At 05:12 PM 9/18/03 -0500, Richard Huggins wrote: >Perhaps we can take solace that with us at least a certain catch phrase of >American society has been altered in favor of the arts, i.e. "You want >polyphony with that?"
Wonderful! Is it yours? May I appropriate it? There is, of course, more to all of this than my ego. Below is an excerpt of a plea I sent to 150 composers and arts supporters here in Vermont. Perhaps the members of this inventive list have ideas. === As some of you know, composer Gilles Yves Bonneau died last December. Having heard nothing from his Seattle friends for a long time, several of us (including his family) assumed his massive body of work was lost. Fortunately, that was not true. And now, sitting in my living room, I have 12 crates of Gilles's life's work (scores, scrapbooks, recordings, and more) -- with no place to put all of it. I have not only Gilles's work, but my own, hundreds of scores from Vermont (and neighboring) composers, and a recorded archive of more than 1,000 hours of Vermont music. Our little house is more than full. So that brings up a question which the Consortium tried unsuccessfully to address 10 years ago: Saving our music from the landfill. I do not know how to do this. We had spoken about a university taking on this collection -- but those talks went nowhere, as the universities were unable to handle large individual collections like this, not only because of space problems but also because of cataloging (personnel/time) demands. (Certainly Gilles was a good self-archivist, with everything carefully labeled and cataloged. I am compulsive about my work as well. But many composers are not. Having spent a few years in the field, I know that librarians are rightly wary of 'gifts'.) Yet it makes no sense to break up these collections, to distribute the work of Vermont composers to dozens of town historical societies and libraries where finding it would be nearly impossible (and successful preservation of media materials unlikely) -- even if these organizations wanted the material. And it would be a tragedy to dump it all in the landfill. But the landfill it certainly will be, unless we can work together to solve this problem of archiving. I have created a forum at the Kalvos & Damian site for discussion, at http://kalvos.org/phpbb2/ Please look at the bottom of the forum list for "Vermont Composers / Archiving, Preservation, and History / To discuss how to save our works from the landfill" and post messages. I will also be happy to hear from you by email, but not only is my house full, my electronic in box is also pretty doggone full. I hope you are all well, and can give some thought to this question. === Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
