Sixty-six years of historical records from the Fort Collins Symphony are getting something new – an audience.
The collection – featuring playbills, photos, and recordings from the symphony’s beginnings through today – will be archived at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, said the symphony’s new executive director Mary Kopco.
“As I started to go through the boxes, I realized that there were a lot of wonderful historical photographs, scrapbooks, board minutes, season programs and recordings that that were just basically sitting in a storage unit and not really being accessible to either the symphony or anybody else,” Kopco said.
One of her favorite finds was an LP recording from the symphony’s 35th anniversary in 1984. The album features performances of Beethoven’s Symphony #9 Finale (Ode to Joy) and Debussy’s The Blessed Damoiselle. There’s also decades of old programs from past performances.
“There’s just lots and lots of history on Fort Collins and the symphony and the people who performed here in those programs,” Kopco said.
Including Will Schwartz. The collection will be named after Schwartz, who passed away in 2010. He was the symphony’s founder, who led the organization for 50 years until his retirement in 1999.
Making sure the items are available to the public for generations to come is important, Kopco added. Particularly to the families of the more than 1,200 musicians who have performed with the organization over the years.
“Periodically, we’ll get calls from descendants of those musicians who are interested in knowing more about their grandparent or their parent who performed in the symphony,” Kopco said. “Being able to make these records accessible to family members is super important to us.”
The symphony is one of the oldest arts organizations in Larimer County – founded in 1949 – so the museum’s archive is a fitting place for them to get the attention and the care they need, Kopco said. At the museum, archivists will be able to catalog the items and store them in a climate-controlled room in acid-free folders designed to protect them from damage caused by temperature changes, moisture and light.
“The storage unit was very secure… but paper in particular, photographs especially, are super sensitive to temperature changes as well as time,” Kopco said. “Time is the enemy of all things… They’re in a much better home.”
