Last year, at the invitation of Rachmaninoff's great-granddaughter Princess Natalie Wanamaker-Javier, the Rachmaninoff Network digitized scores and photographs from the private collection of the American branch of the family (the children of Rachmaninoff's beloved granddaughter Princess Sophia Wolkonsky married Wanamaker). These include hundreds of photographs - many of which are unknown - as well as the entire contents of the cabinet in New York where Rachmaninoff kept his sheet music.
Rachmaninovian hospitality
'Princess Natalie Wanamaker and her husband Jeffrey Javier welcomed us with great hospitality and warmth - as their great-great-grandfather used to welcome his friends', says Wouter de Voogd, chairman of the Rachmaninoff Network Foundation, 'they made sure that we lacked nothing. Wonderful and unforgettable.'
Of course, there was also a lot of hard work. 'It is an incredibly exciting adventure to capture an extensive collection within a few days. Because this was an intercontinental job and we had to travel by plane, we were also faced with the challenge of finding the most portable and foldable high-quality computer, camera and lighting equipment possible', says De Voogd. 'The preparation, in which we made and tested all kinds of test setups in the Netherlands months in advance, certainly took as much time as the actual work on location.'
Triple backup
At least two alternative scenarios were devised in advance for all the actions to be performed. In addition, all digital images taken were immediately saved in triple backup. 'Even with the best equipment, you never know what you will encounter', says De Voogd, who has extensive experience in his daily work as Senior Functional Applications Manager at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. 'Despite everything, a brand new memory card crashed during our work, but thanks to the backups we only had to check that the other carriers were functioning properly. In the end, there were no further problems and we were able to get back to work the next day without any worries.'
In addition to thorough preparation, the Rachmaninoff Network's experience with the collection at SENAR may have yielded the greatest time savings. 'During our work in Switzerland, we developed a method that focuses on recording artefacts on location very quickly and efficiently', says musician and Rachmaninoff expert Elger Niels. 'All time-consuming work is done when we are back in the Netherlands. This involves coding all the images, placing them in clearly arranged folders, provided with tags for the sake of rapid searchability. It is a job that requires great concentration and accuracy. Organizing digital images produced at a rapid pace in four days into folders can easily take four months.'
All new folders have now been added to the underlying folder structure of the Sergei Rachmaninoff International Database that is currently under construction. 'By way of a sneak preview, we will publish an inventory at the ceremonial opening of the website www.rachmaninoff.org', Wouter de Voogd says. 'This inventory will carry all title information of the printed sheet music in Rachmaninoff's music cabinets in NYC and on SENAR. All titles of printed sheet music in the Rachmaninoff collection in the Library of Congress are also added to this list, so that it provides as complete a picture as possible of the sheet music Sergei Rachmaninoff owned after he emigrated to the West.'
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