Swedish Branch 60th Anniversary celebration

Posted on behalf of Pia Shekhter.   The Swedish IAML Branch celebrated its 60th anniversary in Stockholm 18-19 April, with guests from Scandinavia, Germany, Holland and Britain. Altogether 103 people took part in the conference.

"Svenska musikbiblioteksföreningen" (SMBF), is one of the oldest national branches within IAML. The first Swedish IAML President, Folke Lindberg, was appointed in 1959. Two other Swedes have more recently held that position, namely Anders Lönn and Veslemöy Heintz. Sweden has hosted IAML's annual conference three times: 1962 in Stockholm and Uppsala, 1986 in Stockholm then 2006 in Gothenburg. Today SMBF has 117 members - 74 individual and 43 institutions.

Jutta Lambrecht and Antony Gordon were invited as "special guests" from the UK & Ireland Branch and the German AIBM. There were also invited speakers from Denmark and the Netherlands. Among the native speakers were Anders Cato, BTJ (supplier of media products and information services to Swedish libraries) and Veslemöy Heintz, Director of the Music and Theatre Library in Stockholm.

Jutta Lambrecht gave a presentation about the music archive and library of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne with several fascinating sound examples, including Karlheinz Stockhausen instructing the boy soprano whose voice formed part of "Gesang der Jünglinge".  Antony Gordon gave "Sound and Moving Image Collections at the British Library".  He also made a summary of the Report of the Ad-hoc Committee on the Restructuring of IAML, followed by a discussion. Anders Cato gave a well-informed overview of the "Development of music cataloguing in Europe" and Veslemöy Heinz told us about the musical society Utile Dulci, active in Stockholm during 1766-1795. The music collection of Utile Dulci, which is very interesting from a music historical point of view, is digitized and available at the website of the Music and Theatre Library in Stockholm. The conference ended with a closing discussion and news from the participating countries' representatives. The whole programme can be found of the website of the Swedish IAML Branch: www.smbf.nu.

Besides from the presentations we had a very nice jubilee dinner with speeches, a jazz concert and a multislide presentation with photos from the last ten years. Many happy moments were brought to life, but also sad reminders of people who are no longer with us, among them Anders Lönn. The organizers had honoured Anders by including a special song with words about him to music by Carl Michael Bellman.

PS: We were informed that both the German and the UK & Ireland Branches also celebrate their 60th anniversaries this year, so I take the opportunity to say Congratulations! from the Swedish IAML Branch.

Some photographs from the conference by Ingemar Johansson can be found here.