Library Božidar Kantušer

The Library Božidar Kantušer, formerly known as International Library of Contemporary Music (in French: Bibliothèque Internationale de Musique Contemporaine, B.I.M.C.), is a non-profit association chartered under the French 1901 Law on associations. It was created in 1968 to promote contemporary music by facilitating access to published and unpublished scores from around the world. For this purpose, the library centralizes (without aesthetic bias) and lists the scores, and then facilitates their discovery by computerized means. At its inception the association was subsidized by the City of Fontainebleau and the French Ministry of Culture, further by the City of Paris and the Ministry of Culture. Since 2006, the collection of scores and recordings (more than 24,500 documents in 2012) is available in Paris at the Médiathèque Hector Berlioz and through its OPAC.

« The dispersion of scores of music of our time among publishers throughout the world (and especially the fact that most of them remain in the form of manuscripts) represents an almost insurmountable obstacle for anyone wishing to obtain an exact idea of contemporary music production. Only an association of the persons actually concerned, that is to say the composers and music publishers themselves, supported by musicians and other music professionals could overcome this problem. » (Excerpt from a B.I.M.C. bulletin)

To allow the consultation of the deposited works and to establish the database necessary for the distribution of information, the library proposes to centralize the published and unpublished works of contemporary music (from the twentieth century on) and their recordings. The deposit of scores and recordings is open to all composers, without aesthetic bias, to the exclusion of pieces solely dedicated to education. The library regularly stimulates composers and publishers in depositing their works, emphasizing the promotional importance of such a deposit. In an effort of multi-centralization, of creating various consultation sites, for a few years composers and publishers were asked to submit several copies of each score. Cooperation talks were underway with the Lincoln Center, and the effort was carried out in the form of a second center in Slovenia from 1975 to 1985 (the idea was revived in 1999, then abandoned).

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