France

 Agnès Simon-Reecht (National Library of France, Music Department, and vice-president of AIBM-France) announces that a full inventory of the archive fonds of the National Library of France's music department is now available at: http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc1121814

Valère Etienne (National Library of France) will give a full presentation of this product at the Krakow IAML conference, on 18 July  (see programme).

Inventories of fonds related to musicians such as Nadia Boulanger (photo), Pierre Boulez, and Olivier Messiaen are now available

C'est mon troisième congrès. C'est certain, New-York, la Juilliard School, ça impressionne. Mais au fil des conférences, ce sont des têtes connues qu'on recroise, des identitées virtuelles avec qui on fait enfin connaissance.

Today, 26th March we offer our congratulations to Pierre Boulez who has reached the venerable age of 90.

Better known as a conductor than a composer Boulez was born in 1925 in Montbrison, Loire, France. Having initially studied mathematics he arrived at the conservatoire in Paris at the age of 19 intent on studying music. At the conservatoire he had the immense good fortune to study with Olivier Messiaen – the only teacher at that time to introduce music by members of the Second Viennese School, Bartók and Varèse that was completely unknown under the Nazi occupation suppression of 'degenerate' music.

Elisabeth Jacquet was born March 17, 1665 into a prominent family of musicians and harpsichord builders and this year would be the 350th anniversary of her birth. She became one of the first publically celebrated women in music during her lifetime. She received her first music instruction from her father, a master instrument maker and organist at the Église Saint-Louis-en-Île in Paris. In 1673 at the precocious age of eight, she made quite an impression on the court of Louis XIV, where she was proclaimed a true prodigy.

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.