Heritage et AL

May is New Zealand Music Month (NZMM) and to help celebrate the Heritage & Research teams at the Central Library have compiled a playlist featuring some of our favourite New Zealand songs. The only proviso for selection was that we had to hold it in our Heritage collections. Format wasn’t specified as you can see from the images below; we have LPs, CDs, film soundtracks and a couple of songbooks. Ref: Items from Sir George Grey Special Collections, clockwise from top left: The amazing ukulele songbook, Bressa Creeting Cake (self-titled) CD, Able Tasmans 'A cuppa tea and a lie down' CD, Split Enz 'Frenzy' LP.

The heritage music collections at Auckland Libraries include a range of material, including cassettes, LPs, CDs, music scores and manuscript sheet music. The music collections cover a large range of genres and are continually expanding. Ref: Items from Sir George Grey Special Collections music collections, clockwise from top left:  Shocking Pinks (self-titled) CD, Ardijah 'Take a chance' CD, New Zealand poets read their work LP, Freebase 'Raw: live at Cause Celebre' cassette Auckland Libraries' music collections are of historic interest and relate to the development of New Zealand music. In November last year, the original manuscripts of  God Defend New Zealand ,  held at Sir George Grey Special Collections, received national recognition with inscription on the UNESCO Memory of the World New Zealand register of documentary heritage . Older forms of media, sometimes out-dated, hard to track down, unpopular or difficult to purchase, are also part of the ...

Chris Bourke has written a great  profile on the  AudioCulture  website about Auckland entertainment industry entrepreneur and local government politician Phil Warren. Many of the images included in the article are from the Phil Warren manuscript (Click here and type "NZMS 1214" into the search field), donated to  Sir George Grey Special Collections  after Warren's death in 2002. Ref: NZMS 1214, Phil and an unknown friend dining in the early 1960s, Sir George Grey Special Collections. Born in 1938, Warren came from a family in which music and politics were important - his parents were performers and his grandfather's wife's family were political figures in Auckland. As a teenager, Warren worked for the music retailer Beggs and through a contact at this job he was hired as a travelling salesman. When he was 18 years old, Warren met with an Australian agent of Clef Records in an attempt to establish a New Zealand branch of the company. The agent was surp...