About the Brocktorff Project

The BROCKTORFF artists and lithographers are especially well known for their maps and detailed scenes of daily life in nineteenth-century Malta. Before the spread of photography, tourists must have loved returning home with a Brocktorff watercolour or lithograph (such as these below), as a souvenir of their travels to Malta.

                                                                               

                                      Country man & woman                                Windmill

Less known is the fact that the Brocktorff family also printed music in their lithographic presses. Their story of music printing starts around 1832 and spans a good part of the nineteenth century, until the death of the last Brocktorff lithographer in 1893. No other local lithographer of the time attempted music printing. 

The 'BROCKTORFF PROJECT - Music Printing' aims at:

1.     Conserving, treating, storing and digitising the Brocktorff printed music in the Anna Borg Cardona collection, thereby preserving it for the future. Some of this music is not available in any other collections.  

2.       Photographing professionally all the front covers of the music
    a) in the Anna Borg Cardona collection, and also 
    b) those scattered in other private and public collections.

          These photographs will be in preparation for a publication.  

3.      Writing and publishing this new research on the Brocktorff music printing throughout the nineteenth century, including a catalogue of their printed music.

4.       Performance - This music was created to be heard. We hope to end the project with a selection of this music performed by the Ġukulari Ensemble

5.    Exhibition - we would love to exhibit some of this sheet music

6.    Blog - Alongside the project, this blog will be providing a broader view of music printing.  It will be highlighting our fragile paper heritage and the importance of its conservation; looking at the different forms of music printing and the way music was bound. There will be special focus on lithographic music printing and the wonderful music covers/title pages which were so popular in the nineteenth century.

This Project involves the expertise of several people. Apart from years of research by Anna Borg Cardona, it involves paper conservation and storage by Dr Theresa Zammit Lupi,  the professional photography of Peter Bartolo Parnis, a publication by MidSea Books, a performance by the Ġukulari Ensemble, and filming of the performance by Massimo Denaro. 

We have dreams, but this all requires funding. We sincerely hope that enough funds will help us accomplish all this work which we know will add so much to our knowledge of MALTA'S MUSIC HISTORY and to our priceless CULTURAL HERITAGE.  

Still way to go, but we have been able to commence the initial stages of the Brocktorff Project through the kind support of:

• APS BANK   www.apsbank.com.mt                  
• GANADO ADVOCATES                 
• MR ROBERT VON BROCKDORFF

To these I would now like to add THE MALTA BOOK FUND 2023 that will be funding the Publication. 

THANK YOU!