Sweden / Sverige

I would like to share with you a short report about a very nice event that took place last week at the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in Stockholm. The initiative came from the Permanent Secretary, Fredrik Wetterqvist, who contacted the Swedish IAML Branch last spring, inviting us to the Academy. The idea then evolved into a joint arrangement between the Academy and the Swedish IAML Branch. We chose the Swedish musical heritage as the theme of the day, with the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018 in mind.

 “Mark the Music” — a two-day course for librarians working with music in the Nordic countries was arranged by the Swedish IAML Branch (Svenska musikbiblioteksföreningen) in Gothenburg, 15-16 June. All presentations are now available on the website of the branch.

On Tuesday 20 June four music librarians answered the listener’s questions about music libraries in Latvian Radio's Russian-speaking Channel 4. It was the journalist Tatjana Myslevich who had invited Marina Mihaileca from the National Library of Latvia, Alla Semenyuk from Russian State Library, Marina Demina and Besa Spahiu from The Music and Theatre Library in Sweden.

"There exists a significant amount of excellent historical Swedish music that is little known and seldom heard. The aim of Swedish Musical Heritage is to increase knowledge about this music and to propagate its performance. A large part of older Swedish music is notoriously difficult to perform, simply because the existing sources are unattainable for musicians, are in illegible hand writing, or are, for various other reasons, impractical to use. Surprisingly, this is true also of music by some of Sweden’s most prominent composers.