Mining the Mission | Beautiful Music to a University’s Ears
He could have done eBay, but instead of cashing in, Morton Savada chose to share his love of music with a wider audience. The late Manhattan record store owner’s estate recently donated Savada’s 200,000 78-rpm records to Syracuse University, opening up a vast archive of the earliest recorded American music to researchers and audiophiles.
The collection, valued at $1 million, weighs 50 tons and represents more than a half-century of American music history.
Included are recordings from 1895 to the 1950s, with big band, jazz, country, blues, gospel, polka, folk, Broadway, Hawaiian and Latin among the genres. The collection also contains spoken-word, comedy and broadcast recordings, and “V-disks,” which were distributed as entertainment to the U.S. military during World War II.
Savada was driven to make his posthumous donation in hopes that others would share his passion:
Savada did not attend Syracuse, but wanted to donate his collection to a major institution that would maintain it and make the recordings available for research and teaching, said his son, Elias Savada, who runs a film research company based in Bethesda, Maryland.
Syracuse gets no monetary value out of Savada’s generosity, but it surely gains in prestige among music scholars, a nice plus for a university whose communications program is among the nation’s finest. The gift is a nice reminder that funding is not the only things for nonprofits to solicit. | 501(c)
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