Conference Agenda

Music Theatre, as a synthesis of music, theatre, dance, technology and visual media, poses distinctive challenges for archival preservation due to the heterogeneity, ephemerality and dispersed nature of its documentation. Scores, scripts, audiovisual recordings, images, patches, scenographic elements and other artefacts are often scattered across multiple sources or partially lost, further complicated by non-standard notations, obsolete carriers and a historical lack of systematisation. These issues obscure the collaborative and process-based nature of music theatre creation—improvisatory, interpretive and intervention-driven—hindering both scholarly study and performance reactivation, thus contributing to music theatre underrepresentation within Western music-historical narratives. Focusing on music theatre created from the 1960s onwards, this research aims to safeguard the memory of artists engaged in this performative genre and to promote the international visibility of Portuguese contributions. Ultimately, it offers tools to strengthen performance preservation in institutions, support new generations of artists facing evolving technological and expressive demands, and reinforce music theatre’s place within contemporary artistic and archival discourse. This project advances an archival preservation model for music theatre works that integrates musicological, archival and digital humanities methodologies, while acknowledging their diversity and ephemerality. By aggregating all relevant materials, including supplementary and contextual documentation, the project seeks to improve archival description, enhance user search pathways, and promote a more complete understanding of the artistic ecology of each work. Based on conceptual models such as RIC-CM, Dublin Core, CIDOC-CRM, and the DOREMUS ontology, it develops a conceptual modeling approach capable of representing the complex collaborative practices of music theatre.

A library's primary objectives are to protect, maintain, archive, and showcase the cultural content it holds. Similar were the aims of the Manolis Kalomiris Society, founded with the purpose of “studying, disseminating, and promoting the work of the Greek composer Manolis Kalomiris, with the goal of making it more widely known in Greece and abroad.”

For forty consecutive years, the Society established, managed, and developed the Kalomiris Archive as best it could -through cataloguing, score editing, concerts, recordings, small exhibitions, conferences, researcher support, and a dedicated website-working within the financial and spatial limitations it faced.

With its incorporation in 2021 into the Greek Music Archive of the Music Library of Greece of the Friends of Music Society, the Kalomiris Archive now resides alongside many of the composer’s artistic peers and contemporaries. Since then, the use and development of this diverse and significant cultural content has been radically transformed.

Using the Kalomiris Archive as a case study, this presentation examines how management structures (governance models, policies, decision-making processes, legal frameworks, etc.), together with preservation conditions and specialized staff, influence an archive’s use, transform its dynamics, and shape its outreach and impact on the community.

The former E. Czeppe Music Archive, long notorious among Viennese music archivists as an repository of significant materials, presents a rare test case for contemporary collection management and music information provision. After decades of restricted access due to storage and ownership conditions, the nearly 20,000-item collection, centered on nineteenth-century Viennese dance and popular music, entered public stewardship in 2023 when it was transferred to the Historical Music Collections of the University for Continuing Education Krems.

Preliminary sampling undertaken ahead of a complete inventory has revealed substantial research potential. The holdings document, with unusual breadth, the working repertoire and performance practice of a Kapellmeister active in the tradition of the major Viennese entertainment orchestras. They also include numerous unique first editions by members of the Strauss family, among them the only known source of orchestral parts for Sinngedichte, op. 1 (Pietro Mechetti, Vienna 1845), by Johann Strauss (1825–1899).

The relocation of the archive to a university research center rather than to a music archive raises a series of methodological and strategic questions. Should the processing of the collection prioritize the reconstruction of Kapellmeister practice and collecting activity, or the philological and repertorial value of sources that can significantly advance research on the still insufficiently studied repertoire of Viennese dance and popular music? Furthermore, how should user requests and digitization be addressed within an institutional framework marked by acute financial constraints? This paper offers a case study for examining the challenges universities face when assuming responsibility for major musical collections in times of pronounced austerity.