Documentary Collection

Description of the collection

The Arxiu Alicia de Larrocha is an exceptionally unified and coherent collection of documents as far as its size and contents are concerned. The collection is a record of the pianist’s personal life and professional career from her early childhood to the events and tributes that are still being paid to her. The main corpus of documents are those that span a period that began in 1929, when she gave her first concert, and ended with her last public performance in September 2003. In addition, it contains family documents from the collections of Joan Torra, Conxita Rauret and Carolina Lacalle, as well as documents connected with the Acadèmia Marshall, where she was trained and later on director from 1959 to 2009.

Personal collections are usually made up of many different kinds of documents: hand-written and printed scores, commercial and non-commercial recordings, books, graphic and photographic material, hand programmes, press cuttings, audiovisual recordings, correspondence, academic documents, notebooks, prizes and awards, tributes, dresses, etc. Specially interesting and exceptional is a series of recitals and concerts recordings which were made by friends and devoted supporters and were never issued commercially, as well as many scores with hand-written suggestions about their execution and interpretation and, in many cases, holographic dedications from composers such as Mompou, Montsalvatge, Suriñach, Turina, Esplà and others. Lastly, a series of pieces that Alicia de Larrocha wrote in her childhood and youth are noteworthy as an example of Alicia as a composer.

The documents have been studied and analysed into the following collections:

Creative works

40 complete childhood and youth works and one folder containing sketches.

Printed and hand-written scores

12 metres of scores, most of them with hand-written suggestions about how they are to be played, as well as technical notes from recording sessions.

Sound documents collection

The collection currently consists of about a thousand documents in various formats:

• Commercial recordings:
  • 135 LPs
  • 100 CDs
  • 25 cassetes
• Non-commercial recordings:
  • 26 tape reels
  • 466 cassetes
  • 85 CDs

  Live” concerts and recitals, most of them accurately dated according to information gathered from personal and professional notebooks. This is the most comprehensively described body in the catalogue.

• Interviews and master classes

Audiovisual material

70 documents mostly from television recordings, in addition to interviews, master classes and family and commercial recordings.

Correspondence

3 metres of documents connected with the artist’s professional life (agents, students, record companies, musical and academic institutions, etc.), as well as her more personal life (relatives, friends and colleagues).

The Joan Torra collection compiles 1 metre of letters to and from Alicia de Larrocha.

Concert programmes

4.80 metres of concert programmes from 1929 to 2003. Musical events up to the present are included.

Posters

50 posters in different sizes and printing techniques.

PRess cuttings

6 large-format albums and 2 metres of press cuttings about the pianist’s career, both at home and abroad.

Awards, honors, prizes

Collection of 150 awards, diplomas, medals, commemorative plaques, etc., received during her professional and academic career.

Photographic collection

36 albums covering the artist’s professional period, 1929-2009, and 2 metres of family and professional photos.

Clothes

30 dresses plus accessories: shoes, scarves, hats, etc.

Notebooks

73 professional and personal notebooks with notes on concerts schedules, rehearsals and other events.

Library and record collection

15 metres of books and magazines make up the musical library, as well as 1.70 metres of LPs; 10.20 metres of CDs and 3.85 metres of cassettes by other performers.

Treatment of the collection

The systematic catalogue is the result of the identification and description of each document through an exhaustive analytical process. The Omeka publishing platform has been used to emphasize the importance of:

• Relating different documents connected with the same event in order to facilitate navegation from one entry to another. For example: a Grammy award, the prizewinning record, the annotated score that was used by the recording engineer and the correspondence with the record company.
• Carrying out combined searches based on specific criteria that have been established by means of closed and standardized lists. This makes it possible to obtain information such as: how many Beethoven concerts Alicia de Larrocha played with André Previn as conductor at Carnegie Hall, New York..
• Offering examples of the sound and audiovisual collections, as well as digital images of the graphic material, scores, awards, clothes and letters linked to the entries in the catalogue.
• Guaranteeing the interoperability with other open-access repositories.

In parallel, after an analytical study of concert programmes and the professional notebooks, individual indexes are made of composers, conductors, orchestras and concert halls with the aim of making it easier to carry out a reliable assessment of the scope of Alicia de Larrocha’s professional career.

The recommendations of the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) have been borne in mind, along with those of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2), the proposals of the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) and the Resource Description and Access (RDA). The subject headings are drafted in accordance with the rules of the Library of Congress (LCSH), the Biblioteca Nacional de España and the Biblioteca de Catalunya. It must be pointed out, however, that in view of the variety and singularity of the documents, an ad hoc interpretation of the rules has been preferred to their automatic application.

The ultimate aim is to offer through the net an open-access digital catalogue with adequate navigational tools for each user, a catalogue which is indispensable both for music lovers and for the research community, specially in the field of musicology and interpretation.

Conservation and preservation

Following preservation and diffusion criteria, some collections are being digitized in accordance with conditions of quality, permanence and interoperability. The sound and audiovisual collections have both been entirely digitized and restored by specialist technicians and digital examples shall be introduced in the appropriate entries as cataloguing goes on. The scores, graphic material and correspondence series are being digitalized at the moment.

Although most paper documents are in good condition, others have been carefully restored because of their patrimonial and artistic value.¹.