Spie

Patronage

SPIE has been supporting the Royaumont Foundation's ambitious art projects for the last ten years. For example, the recently-opened François-Lang music library offers performers and music scholars the only facilities of their type in Europe.

• In recent years, SPIE has provided backing for the Foundation's musical programmes, with particular focus on the discovery and promotion of young singers, instrumentalists and composers from all over Europe. The Royaumont Foundation is Europe's leading centre for cultural encounters, with a network of 43 historic buildings in 12 European countries.
• Since 2006, SPIE has scaled up its patronage activities, beginning with the decision to provide operational support for the library that houses the François Lang music collection. This major privately-owned French music collection, which was built up shortly before the Second World War, contains almost 1,300 handwritten and printed documents spanning the 16th to 20th centuries. Highlights include handwritten music and signed correspondence by Fauré, Debussy, Berlioz, Weber and Liszt, the annotated score of Debussy's Pelléas et Melisande, and original scores by prominent French baroque composers such as Couperin and Rameau, and by the leading lights of the German romantic school, including Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann.

• Supporting the development of the Royaumont Foundation

  SPIE has implemented a "virtual library" solution featuring all of the Group's institutional publications and sales literature. A trial conducted when the music library opened in 2008 demonstrated the feasibility of applying this solution to the library's documents, in order to give the general public online access to the Royaumont Foundation's musical works. Users will be able to turn the virtual pages of annotated orchestral scores, which will be synchronised with one or more renditions and enhanced with informative multimedia content.