asch, "Creating Jonathan Larsen's Archive: a Letter from the Woman who Built his Library of Congress Collection," Playbill, Jan. 28, 2016.

[3] Jennifer Ashley Tepper, "Finding Jonathan Larsen’s Lost Works In Tapes and Boxes…and Turning Them Into a Show," Library of Congress> Blogs > Music, Sept. 6, 2018.