Statement by Rupert Ridgewell.
Honorary membership is awarded by the General Assembly in recognition of distinguished service over many years. Thus far, there have been only 24 honorary members in the Association’s 72-year history. All of those eminent individuals were active in either Europe or North America. IAML is, however, a global organisation and it is my pleasant duty to propose awarding this signal mark of recognition to a colleague who made a career in another part of the world.
In reviewing that person’s career, it is tempting to see it through an operatic lens. Act 1 opens in London in the 1960s. I invite you to picture the scene. A precocious teenager goes into battle with the local library, in an effort to keep the collection of opera scores available on open access shelves, rather than it disappearing into the basement stacks. A music library career clearly beckons, whether the brave youngster realises it or not, but at first it seems possible that the lure of the stage could gain an upper hand. After vocal studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he finds some success on the opera and oratorio circuit, but decides, in his own typically self-effacing words, ‘that a potential career as a third-rate singer was not for me’. Employment as a library assistant at the Central Music Library offers a taste of the joys of librarianship, but the future path remains unclear. Act 1 closes with the young man boarding a flight in search of new adventures on the other side of the world. It could almost work as a radical staging of Wagner’s Siegfried, were it not for the fact that our hero developed a much closer association with the Italianate repertoire.
In case the clues are not already heavy enough, the destination of that flight was New Zealand and the hero’s identity is, of course, our dear colleague and past President, Roger Flury. Moments of dramatic tension and catharsis undoubtedly followed in Roger’s career, but it would strain the operatic simile to continue with it much further. The twists and turns of the plot are described in much more authentic detail in his own synopsis, which is now available as one of a growing collection of memories on the IAML website. It nevertheless seems clear that the past 50 years or so of Roger’s life can be divided quite neatly into two further acts, framed by his engagement with IAML.
Let’s move on to Act 2, which spans the years from around 1973 to 1999. After his arrival in New Zealand, Roger at first took on a series of temporary jobs, but it seems the desire to work in libraries grew ever stronger. During an especially busy period, he combined studies at the University of Canterbury and the New Zealand School of Library Studies with a job at Canterbury Public Library in Christchurch. A breakthrough came with an introduction to the IAML New Zealand branch engineered by Dorothy Freed. Roger joined the branch in 1980, becoming a member of the branch committee five years later. He subsequently served as Secretary, Vice President and twice as President, from 1987 to 1989 and from 1997 to 1999. Greater professional prominence led to career advancement and his appointment in 1990 as Team Leader of Music Services at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington, where he proceeded to build the collection over the next 23 years into one of the finest in Australasia. In 1999, the IAML conference came to New Zealand for the first time. This was the Association’s very first meeting in the southern hemisphere and only the second outside of Europe and North America. It was, by all accounts, a remarkable and memorable event, and as Chair of the Local Organising Committee, Roger was central to its success.
Act 3 opens at the Edinburgh conference in 2000. This was my very first IAML conference and one of my abiding memories is meeting Roger for the first time. I immediately warmed to him, struck by his disarming modesty and his friendly, open personality. Above all, he made me feel like an equal, despite the difference in professional experience between us. This also marked the beginning of Roger’s deeper engagement with IAML internationally. A year later, he was appointed to succeed Alison Hall as Secretary General at the end of her term of office in 2002. He held that role for eight years and served under three Presidents: John Roberts, Massimo Gentili-Tedeschi and Martie Severt. During this period, discussions concerning IAML’s organisational structure began to intensify, most notably with a plenary session led by Jim Cassaro at the Moscow Congress in 2010. Following his election that year as President, Roger helped to navigate a way forward that balanced long-held traditions with a need to envision a new structure that recognised changing realities. He brought to this task a patient outlook and a genuine desire to encourage debate and open discussion.
He also presided over the conferences in Montreal, Dublin and Vienna, and I remember very clearly a touching speech at the outset of his term as President in which he acknowledged an innate shyness that he would endeavour to overcome, something I am sure many of us can identify with. He retired in 2014 after a final professional appointment as Curator of Music at the Alexander Turnbull Library. In the same year, Roger began a five-year appointment as IAML’s very first official historian, a task he took up with alacrity, deploying his formidable skills as a writer to chronicle the Association’s activities between 2001 and 2016. Among other offices, he also served as the IAML representative on the RILM Commission Mixte, as a member of the inaugural IAML (UK & Ireland) Music Library Excellence Awards panel, as Chair of the Ad-Hoc Committee on Electronic Voting, and as a member of the Publication Awards Sub-Committee.
All of this is just the tip of the iceberg of Roger’s wider professional activities and achievements over the course of his career, from the development of inter-library loan for sound recordings and finding aids for choral and orchestral hire collections in New Zealand, to coordinating RILM abstracts and contributing to many 100s of radio broadcasts. No wonder that he was recognised in 2012 by the Library Association of New Zealand for his outstanding contribution to music librarianship. He didn’t neglect his opera passion either, somehow finding time to be a co-founder of Canterbury Opera (now Opera New Zealand), adjudicate singing competitions, and produce a series of publications relating to Mascagni, Toscanini and Puccini. Just this year he realised a book project relating to the conductor Warwick Braithwaite, incorporating an annotated edition of his previously unpublished autobiography from a manuscript held by the Turnbull Library. We look forward to seeing the fruits of many more productive years ahead.
For now, however, it seems to me that the stars have aligned perfectly to allow us to recognise Roger’s outstanding service to IAML over the past four decades, in the country of his birth, and in his 75th birthday year.
