Future Memories: Lotoro's journey to discover music written in concentration camps continues in the UK

Francesco Lotoro all'Imperial War Museum di Londra

Francesco Lotoro 's journey in search of music composed in concentration camps and other places of civilian and military captivity around the world stops in the United Kingdom . The project "Future Memories: Lotoro's Journey to Save the Lost Music," of which this journey is also part, is promoted by the Fondazione Istituto di Letteratura Musicale Concentrazionaria ETS and supported by the Claims Conference (New York), the Puglia Region, the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe (London), the Righteous Persons Foundation (Los Angeles), and the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (Paris) . The journey was undertaken together with Donatella Altieri , head of management of the ILMC Foundation.

In the photos: Francesco Lotoro at the VWML Library and on the streets of London; photo portrait of Herman Leopoldi

A copy of CDs 23 and 24 of the Roy Palmer Collection , one of the most comprehensive phonographic collections containing, on those two CDs, songs composed by British prisoners of war in Japanese camps during the Second World War, was acquired from the VWML Library in Cecil Sharp House 2. On the same day, a light rail journey was made to King's College, Cambridge, to consult the collection of works written by Jewish composers deported to the concentration camps and British soldiers interned in Stalags and Oflags. The Papers of Ronald Edmund Balfour, Gertrude Kingston, George Williams, Reginald William Pole, John Reginald Lang-Hyde, Brigadier Robert E. Loder, Alan Noel Latimer Munby, Oliffe Legh Richmond, Philip Fitz, Hugh Radcliffe, John Edwin Nixon, and Edward Joseph Dent were consulted; at the end, scans of the selected materials were requested.

In the photos: Cambridge and some scores recovered at King's College

The next day, it was the turn of the Research Room at the Imperial War Museum , where consultation of paper and audio materials had already been booked. Scanning was not permitted, so the available manuscripts were photographed with a smartphone and selected, from the hundreds of files not yet consulted, those that could be downloaded online, and those requiring a request to the Research Room. The operation took three days of work. Since it was impossible to travel to the Vienna Holocaust Library due to time constraints, the Vienna Holocaust Library was asked to scan the musical materials of the Austrian-Jewish composer Hermann Leopoldi (deported to Dachau) and send them online.