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Disposing of Cassettes, 2020.9.22

I have a collection of 2,000 cassette tapes of classical music and have no future use for them, since I have put the best ones that are
out-of-copyright onto a server in Austria, called File Factory and have
gotten 74,272 downloads, from 2011 July 13 until 2020 September 22 (today).

Please browse
http://filefactory.com/file/2vkhlkchqrcv/C0925-1538.pdf
and
http://filefactory.com/file/c25dead/C1539-2604%20%28fiddle%29.rtf
to get an idea of what I have.

I recall discussions of erecting a building in Chantilly, VA,
to house recorded
sound collections. Whenever there is no better sound than on one of my cassettes, the library (part of the Library of Congress) can quite easily
make a temporary computer file out of it that will be a place holder for one that sounds better.

For example, I treasure the sheer intense almost mad recording of the Tchaikovsky Fifth, conducted by Alexander Kitschin and the Berlin-Charlottenburg Opera (1928) and not in good shape. Considering the competition from Coates (acoustic), Mengelberg (electric), and Mravinsky
(mono and stereo LP), this is praise on the highest level! Go listen to it
at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Loz75i9wL-g> It was ARSC member who
taped it for me.

My ideal would be for someone in a good-sized van come pick up several book boxes of cassettes at my apartment in Chevy Chase, MD, and in a friend's apartment in Annandale, VA and haul them out to Chantilly, VA.

If you can fit a cabinet that is 53" tall ×27" deep ×18" wide into your van, that would be best. The cabinet houses 8 drawers, each drawer having 6 rows, and 60 cassettes filling up each row. So the cabinet holds 8×6×60 = 2880 cassettes.

Otherwise, I will offer them to those I regularly send newspaper and
magazine articles to and to those who read the UseNet groups rec.music.classical and rec.music.classical.recordings. The problem here is that music lovers who are not as ardent as ARSC members may take the cassettes, start converting, and shortly giving up. This has happened too
many times!

OR, just give me the cassette numbers of a limited number of cassettes and
we can work something out. The really good stuff is already in my space in File Factory.

In the final end, I may just take a rather large collection and put it
into the Dempster Dumpmaster. A sad end to sixty-one years of collecting,
but not a miserable one: you've already got the those 74,272 downloads.

A bit about me:
You may remember me as the author of the three-part article in the Journal, "Acoustic Chamber Music Sets (1899-1926)" (Volumes 31-32 (2000-2001) and
(with the late Kenzo Amoh) "Evgeni Mravinsky (Vol. 25 (1994). I am presently compiling a discography of the first recordings of each of Beethoven's
music, a job that is far more difficult (and tedious) than a layman would expect.

I have been collecting records way back to the Spring of 1959 when I was in the seventh grade in grade school in Colorado Springs of my first and second year in high school (1959), when I bought the 12" LP of Leonard Bernstein's television broadcast, "How a Great Symphony Was Made" (still my favorite article (which was reprinted in _The Joy of Music_). The other side had
Bruno Walter conducting the entire symphony. I had two small book cases holding 600 LPs,when we moved apartments in D.C. about 1975. I would say really heavy-duty collecting began with my first ARSC annual meeting, in DC about 1978, when I started correspond with exchanging tapes of our rarities
on six continents (none from Antarctica).

My hearing started getting worse when I got measles in the third grade. It
got to the point when I opted for a cochlear implant in 1977. It improved my hearing speech but almost totally lost my ability to hear music. The problem is that the operation focused on speech worked but not for music. There are only eight connections in the implant, while there are 88 keys on the piano. Those who made the implant thought that speech was more important than the immortal truths of Beethoven!

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