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Affelder, Paul B., 1915-
The Paul Affelder papers consist primarily of press releases, programs and other promotional materials relating to individual musical artists, organizations, or venues. Much of this material probably was sent to Affelder in his role as the director of Program Note Service, and dates from 1964-1975. The collection also includes drafts of Affelder's writings, including reviews and other pieces that appeared in Musical America, the Brooklyn Eagle, and The National Observer. A small amount of personal papers cover Affelder's student years and his early work as a conductor. His 1935 summer spent studying conducting at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria is especially well documented through a set of letters home to his family and a scrapbook containing postcards, commercial photographs, and snapshots, which show some of the notable musicians he encountered during his stay, including Adrian Boult, Arturo Toscanini, and Felix Weingartner. Also well represented, by clippings and programs, is the period (1939-1942) in which Affelder served as the conductor of a WPA orchestra in Richmond, Virginia. The collection also includes an incomplete set of orchestral parts for the Emmerich Kálmán-George Marion,Jr. operetta, Marinka, which was staged in New York in 1945.
Paul B. Affelder (1915-1975) was a music critic and the founder of Program Note Service, which created and distributed program notes for music and ballet performances throughout North America. Affelder, who was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania studied the cello from anearly age and spent summers at the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. He attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1937.Affelder spent the summer of 1935 in Europe and studied conducting with Bruno Walter and Bernhard Paumgartner at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. In 1937, he began graduate work at New York University. After completing a Masters in Music in 1939, Affelder became the first cellist and assistant conductor for the Virginia-North Carolina WPA Symphony, which led to a position as conductor with a Federal Music Project-sponsored orchestrain Richmond, Virginia for three years. He also helped to found the private Richmond Philharmonic Orchestra in 1939 and served as its conductor from 1939-1941. Following his stint in Virginia, Affelder settled in New York, where in 1943 he became the Musical Director for the Masterworks Division of Columbia Records. He joined the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1948 as a music annotator and writer for CBS Radio, writing continuity for classical music broadcasts for many years, and becoming music and dance critic for WCBS-TV News in 1963. Affelder also served as the music editor and critic for the Brooklyn Eagle from 1948 through 1955 (when the newspaper folded), contributing numerous performance and record reviews. He later would serve in a similar capacity for The National Observer from 1962-1966. In addition to writing for periodicals, Affelder was the author of How to Build a Record Library (1947), which went through several printings, as well as a monograph on the dancer, Sybil Shearer, in 1955. In 1965, he created the Program Note Service, which made available through subscription, descriptive notes about compositions, composers, and performers to various musical organizations or individuals. Affelder ran the Program Note Service out of his home until his death in 1975; at the time of his deathit was reported that the service was being used by over seventy orchestras.
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