Kevin Bartram, director of the UMW Philharmonic Orchestra, will be featured on the radio program With Good Reason April 1-7.
The program, called “Get Rhythm,” http://withgoodreasonradio.org/episode/get-rhythm/ explores a musical treasure hunt that Bartram is leading. Along with a national research team, he’s working to track down American classical masterworks that may have been long forgotten.
Known as “Unearthing America’s Musical Treasures,” the project is being run by a team of eight college orchestra directors who are conducting online and onsite research in the archives of the Library of Congress in search of orchestral works that are unknown to the public. The Library of Congress’ music division has more than 25 million holdings, making it the largest music library in the world. Of these holdings, 10 million are of American music, with a significant portion not yet digitized and some collections still awaiting full cataloguing.
Bartram’s passion for finding seldom-heard symphonies ignited in 2010, when the UMW Philharmonic performed a newly discovered symphony by 18th-century Austrian composer Joseph Haydn that had gathered dust for two centuries until it was found in the library’s archives.
With Good Reason is a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. The show airs weekly in Fredericksburg on Sundays from 1-2 p.m. on Radio IQ 88.3 Digital. To listen from outside the Fredericksburg area, a complete list of air times and links to corresponding radio stations can be found at http://www.withgoodreasonradio.org/when-to-listen/.
Audio files of the full program and its companion news feature will be posted the week of the show to our website: http://withgoodreasonradio.org/episode/get-rhythm/