Mark Bailey: Building Community

Mark Bailey is the head of the Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings (HSR) at Irving S. Gilmore Music Library. Mark came to the library in 1991 as an archivist in Manuscripts and Archives. He took the position of archivist at HSR in 1998 and in 2013 became its head.

 

Mark oversees the nearly 280,000 historical sound recordings in Yale Library’s collection. Yale University was one of the first academic institutions to recognize the importance of sound recordings to scholars. It established HSR as a department within Yale Library in 1961. Among the few sound archives in the United States, HSR is significant because of its focus on historical sound. 

 

The recordings in the collection are in various formats: cylinders, 78 rpm discs and LPs, reel-to-reel tapes, wire recordings, audio cassettes, and CDs. Mark is responsible for the care and preservation of these diverse resources. He also guest-teaches undergraduate and graduate classes and seminars in Music, Theater, and Media Studies. He writes about the collection in his blog and is the founder of an international research group dedicated to Romantic-era performance practice. 

 

Mark is often invited to speak at international, national, and regional conferences on behalf of Yale Library. 

 

“I feel the joy of it at all phases,” he said about these presentations—“in the research, the preparation, and then also in the delivery. I get to explore our collection as I select those recordings that will give me wonderful material to talk about and play for audiences of various types and sizes. Hearing their enthusiastic responses and their questions is very exciting.”

 

In 2024, Mark gave a presentation to the International Conductors Guild at Lincoln Center in New York—his first to this group. He spoke to an audience of about 100 people about orchestral performance and practice during the Romantic Era, introducing them to largely forgotten recordings by renowned conductors of the era.

 

Last summer, at a workshop at the University of Surrey in England, he spoke to another international audience about the mechanical impact of the early-sound-recording process on operatic performance production and style. 

 

Mark considers this presentation work “building a community.” “It invites people into our collection,” he said, “and into the world of early historical sound recordings and their relevance to research, teaching, and musical performance.”

 

Furthering his commitment to community, Mark is an active participant in diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) efforts at Yale Library. He is the co-chair of the Advisory Committee on Library Staff Diversity and Inclusion. In fall 2024, he also served as a member of the semester-long Task Force on Library Promotion, which was formed in response to the Library Climate Survey. 

 

“Those who exist in and represent demographics who are underrepresented in society and in the profession often encounter unforeseen impediments to the opportunities for professional growth and advancement that are afforded to others,” he said. “I believe we should identify, understand, and dismantle the restrictive presumptions of demographic similarity so as to embrace all manners of representation and enable the same unhindered path to all.”

 

On an ongoing basis, Mark participates in the library’s many forums and events that promote DEIA values. As efforts continue, he is looking forward to supporting Risë Nelson in the launch of the new DEIA strategic plan. “I look forward to helping with that in any way I can—making recommendations and promoting it in its dissemination.” 

 

“It’s one thing to create values and principles, think about them, discuss

them, articulate them, and embrace them,” he said. “It’s another thing to operationalize them, to actually put them into practice. And that’s the thing we are still learning how to do.” 

 

“But there are still questions, and that’s where diversity and equity come into play. At the library and within the profession, the path to growth and evolution is led by those who have things in common, which can create outcasts—inadvertently—of those who do not share that commonality. People need to put themselves in the shoes of others and try to imagine achieving what they themselves have achieved but with those difficulties weighing on their shoulders. Understanding this is absolutely critical for all of us to move forward.”

 

— Deborah Cannarella