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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 48| December 2000
Preserving
Australian music:
the National Library and the Australian Music Centre
The completion of a special retrospective project to acquire 4000 unpublished music scores by Australian composers, in facsimile editions, was celebrated at a joint meeting between the National Library of Australia and the Australian Music Centre on 6 November.
The Australian Music Centre (AMC), located in The Rocks in Sydney, is a national music information centre, funded by the Australia Council to provide services for Australian composers and to promote the performance and reception of Australian music. It is one of a number of such international centres, coordinated under the umbrella of the International Association of Music Information Centres (IAMIC). As part of its service, it reproduces and makes available to the public on licence the musical works of about 350 contemporary Australian composers, who are selected for representation at the Centre through a process of peer review. During the last year, the National Library selectively acquired some 4000 of these AMC facsimile scores for the purposes of preservation and research and agreed to ongoing acquisition of new material. In September, the completion of item level cataloguing and shelving of this first huge collection, with each score individually preserved in plastic, brought the initial retrospective project to its conclusion. The remarkable efforts of staff at both institutions were heralded at an afternoon tea celebration.
At this celebration, the Australian Music Centre also presented to the Library two boxes of original music manuscripts written for Australian radio and television from the 1920s to 1970s. These consist mainly of jingles and advertising songs of the era, collected originally by the Australian Performing Rights Association. The collection represents a cross-section of material important to Australias social history, much of which is documented elsewhere in other printed collections in the Library, including ephemera. As manuscript after manuscript was revealed (often written by the leading composers of the period), nostalgia took over the celebration, as songs about cars and car yards, soap powders, electrical equipment, televisions and radios, toys and favourite foods were fondly remembered.
The visit also provided the opportunity for consultation between the AMCs General Manager, John Davis, and the Manager Music Resources, Judith Foster, the Curator of Music, Robyn Holmes, and staff across different sections of the Library. A wide range of issues concerned with national music infrastructure were discussed. These included collection agreements, policy and guidelines for archiving of Australian music scores, digital deposit of scores and digitisation of music resources, sharing cataloguing and data, publishing patterns in music, and the future of the collaborative subject gateway in music, the National Networked Facility for Research in Australian Music (NFRAM).
Both the Music section of the National Library and the Australian Music
Centre were established in the early 1970s, with a key objective of
together providing a national music archive and service to composers. Such
a spirit of endeavour to support and preserve Australias creativity
in music has now been assured through this commitment to long-term
institutional cooperation.
Robyn Holmes
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au