The 65th Congress of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML) was held in Rome‘s Auditorium Parco della Musica July 3-8, 2016. This year’s conference was jointly hosted by the Italian branch of IAML and Rome’s venerable Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. The sprawling, modern and air-conditioned facilities—Santa Cecilia Hall, Teatro Studio, Museum of Musical Instruments, Spazio Risonanze and several smaller studios—provided excellent venues for a great number of presentations by librarians, scholars, and other invited guests.
The Polish Music Center at USC was scheduled to present during the July 7 morning session, dedicated to Archives of Composers and held in the spacious Teatro Studio hall. Chaired by Marie Cornaz (Bibliothèque royale de Belgique in Brussels), the meeting opened with a paper by Angela Carone and Francisco Rocca from the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, “The Musical Archives of the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice: Valorisation and Cataloguing.” Next, Marie-Gabriel Soret from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Departement de la musique in Paris, spoke in great detail about the Olivier Messiaen Collection and the methodology of cataloguing and treating the recent bequest of documents made to the Library by the composer’s wife, Yvonne Loriod.
“Polish Music Center at USC and Its Unique Manuscript Collection” was the title of presentation made by PMC director, Marek Zebrowski. This well-attended event elicited a great deal of interest in the Polish Music Center and its holdings among the attending music librarians, and Director Zebrowski was invited by the Polish branch of IAML to present his talk in Warsaw later this year. The July 7 session chair, Marie Cornaz, had also asked for a copy of the PMC presentation to be placed on the IAML website (see link above).
All in all, the Polish delegation to the 65th Congress of IAML (pictured below) represented one of the largest groups among this year’s attendees, and the conferences and presentations provided an excellent forum for the exchange of ideas and methodologies of dealing with cataloguing and preserving archives and collections of composers’ manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, recordings, programs and other, related objects.
Networking among the representatives of various institutions attending the IAML 2016 will also bring benefits to the PMC. Thanks to the discovery of the Library of Polish Song and Czesława Zawrotniak from the Academy of Music Library in Kraków, we will be able to collaborate on many research requests regarding folk and religious songs the PMC receives on a weekly basis. Hanna Bias from the Karol Szymanowski Music Academy in Katowice presented an excellent and very entertaining paper of the great Polish singer, Jan Reszke, which dovetails into some of the materials we have in our Paderewski and Stojowski Collections. Also at the same session, Federica Biancheri (Historical Archive of Teatro Regio in Parma), painted a fascinating portrait of pianist Mieczysław Horszowski, based on materials donated to them by the artist’s wife. This too links nicely to the Stojowski Collection at the PMC, because Zygmunt and Luisa Stojowski were close friends of Horszowski, and we have some photos, correspondence and programs of his concerts collected by the Stojowski family. The entire session, held in the Museum of Musical Instruments during the afternoon of July 7, was ably and amiably chaired by Dr. Stanisław Hrabia (Jagiellonian University, Kraków), who took the initiative to graciously extend the invitation to Director Zebrowski to speak at this year’s conference in Rome.