Samuel Brylawski, head of the Recorded Sound Section of the Library of Congress' Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, will speak on "Emile Berliner and the Birth of the Record Industry" at 4 p.m. April 12 in the 1916 Room of Syracuse University's E.S. Bird Library. The talk is the next installment of the SU Library Associates Lecture Series.
Brylawski will speak about the period from 1888 to 1896, when Washington, D.C., was the center of the world's recording industry. He will review the birth of Columbia Records and the Berliner Gramophone Co., discussing the pioneering personalities involved and the beginnings of recorded music as entertainment.
At the Library of Congress, Brylawski oversees a collection of nearly 3 million published and unpublished recordings, including several hundred thousand radio broadcasts. In his career there, he has worked as an audio preservation engineer in the recording laboratory and as business manager of the recording laboratory, where he oversaw the release of folk music and literary recordings. For 15 years, he was a reference librarian in the Recorded Sound Reference Center.
As head of the Recorded Sound Section, Brylawski has responsibility for the conservation and cataloging of the library's vast audio collections and supervision of the Recorded Sound Reference Center. Under his guidance, the Library of Congress has acquired more than 250,000 popular and jazz 78 rpm discs, more than 40,000 jazz LP discs and complete collections of the works of such artists as Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Maud Powell and John McCormack.
Brylawski writes and lectures on recordings and American popular music. He co-produced the six-disc set "The Library of Congress Presents Historic Presidential Speeches, 1908-1993." His recent projects include acquiring the Bob Hope Collection and curating the opening exhibition for "Bob Hope and the American Variety" in the newly established Bob Hope Gallery of American Entertainment in the Library's Thomas Jefferson Building.
