archives

In honor of International Archives Day, Jon Bagüés has written an announcement concerning ERESBIL-Basque Archives of Music: Shortly after its coming into being in 1974, the Basque Music Archive (ERESBIL) began collecting Basque composers’ fonds preserved by their families. The first of the fonds, concerning Norberto Almandoz and received in 1977, arrived on the express request of being kept as a single physical unit. This peculiarity, which at that time was an unusual practice among libraries, initiates a trend that, later on, turns into a standard, being the starting point of the creation of one of the main sections of ERESBIL, the archive’s fonds section.

The Paris-based Museum of Music keeps archives from luthiers, instrument makers and musicians. Several hundreds of these documents are now accessible online. These archives testify to evolutions both in instrument-making and in the musical scene during the 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, they comprise registers from Érard, Pleyel and Gaveau, from Nicolas Lupot, Gand and Bernardel’s instrument-making workshops, and they also include substantial correspondence between luthiers Chanot and Chardon. The main part of these archive collections - comprising extremely fragile documents, sometimes in poor condition - was digitized and uploaded for safe-keeping and accessibility purposes, as testimony.

From the AIBM-L, the mailing list of the German IAML branch, we have learned that the Archiv Frau und Musik is facing a drastic cut in funding that would threaten the future of this valuable archive.

The Archiv Frau und Musik, located in Frankfurt, Germany, is an important research center and the only one of its kind worldwide. It has been receiving funding from the City of Frankfurt, but this support is slated to be cut beginning in 2014. There is an online petition to show your support for the archive's work: