MIC

The Croatian Music Information Centre (MIC) was founded in 1971 by a group of composers and cultural workers in Zagreb as a non-profit organization whose purpose is to document and promote Croatian music in the country and in the world. The main support for the activities of the CMIC is provided by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the City of Zagreb, City Office for Culture.

Since 1973, CMIC has been operating within the Zagreb Concert Management, and since 2017, by merging the Zagreb Concert Management with the Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall, it has become part of the Hall within its Multimedia and Documentation Department with Ana Unkić, who joins the three-member editorial board. composed of: Jelena Vuković, Davor Merkaš, Ivan Živanović. The work of CMIC is focused primarily on professional musicians, but also on everyone else who needs information, notes or anything else related to Croatian music.

Activities

Publishing

Since 1973 the Music Information Centre has made a place for itself as one of the most important publisher of musical editions (of books and articles, sheet music and recordings) in Croatia. In its first years of operations, in association with the record company Jugoton, the Music Information Centre published an impressive sequence of over a hundred gramophone records and cassettes of the music of Croatian musicians. In parallel with this it started to make an outstanding catalogue of book editions about Croatian music (Acezantez, a work of several hands, Sound – sign – music by Nikša Gligo, 16th and 17th Century Music in Dalmatia by Dragan Plamenac, Labyrinths of Milko Kelemen, The Harmonic Element in Musical Works of Ivo Maček by Natko Devčić, Our Beautiful Homeland – Story of the Croatian anthem, of Andrija Tomašek, 40 years of electronic music by Hans Ulrich Humpert and Vladan Radovanović and many others). Also published were monographs about Croatian composers meant for foreign and domestic readers, in the Croatian Composers imprint (Luka and Antun Sorkočević, Ivan Mane Jarnović, Josip Štolcer Slavenski, Josip Hatze, Ivan Zajc, Jakov Gotovac, Ivan Lukačić, Tomaso Cecchini, Francesco Sponga Usper, Dora Pejačević and others). In the last ten years the Music Information Centre has placed a particular emphasis on sheet music publishing, with the aim of fostering a greater presence of Croatian composers in the repertoires of Croatian and foreign musicians. In 2017, the Music Information Centre launched the series Tomaso Cecchini  Opera omnia, aiming at publishing the whole of the printed oeuvre of Tomas Cecchini. As well as the main Croatian editors, Professor Enno Stipčević and the manager of the Music Information Centre of that time the musicologist Ivan Živanović and Jelena Vuković, the editorial board for the series consists of distinguished musicologists specialising in the period of the musical Renaissance and Baroque, as well as experts from musical palaeography from France, Italy and Slovenia: Vincent Besson from the Centre for Advanced Renaissance Studies, Francois Rabelais University of Tours; Professor Metoda Kokole, head of the Musicology Institute of the Scholarly Centre of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts; the distinguished music palaeographer Marina Toffeti, professor at the Università degli Studi di Padova of Padua; and Marco Di Pasquale, professor at the Conservatorio di musica di Vicenza. It is anticipated that the series will consist of eight volumes.

Digitalization

The project of digitization of musical material aims to save, preserve and adequately store the works of Croatian composers, as well as provide access to information about Croatian musical life and encourage greater interest of domestic and foreign scientists and musicians for Croatian national culture. The Music Information Centre digitally copies songs that in most cases exist in one copy, most often as an autograph, which belongs to the zero category of Croatian musical heritage. The project includes recording of stored material, its collection and collection of necessary documentation, digitization, processing of digitized material. The last step is to make the material available to interested users (culturologists, musicologists, students, performers, conductors, music institutions and art academies, music archives, National and University Library, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, wider music audience, etc.). In the project of digitization of material, the Music Information Centre also cooperates directly with other institutions that store composer’s manuscripts, such as the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Academy of Music in Zagreb, the Croatian Music Institute, the Croatian State Archives and the National and University Library. composers, musicologists, conductors, reproductive artists and others.

Quercus database

Quercus, the Central Information System for Croatian Musical Life, regularly tracks cultural events, particularly musical, with the storage of important information about Croatian serious music. In its structure, the information system provides for the input of relevant information about persons (musicians – composers, performers, people in the arts field and so on), institutions (music schools, publishers, organisers of music events and so on), oeuvres of Croatian composers with all the pertinent information about the compositions (title, year and place of origin, data about first performance, where kept and so on), sheet music editions, albums and sound recordings, literature (books, journals, musical periodicals in general), events and performances, concerts of serious music and so on. The creators of the database are Ivan Živanović (founder), Jelena Vuković (manager and structural developer) and Maja Šojat-Bikić (software developer) and through its more than twenty years of existence (since 1998) it has several times been subject to systematic technological upgrading (2009, 2016, 2021).

Editorial Board

The editors of the Music Information Centre regularly support the realization of the program of the parent company within which they operate: originally the Zagreb Concert Directorate, and since 2017 the Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall. As authors and / or editors, they sign numerous promotional materials, season announcements (Cantabile, Forte Fortissimo, Music Ring, Piano Pianissimo, Molto Cantabile, World of Music of the Zagreb Concert Directorate; Lisinski Arioso, Youth in Lisinski, Hall Day, Lisinski on Saturdays of the Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall ), competition catalogs (EPTA – International Piano Competition Svetislav Stančić, International Cello Competition Antonio Janigro), as well as festivals organized by the Zagreb Concert Directorate (ZABAF – Zagreb Baroque Festival, ZLJV – Zagreb Summer Evenings, Heferer Festival, YES.ZGB. Zagreb, Advent in Zagreb) and booklets of concert programs within the seasons of the Zagreb Concert Directorate and the Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall.

International cooperation

The Music Information Centre is a member of the International Association of Music Information Centres or IAMIC. In association with member countries it takes part in the production of numerous joint projects, and from 2001 to 2005 the Croatian Music Information Centre led a project for making catalogues of compositions of member countries the IAMIC Annual List of Works (Jelena Vuković, editor), and from 2012 to 2016 took part in the Minstrel Project (MusIc Network Supporting Transnational exchange and dissemination of music Resources at European Level) financed by the European Union (a programme of the European Commission for Culture and Education Culture 2012 – 2015, in which twelve countries participated (Greece, Slovakia Poland, Austrian Cyprus, Belgium, Slovenia, Czechia, Portugal, Croatia and Latvia) The MIC regularly takes part in the annual meeting, conference and general assembly of IAMIC, which is held each year in one of the member countries. The IAMIC currently has 37 member countries, among which there are several extra-European countries (Australia, the USA, New Zealand, Canada, Israel, India, the SAR).