This has been a very exciting half a year at the USC Polish Music Center, so exciting that we’ve barely had time to properly digitally welcome our newest staff member, Dr. Tomasz Fechner. Tomasz, or Tomek, has been a good friend of the PMC since 2015 when he was a classical guitar student at the USC Thornton School of Music. After his graduation in 2020, Tomek moved back to Poland for over two years but has since returned to the US with his young family. We are thrilled to have hired him as a full-time staff member in our new Archive Specialist role.
Adding this new position to the PMC staff was made possible thanks to the generous late-2019 gift of Dianne and Tad Taube. Having assumed this new role, Tomek is working to archive, preserve, and catalog our most precious collections and make them widely visible and discoverable for students and scholars worldwide. He is also contributing his considerable additional skills as a technology expert, musician, scholar and native Polish speaker to all of our efforts at the Polish Music Center.
Since Tomek had worked for us in the past as a research assistant, his knowledge and familiarity with PMC and USC operations allowed him to start work in full swing. His arrival in late July overlapped with a month-long visit at the PMC of another specialist working with the Polish National Archives in Gdańsk, Dr. Monika Płuciennik. Monika is not only one of the top archival experts on music in Poland but also a fantastic mentor who is always eager to share her knowledge and expertise with others. This was Monika’s second visit to PMC after almost nine years, yet it felt like no time had passed.
While at the PMC this summer, Monika helped us immensely with archiving, preserving, and evaluating the organizational and spatial needs for some of our most valuable collections: the Zygmunt Stojowski Collection, Henryk Wars Collection, and Bronisław Kaper Collection. Assisting Monika with certain archival tasks was also an invaluable opportunity for Tomek to build on his previous archiving and cataloging experience by learning about some of the newest techniques and standards currently used by the Polish National Archives and around the world.
Welcome Tomek, and thank you for all that you bring to the PMC team!
The Polish Music Center is entirely donation-based, for everything from our operational budget to the growth of our vast library and rare archives. If you’ve found our website interesting and helpful, please visit our Donations Page. There you can donate directly to the PMC, knowing that a gift of any amount helps keep our website flourishing and our doors open. Thank you!