Moving Day

Dear Friends,
It is moving day here at GOArt! Even though the elevator is not finished and the library hasn’t arrived and the alarm still likes to turn itself on at random and most of the boxes are still unpacked, it already feels like home, and now that I have found my computer screen in a box under my neighbor’s desk, I am able to share some impressions from the day.

We are situated on the hill above the Academy of Music and Drama, at the end of a short street that overlooks the City Art Museum. Walking up the old stone staircase at lunch-time, more than one of us felt a physical memory of being home, because we are now only a few meters away from GOArt’s first home almost ten years ago at the top of these same stairs in the neighboring villa on Lyckans väg. Our new building, from the early 1930s has been beautifully restored. It was the first home of the Musicology department and then served as the Ibero-American Institute and now it is filling up with music once again. Many new shelves downstairs are waiting for the largest organ research library in Scandinavia to arrive.

There is new paint and wonderful 1930s-reconstructed wallpaper and new possibilities hanging in the air. A beautiful eighteenth–century upright piano built in Göteborg has just come up the main staircase without incident. And the basement is filling up with archive material and historical clavichords, as well as two carefully moved piles of pieces that will one day once again be two nineteenth-century Swedish chamber organs.

The summer at GOArt has been busy with our bi-annual Organ Academy and preparations for this moving day, which has now finally arrived. The Organ Academy from 2009 had many highlights: Barbara Dennerlein’s Swedish premiere, an overwhelming interest in the improvised music and silent film performance of Lang’s Metropolis, accompanied by Franz Danksagmüller, the capacity crowd for the Duke Ellington Celebration, as well as one of the best participants’ concerts any of us can remember, to name just a few. In future Reports there will be more detailed information about the symposium on research in performance as well. We will have a date for the official open-house soon. For now, a brief update to announce that we have moved in and you are welcome to come and visit!