When he was 16, Schwartz suffered through a six-month period of blindness after an illness. Around that time, he bought his first tape recorder. After a spell in the Navy during World War II, he began his advertising career as an art director. His family subsequently moved near Peekskill, New York, but he returned to Manhattan to study at the Pratt Institute. Tony Schwartz was born in New York City on August 19, 1923. Schwartz had an uncanny ability to connect the intimacy of everyday life with the troubling abstractions of the wider world. It feels at once like a miniature act of mourning for a pet and a president. Kennedy’s funeral a couple of months earlier. It also gestures from the specific to the global: Darryl wraps the flag around the coffin and plays “Taps” at the burial, because that’s what happened at President John F. “Death of a Turtle” creates an intimacy of scale-a small child, a tiny dead turtle, toy musical instruments, and an improvised wooden tombstone-that allows age-old questions of mortality and loss to creep up on you in a disarming way. It gave you access to his or her inner life. He also thought that an audiotape had an advantage over a photograph: You could ask someone how he or she felt. He foresaw that, as recording devices became cheaper, people would create audio scrapbooks of their memories, in the same way they compiled photo albums. Schwartz believed that a tape recorder could, and should, be used like a camera: to capture snapshots of everyday life. Tony Schwartz believed that a tape recorder could, and should, be used like a camera: to capture snapshots of everyday life. “Here lies Tony Cherney, once a pet turtle of Darryl Cherney, died February 24, 1964.”ĭarryl then plays “Taps” on the clarinet before concluding by saying, as if in disbelief at the loss of his pet: “Wow. Darryl starts digging, says bye to the turtle, audibly kisses it, buries the box wrapped in the flag, and hammers down the piece of wood as a tombstone. Schwartz asks him to read what’s written on the wood. It’s sort of just like the president of the United States when he died, but he’s like in my family.” “I’m going to play ‘Taps,’ and the flag is because I like him.
“Why do you have the flag, and what kind of music are you going to play?” Schwartz wondered about the flag and clarinet. “He got a soft shell, and we tried to save him by giving him hamburger and things.
“Can you tell me what happened?” Schwartz asked Darryl. When Darryl arrived with the dead turtle, Schwartz pressed record.
Tony schwartz portable#
For convenience, he had his commercial reel-to-reel modified-attached a shoulder strap, added a portable power source, adjusted the levels meter-so that he could carry it with him. He recorded almost everything that interested him, and he nearly always toted a tape recorder.
Tony schwartz archive#
He compiled an audio archive of sounds from the streets around his house in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. Tony Schwartz was an ad man and urban folklorist. There's a big fat policeman at the door door door." I was interested in the sound around us.Tony Schwartz compiled an audio archive of sounds from the streets around his house in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. The children's games of the streets - I called it "1-2-3 and a Zing-Zing-Zing." "I won't go to Macys any more more more. I made fourteen records for Folkways records you can see them up there. I could go record children in the park doing jump rope rhymes. I brought the VU meter from inside the case to the top so I could look down at it and see how loud things were and I put a strap on it so I could hang it over my shoulder, that was in 1945. I have agoraphobia and in walking I could just go around my postal zone in the midst of Manhattan. And the postal zone was New York 19 at that time. "New York 19" was the non-commercial musical life of my postal zone.
Tony schwartz series#
Schwartz composed the Lost and Found Sound series theme music, "Music in Marble Halls." He recorded it in the lobby of 14 East 36th Street in New York City in the late 1950s. We hear a profile of Tony Schwartz, an innovative and inspired sound gatherer, recording the sounds of America since 1945.
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