As mentioned in the president’s letter, several MLA members traveled to Prague during July for the 2022 IAML conference. Below you’ll find excerpts from Ray Heigemeir’s travel blog.
Day 1 of the conference was warm and sunny, and well-caffeinated attendees bustled around our two meeting venues: the Municipal Library and the neighboring National Library, which is housed in the Klementinum, a complex of buildings originally used as a monastery and then a Jesuit college. My 2 pm presentation was in the rather generically-named “Meeting Hall C.” Imagine my shock and absolute delight when the venue turned out to be the baroque Mirror Chapel (built 1724-25). Never have I doled out Powerpoint in such ornate surroundings!
Paper topics ranged from archival practices to music encoding to collaborative research to data modeling (and more) and many focused on the Czech Big Four: Dvořák, Smetana, Janáček, and Martinů. Poster sessions touched on composers, collections, staff training, and preservation projects, among other areas. Thursday’s session was a joint meeting with the Conference of Digital Libraries for Musicology.
Attendees were treated to three evening concerts. First, a performance at the National Museum by Cancionata Praga, a women’s a cappela group singing traditional and popular Czech music (and thank you Chris Durman for navigating the transit system!); the next night we were treated to a chamber concert in the Mirror Chapel by the Epoque Quartet; and on Thursday night we gathered in St. Salvator Church for chamber music by the Capella Regia Musicalis.
Additional musical encounters included a behind-the-scenes look into cylinder preservation at the Czech Museum of Music (thanks to Filip Šir for hosting us!); a stroll by the Estates National Theatre, where Mozart premiered Don Giovanni in 1787 (movie buffs, this is one of the Prague locations where Miloš Forman filmed Amadeus); and some social time with professional harpsichordist and Stanford alum, Mahan Esfahani.
Thanks for sharing, Ray!