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Papers, Tapes, and Ephemeral Traces of a Singer’s Life and Legacy: The Cullen Maiden Archive at the British Library
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2026
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Cullen Maiden was a bass opera singer, poet, actor, composer, and teacher born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932. After serving with the US military in Korea and postgraduate study at the Juilliard School, he toured with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company and the Belafonte Folk Singers before travelling to Europe — Stockholm, Rome, London, Munich — for further study and professional engagements in the early and mid-1960s. His move to Europe was motivated by racist barriers in the music industry which, while still inescapably present in Europe, seemed more navigable than those in the United States at the time.1 Maiden therefore belongs to a multi-generational cohort of African American musicians who made similar moves to German-speaking Europe, as outlined in Kira Thurman’s landmark study Singing like Germans.2 A successful audition for the Komische Oper in East Berlin led to stable employment in the house’s ensemble, and Maiden later rose to prominence as a popular Porgy in productions of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Maiden lived in West Berlin for over thirty years, regularly crossing the border for work, and he pursued many independent artistic projects there, some in collaboration with political and aid organizations. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, while still living in Berlin, he made a professional return to the United States to give a series of recitals and to perform with the Black-led company Opera/South. By the early 1990s, Maiden was experiencing difficulties singing due to a medical condition, so took on increasing teaching work during his final decade in then-reunified Germany. Maiden and his British wife, Chris Hall-Maiden, moved to London in 2000, from which point he focused his multifaceted creativity on composition. He died in 2011.
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- © The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Musical Association
Footnotes
We would like to thank Amanda Hsieh, Sandra Tuppen, Chris Scobie, and Peter Asimov for their helpful comments on earlier drafts; remaining oversights remain our own. Thanks also to Chris Hall-Maiden, Jonathan Summers, and Caroline Shaw.
References
1 The ‘Opera’ entry in the Encyclopedia of African American Music describes the twentieth-century opera industry as a field where ‘racist ideology often superseded the vocal prowess of a singer in casting decisions’; see Encyclopedia of African American Music, ed. by Emmett G. Price, Tammy L. Kernodle, and Horace J. Maxile, Jr (ABC-CLIO, 2010), pp. 694–709 (p. 705).
2 Thurman, Kira, Singing like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms (Cornell University Press, 2021)Google Scholar.
3 We are grateful to Chris Hall-Maiden for so generously sharing her memories of Maiden’s working life, for giving us a wonderful impression of his character, and for providing access to additional archival materials which became a supplementary donation to the British Library collection (Mus. Dep. 2023/30, now incorporated as part of MS Mus. 1894).
4 On the research value of archival cataloguing, see Dominic Newman, ‘Cataloguing as Research’, unpublished paper presented at the panel ‘Uncovering Cataloguing’ (British Library, 10 July 2024) <https://bl.iro.bl.uk/concern/conference_items/2b3c2f10-0ce0-4de3-b1a7-4587c4540b13> [accessed 1 October 2025]. It should be noted that, beyond the writing of catalogue introductions and promotional activity such as blog posts, work towards research outputs is typically not considered to be part of a cataloguer’s role from an employer’s perspective, so is often done outside of working hours.
5 Frankie Perry, ‘Maiden, Cullen’, Grove Music Online (2024), doi:10.1093/omo/9781561592630.013.90000382102. The conference papers were given at the British and Irish Sound Archives Conference (Leicester, 2022) (Perry and Tasker); the International Association of Music Libraries and Archives Congress (Cambridge, 2023) (Perry and Tasker); and the Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association (Nottingham, 2023) (Perry).Google Scholar
6 André defines ‘shadow culture’ in the introduction to her Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (University of Illinois Press, 2018); she notes that the term should not ‘inadvertently give an impression that the thing fully illuminated is the true art, and that which is obscured is of lesser importance’ (p. 10).
7 The collection was prioritized primarily because its several hundred open-reel tapes were physically vulnerable and at risk of becoming unplayable through technological obsolescence.
8 Many collections of music manuscripts and archives have similar inventories drawn up by curatorial staff before full cataloguing is possible, which — given competing demands of resource and priority, added to existing backlogs — can sometimes take many years.
9 Adherence to ‘original order’ — that is, the order in which the creator placed their papers — is one of several guiding principles of archival practice that have been drawn up, modified, and critiqued through the long history of archival theory and professional practice. For current guidance, see the International Council on Archives, ‘Records in Context: Foundations of Archival Description’, version 1.0 (November 2023) <https://www.ica.org/app/uploads/2023/12/RiC-FAD-1.0.pdf> [accessed 28 August 2025]. Such guidelines are more or less viable for different collections, and cataloguers at the British Library generally approach collections on a case-by-case basis.
10 [Anon.], ‘Interview with African-American Opera Star, the Bass-Baritone, Cullen Maiden’, Isivivane: Journal of Letters and Arts in Africa and the Diaspora, 3 January 1991, pp. 20–25 (p. 21).
11 Thurman, Singing like Germans, p. 257.
12 [Anon.], ‘Interview with African-American Opera Star’, p. 21.
13 The notion of the GDR as a ‘promised land’ to Black musicians is explored and questioned at length in Thurman, Singing like Germans, Chapter 9.
14 Elaine Kelly has written about how everyday racism and institutional hostilities undermined the GDR’s promise of international solidarity and antiracism; see ‘Music for International Solidarity: Performances of Race and Otherness in the German Democratic Republic’, Twentieth-Century Music, 16.1 (2019), pp. 123–39, doi:10.1017/S1478572219000124.Google Scholar
15 [Anon.], ‘Interview with African-American Opera Star’, p. 21.
16 On aspects of Felsenstein’s work and its legacy for German Regieoper, see Calico, Joy H., ‘The Legacy of GDR Directors on the Post-Wende Opera Stage’, in Art Outside the Lines: New Perspectives on GDR Art Culture, ed. by Kelly, Elaine and Wlodarski, Amy (Brill, 2011), pp. 131–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Thurman, Singing like Germans, p. 231 and n. 69. See also Cheatham, Wallace and Lee, Sylvia, ‘Lady Sylvia Speaks’, Black Music Research Journal, 16.11 (1996), pp. 183–213 (p. 206)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 The performance ephemera and general papers are mostly at MS Mus. 1894/3/5–8; the photographs are at MS Mus. 1894/4/2, and an album is at MS Mus. 1894/5/4/4; the annotated score is at MS Mus. 1894/5/2.
19 Thurman, Singing like Germans, p. 260.
20 Ibid. Her previous pages analyse the production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which cast Ella Lee and William Ray as Titania and Oberon.
21 See ibid., with wider context given earlier in Chapter 9.
22 Kelly notes that the use of make-up for the white cast members created a disconcerting effect that only served to emphasize the Otherness of Maiden and Smith-Meyer; see ‘Music for International Solidarity’, p. 135.
23 Thurman, Singing like Germans, pp. 259–60.
24 Ibid., p. 211.
25 Cited in Wilma Salisbury, ‘Heart and Soul, Singer’s Quest Is for Identity’, The Plain Dealer, 1 September 1974; newspaper cutting housed in the Cullen Maiden Papers.
26 Cited in ibid.
27 A recent interview-based doctoral study by Ayesha Casie Chetty demonstrates that the weight of this history is felt keenly by young Black singers training in the US in the twenty-first century, some of whom feel obliged to avoid Porgy and Bess for fear of being pigeonholed. See Chetty, ‘Voice, Body, and Identity: Negotiating the Color Line in Opera’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2021), esp. pp. 84–93.
28 André, Naomi, ‘Complexities in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess: Historical and Performing Contexts’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin, ed. by Celenza, Anna Harwell (Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 182–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 191).
29 Salisbury, ‘Heart and Soul’.
30 Ibid.
31 On Opera/South, see Bailey, Ben E., ‘Opera/South: A Brief History’, The Black Perspective in Music, 13.1 (1985), pp. 48–78 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Opera/South is now run as part of Jackson State University’s Opera and Music Theatre programme.
32 The importance of listing and studying concert programmes is emphasized by the Concert Programmes Project, which refers to programmes as a corpus that represents ‘the last major category of material relevant to music research that has not been subject to systematic treatment’ <https://cpp.orangeleaf.org/about/background/> [accessed 28 August 2025].
33 Because of the impacts of the cyberattack on the British Library in 2023, preparatory work for name indexing and authorization has been done, but this will be implemented upon the return of an archives and manuscripts cataloguing system.
34 Inclusive description is a fast-evolving area within the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums sector. See for instance ‘Inclusive Description’, Society of American Archivists <https://www2.archivists.org/groups/description-section/inclusive-description> [accessed 28 August 2025]. The recent formation at the Library of an Inclusive Description Community of Practice allows staff working with collections metadata to discuss ways to promote sustainable inclusive description and discovery, especially in view of racial justice, and share developing workflows for implementing change between curatorial areas.
35 Maiden’s boxing background is occasionally mentioned in press coverage, for instance in the title of an unidentified newspaper cutting, ‘Vom Boxer zum Bariton: Die ungewöhnliche Karriere eines Amerikaners’, dating from 1975.
36 Donald Molin and Cullen Maiden, Black America (Sveriges Radio, 1965). Copy housed in MS Mus. 1894/5/4/2; a further copy is in the main British Library printed collection at YD.2015.a.2255.
37 [Anon.], ‘Interview with African-American Opera Star’, p. 21.
38 Wolfgang Quander, ‘Beseelt von Hoffnung und Brüderlichkeit: Begegnung mit Cullen Maiden — Sänger, Schauspieler und Poet’, from unidentified newspaper cutting dated 19 March 1992.
39 The exact dates of Maiden’s participation are not clear from the materials in the collection, but information can be pieced together from the audio content of the recordings and a newspaper cutting. The latter reports that he won first prize in the Cleveland contest, for a performance of ‘Water Boy’, the prize for which was a trip to New York City and entry into the national competition, where he ‘won the second prize position for the Radio Division [and] third prize for the Television Division’. See ‘Cullen Maiden Develops Qualities of Leadership at Central Sr. High’, undated newspaper cutting, c. 1949. In one clip (C1680/563 S1), Maiden is prompted by the host to demonstrate hitting a B♭1.
40 Molin and Maiden, Black America, p. 142.
41 [Anon.], ‘Interview with African-American Opera Star’, p. 24.
42 Grant Olwage has traced Robeson’s debt to Hayes’s practices of programming and performing spirituals; ‘Listening B(l)ack: Paul Robeson after Roland Hayes’, Journal of Musicology, 32.4 (2015), pp. 524–57, doi:10.1525/jm.2015.32.4.524.Google Scholar
43 For a detailed history and theorization of Robeson’s own vocality, and its presentation on the concert stage and on record, see Olwage, Paul Robeson’s Voices (Oxford University Press, 2023).
44 The collection includes Maiden’s annotated copy of a volume of folk-song arrangements by Kim Sung Tai published in 1954, and recordings of the famous song ‘Arirang’, dating from 1958 recitals.
45 See for instance Vriend-Robinette, Sharon R., ‘Marian Anderson as Cold Warrior: African Americans, the U.S. Information Agency, and the Marketing of Democratic Capitalism’, American Studies, 57.4 (2019), pp. 23–47, doi:10.1353/ams.2019.0001 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 C1680/193, side 2.
47 The posters and programmes have already been used by participants in the Library’s ‘Young Creators Lab’ scheme, as part of a video about Dunham’s dance and political achievements. See ‘Dance as Activism | Young Creators Lab’, British Library, 4 November 2024 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvrsoJgW0as> [accessed 28 August 2025].
48 These papers, together with those of the Dunham and Belafonte tours, are mostly at MS Mus. 1894/3/2, with additional materials relating to these projects at MS Mus. 1894/5/4/3.
49 See Nina Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (Duke University Press, 2018), esp. Chapter 2, ‘Phantom Genealogy: Sonic Blackness and the American Operatic Timbre’.
50 Within Music Collections at the Library, the process of cataloguing Maiden’s collection has helped to improve workflows surrounding material which contains harmful and offensive terminology, including the development of content guidance notes within catalogue records and on physical packaging.
51 In some cases, recordings from the same recital exist on open-reel tape, VCR, and CD. This occasionally caused problems for the audio cataloguers, as sometimes the copies were not adequately labelled to facilitate identification as such; users of the sound archive collection should be aware that encountering duplicated recordings is likely.
52 On ‘Compensation’, see Charis Kelly Hudson, ‘The Vocal Works of Charles Lloyd, Jr.: A Performer’s Guide to Selected Dramatic Works, Art Songs, and Spiritual Art Songs’ (unpublished DMA thesis, Louisiana State University, 2011), pp. 46–50.
53 See Samantha Ege, ‘The Aesthetics of Florence Price: Negotiating the Dissonances of a New World Nationalism’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of York, 2020), p. 144.
54 Transcribed from recording at C1680/168; concert programme at MS Mus. 1894/3/16.
55 In Molin and Maiden, Black America, pp. 151–52; emphasis original.
56 Caplan, Lucy, ‘“All These Songs Help Us to Trace History”: Black Women and the Black Music History Narrative in the Harlem Renaissance Era’, in The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow, ed. by Guthrie, Kate and Chowrimootoo, Christopher (Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 305–28Google Scholar (p. 317).
57 Ibid., p. 305.
58 Most of these papers are at MS Mus. 1894/3/16.
59 Caplan details DuBois’s contributions to Black music historiography; ‘“All These Songs Help Us to Trace History”, pp. 308–09.
60 See Florvil, ‘Rethinking Black History Month in Germany’, Black Perspectives, 20 February 2019 <https://www.aaihs.org/rethinking-black-history-month-in-germany/> [accessed 28 August 2025].
61 This recital was presented as a Black Theatre Arts Production, an organization that Maiden had conceived with the filmmaker Skip Norman; MS Mus. 1894/3/16.
62 Maiden eventually published his book of poems in 2008 as Soul on Fire: Poems and Writings (AuthorHouse, 2008). He had been performing and refining some of them for decades, and several individual poems were published in journals in the 1960s–1990s.
63 In an essay published in 2016, fellow singer Annabelle Bernard recounts that she and Maiden first met Lorde after a reading of her poetry at the Amerika Haus on 22 June 1984. See Bernard, ‘We Were All So Proud to Be There’, in The Wind Is Spirit: The Life, Love and Legacy of Audre Lorde, ed. by Gloria I. Joseph (Villarosa Media, 2016), pp. 209–12.
64 The tapes relating to Maiden’s teaching include several recordings of his teaching sessions with students in Berlin, which mirror a set of tapes made decades earlier that document his own singing lessons with teachers including Luigi Ricci and Harry Gottschalk.
65 Maiden’s library of purchased recordings was not acquired by the Library.
66 The Library’s Sound Archive holds several large, often genre-, style-, or performer-specific collections of tapes recorded from the radio by at-home enthusiasts that provide rare and possibly unique points of access to historical broadcasts that may not have been archived by the broadcaster. For context, see for instance ‘BBC Archives — Wiped, Missing and Lost’, BBC Archive Service <https://www.bbc.co.uk/archiveservices/wiped-missing-and-lost> [accessed 28 August 2025].
67 He and Hall-Maiden later created an index of the tapes using the general descriptors on the spine or cover, but the contents of tapes could comprise up to dozens of unlisted tracks.
68 The model for ingesting sound recordings during the ‘Unlocking our Sound Heritage’ project did not have capacity to include digital images alongside audio files. Unfortunately, complications from the cyberattack mean that we are unsure if and when these images might be available for consultation.
69 Most Estes recordings are found in the range C1680/25–34, with a few others elsewhere.
70 See, for instance, Emmett Jamieson, ‘Simon Estes Sings in Bayreuth (1978)’, entry for the web resource Black Central Europe <https://blackcentraleurope.com/simon-estes-sings-in-bayreuth-1978> [accessed 28 August 2025]. Estes has spoken widely about the occasion, his subsequent roles, and the particular challenges facing Black male singers; one example is his interview with Bruce Duffie, originally published in Wagner News in 1983, now available on Duffie’s website <https://www.bruceduffie.com/estes.html> [accessed 28 August 2025].
71 In line with wider shifts in the sector, the Library’s 2023–30 Knowledge Matters strategy emphasizes the importance of representation and inclusivity within the institution’s collections, which will steer the acquisitions and processing policies of curatorial areas.
72 The roles of women as curators of the creative archives of their husbands, fathers, sons, or friends is well known; recent talks by Loukia Drosopoulou, including at the 2024 British Library Study Day ‘Women Musicians, Past and Present’ (8 March 2024), have highlighted the efforts of several women whose contributions have shaped aspects of the British Library’s Music Collections (such as Ursula Vaughan Williams, Carice Elgar Blake, and Imogen Holst).
73 <https://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/903> [accessed 28 August 2025]. Printed copies of these compositions, together with several arrangements, are included in the papers at MS Mus. 1894/1.
74 There is no born-digital component to the Library’s Cullen Maiden archive, and we believe that his website ceased to exist before the Library introduced routine crawling of UK-based web domains to fulfil the requirements of Non-Print Legal Deposit (2013); prior to this, the UK Web Archive was established in 2004 as a ‘selective archive of UK websites that are considered to be of scholarly and cultural importance’ — a threshold which Maiden’s site is unlikely to have met.
75 Caplan, Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed Opera (Harvard University Press, 2025), Chapter 7, ‘Open Doors and Shadow Archives’.