Unearthing Catalan Musical Heritage: the IFMuC Project

Until recently, Catalonia was one of the few European regions still unaware of the richness of its musical heritage in terms of the repertory of compositions by its chapel masters, organists, and musicians, which are conserved but forgotten in numerous, mainly ecclesiastic, archives. At the beginning of the 2001-2002 academic year, at the Department of Art and Musicology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, a group of researchers and students, undertook a new line of research with the priority of working to recover collections of manuscripts that constitute the musical heritage of Catalonia. This project is ongoing, and now known as the IFMuC Project, the acronym of Inventaris dels Fons Musicals de Catalunya (Inventories of the Catalan Musical Collections). This article presents the IFMuC Project in an international forum in order to make it known beyond Catalan boundaries. To date, the IFMuC Project has registered almost 300 collections of music manuscripts; seventeen of them now catalogued, with an index of approximately 1,000 composers and 10,358 works, including manuscripts and printed materials. A considerable number of musical collections are still in the cataloguing process. The dissemination process has been conducted through different strategies, including the publishing of printed copies of some series, articles in journals, and in the creation of a Web site (http://ifmuc. uab. cat), an open-access digital data- base, undoubtedly the greatest milestone hither to of the IFMuC Project.