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PROFESSIONAL BRANCHES
Swedish Archives at Home and Abroad (Monday, 19 June)
Three speakers investigated different collections of Swedish music in Sweden and France. Erik Kjellberg briefly described the Düben collection at Uppsala University which comprises some 2500 works from the 17th and 18th century by 230 composers from many countries. Most works are in manuscript and with the majority not known in any other sources; the collection probably comes from the Swedish Royal Court library. A project to produce the first full catalogue of the collection was begun in 1988, and following more recent funding the database was completed and is planned to be available online from September 2006 (www.musik.uu.se). The complex database includes eighty different catalogue fields with facsimiles of all the pages and hyperlinks to a bibliographical database of supporting literature and also to sound recordings.
Two speakers described elements of the archives of the Ballets suédois, a company which existed from 1920 to 1925 as a rival to Diaghilev's Ballets russes. When the company closed, the archives were divided between the Dance Museum (Dansmuseet) in Stockholm and the Bibliothèque-musée of the Paris Opéra. Erik Näslund from the Dansmuseet described the history of the Ballets suédois and some of the exciting treasures in the archive, including "lost" music for ballets by Cole Porter, Darius Milhaud and "Les Six", and demonstrated that despite their name the company's repertoire was often neither ballet nor Swedish, but French...