Kilgore College Sunday downsized its music department by filling a dumpster with CDs, vinyl records and sheet music. Double Bass player John Porter says a friend tipped him off and Porter went to take a look for himself. And what he saw, as he stood on the roof of the 20-foot-wide dumpster astonished him.
He first thought it would be full of stuff from dorms because it's the end of the semester. It wasn't. "I just stood for 20 seconds and thought 'What the heck is this?'" From wall to wall, six or seven feet deep were thousands of CDs, thousands of priceless musical artifacts and vinyl records."
Some of what he recovered is rare, including a first edition conductor's score of Brahms' first piano concerto printed circa 1859. They found Shostakovich's second piano concerto written in 1957 and not yet under public domain, which cannot be purchased online. There is a debate between Russian and US copyright laws. But he says the issue is a lot of the music found was first edition. "Music that had been marked up by the piano professors of the golden age of Kilgore College's music program. That was Anne Dean Turk, Alexander Ryan Boggs. They had thousands of piano scores that they had not only studied themselves but that their students marked up. They had autographs from Van Cliburn and even some of Van Cliburn's personal collection of music that had been thrown out."
He took the back seats out of his SUV and brought three loads home. Others took some as well, and Porter is asking everyone who has this music to hold on to everything. "I'm hoping against hope that Kilgore College will come back to us and say we'd like the sheet music back because we'd like to preserve it." He adds most importantly "The supreme issue is the importance of the preservation of this music to Kilgore College's history and the universal culture of humanity. Not just music, literature or film, but our entire universal culture as humans. It's important we try to preserve that as best as we can."
A statement from the college says "As has been widely distributed on social media, Kilgore College is reducing the amount of material that is stored in its music library. We've seen the concerns online about the disposal of music materials and regret that many people equated this to the devaluing of music and fine arts at Kilgore College. This is simply not true. KC continues, and will continue to, value the importance of music and fine arts education with continued enhancements and increased funding for fine arts programs."
They say much of these materials had been in storage for years and many were left over from the old radio station or KC library and were no longer of use to the college or the music department due to the use of new technology.
The statement continues "Just this year, the KC Board of Trustees approved an additional $100,000 for band scholarships, new state-of-the-art lighting for Van Cliburn Auditorium and is in the process of vast improvements to the Anne Dean Turk Fine Arts Center. The KC Choir was also awarded an Innovation Grant in April by the KC Board of Trustees to purchase iPads to allow our choirs to move to digital music."
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