Répertoire International des Sources Musicales

Marking Music: The Use of Music Books in Early Modern Europe

2026-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

The acronym DORMEME stands for “Dissemination, Ownership, and Reading of Music in Early Modern Europe.” This interdisciplinary project – led by Dr. Elisabeth Giselbrecht at King’s College London – focuses on surviving copies of polyphony printed across Europe between 1500 and 1545, and poses diverse questions regarding their users. Who owned and read music books in early modern Europe? Who had access to printed musical material, how did they interact with it, and to what end? Keeping in mind that the period in question saw a decisive rise in musical literacy, DORMEME seeks to shift the scholarly discourse from the production of music books to their consumption, offering insights into diverse fields of music-making ranging from self-taught instrumental playing to participation in larger groups. At the same time, a database is also in the making to describe marks of ownership and annotations in surviving copies of printed editions from the period in question. For more information, see the project’s website.

DORMEME’s first conference will be held on 11 and 12 May 2026 with the title “Marking Music: The Use of Music Books in Early Modern Europe,” and registration is still possible through this link until 12 April. Furthermore, while the event is essentially an in-person one, taking place at the Strand Campus of King’s College London, interested parties can opt for auditing the papers remotely by contacting Louisa Hunter-Bradley at louisa.hunter-bradley@kcl.ac.uk before 13 April. The provisional program (available through the registration link above) promises nuanced insights into 16th-century musical life all over Europe, and will end with a panel also featuring Claudio Bacciagaluppi and Laurent Pugin from the RISM Digital Center.

Collaboration between the WEAVE project “Tartinians” and RISM supports the long-term preservation of project data

2026-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

The WEAVE research project Tartinians – The School of Nations and its networks, based at the Universities of Graz and Augsburg, as well as the Schola Cantorum in Basel, was launched in April 2025. It examines the pedagogical work of Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) and his students primarily on three levels: (1) professional biographies and networks of the students, (2) musical output, and (3) pedagogical writings. All the information about Tartini’s students is summarized in a database developed specifically for the project, their musical output is also cataloged, and Tartini’s pedagogical writings – as a rule preserved in the form of notes taken by his students which sometimes differ from one another – are also edited.

The Augsburg subproject focuses primarily on the musical output of the Scuola delle nazioni, the activities of Tartini’s students at the courts of the Holy Roman Empire, and 18th-century violin pedagogy in the light of Tartini’s teachings. Most of the musical sources collected during the project will be cataloged in RISM for the first time, while existing RISM entries will also be elaborated on.

As an example, here is a description created by the project group about a manuscript copy preserved in Vienna, featuring a duo sonata by Domenico Ferrari (1722–1780): RISM-Catalog | RISM Online.

Of particular importance for the project is the documentation of incipits, which allow for the comparison of concordances and variants, as well as the examination of melodic relationships. The collaboration with RISM ensures the long-term preservation of project data and provides an ideal starting point for in-depth data analysis in relation to the project’s key research questions. Upon completion of the project, the data collected in RISM will also be linked to the Tartinians project database.

To document the current status of our work, a project blog has been set up.

Image: First page of the Basso part from an undated manuscript of Giuseppe Tartini’s Sonata in C, No. 3, for Violino Solo e Basso, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (A-Wn), Mus.Hs.12722 MUS MAG. Source: ÖNB Digital/Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

The National Library of Spain and its Music Department collaborated with RISM to disseminate its musical heritage

2026-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Over the past 30 years, the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) collaborated closely with the RISM project. Through Nieves Iglesias and José Carlos Gosálvez the National Library participated in the team that translated RISM’s cataloging guidelines into Spanish – alongside other notable experts such as José Vicente, González Valle and Antonio Ezquerro from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Institución Milá y Fontanals de Investigación en Humanidades) in Barcelona, as well as Joana Crespí from the Library of Catalonia.

The National Library of Spain first contributed to the RISM project by reporting some copies that belonged to the early A/I series, “Individual prints before 1800.” As a more recent step of our collaboration, in the years 2024 and 2025 we added more than 2,500 bibliographic records of music manuscripts to the international database directly through Muscat, RISM’s special cataloging program. RISM’s A/II series concerns “Music manuscripts after 1600,” and today in fact admits even 21st-century materials, whereas our BNE project covered historical sources produced before 1830. The inclusion of these precious manuscripts means a significant enrichment for the RISM database, while at the same time it ensures much greater visibility for the collection of the National Library of Spain on an international level. As a special advantage, the sources now searchable in RISM have also been digitized, therefore you can explore them from your own computer, wherever you are in the world.

At the same time, the National Library of Spain – represented by its Departamento de Música y Audiovisuales – has recently become an integral part of RISM’s international structure. The latter has traditionally been based on a network of more than 30 working groups representing their respective countries, and the Spanish working group now involves two centers: the Institución Milá y Fontanals de Investigación en Humanidades and – as a new host institution – the National Library of Spain. We are delighted to assume this important new role, and look forward to actively contributing to the larger RISM community. It is our hope in particular that our assistance can help to increase the number of Spanish-language sources in RISM.

Image: Juan de Vado (ca. 1625–1691), Libro de misas de facistor (ca. 1667), Manuscript copy, Biblioteca Nacional de España, shelfmark M/1323, f. 4 Available online at Biblioteca Nacional de España, (RISM ID no. 1001313237 – RISM Catalog | RISM Online).

Music manuscripts from Cologne now linked to digitized copies

2026-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

One of the major benefits of the RISM database is the option to link the description of manuscripts and printed editions with digitized copies of the original sources, thereby allowing users to access right away the items of interest to them.

A while ago the Cologne University and City Library (RISM siglum D-KNu) provided us with a list of links to newly digitized copies, which we have promptly added to the corresponding RISM records. The collection had been cataloged for RISM in 2014; the current update significantly enhances the usability of these source descriptions by adding links to no fewer than 480 of them.

Most of the sources in question had once belonged to the collection of the Cologne musicologist Ernst Bücken (1884–1949), which the Cologne University and City Library acquired in 1950. Some of the records, however, describe sources purchased at a 1924 Cologne auction from the estate of the Bonn-based Beethoven scholar Erich Prieger (1849–1913). Overall, the most precious treasures of the collection include several manuscript scores of oratorios and sacred cantatas prepared in Central Germany in the second half of the 18th century. Among these we find Johann Georg Röllig’s Markuspassion, composed in Zerbst in 1750, which for some time was mistakenly attributed to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach RISM Catalog | RISM Online, as well as copies of Georg Benda’s Trauer-Ode (Gotha 1767) RISM Catalog | RISM Online, and the Easter cantata Der Sieg des Erlösers by Ernst Wilhelm Wolf RISM Catalog | RISM Online. Yet another outstanding treasure from Bücken’s estate is the lute tablature Livre pour le lut, a collection of 33 pieces that contains not only anonymous works but also compositions by the German lutenist Silvius Leopold Weiss RISM Catalog | RISM Online, and in conclusion it is also worth calling attention to a bulky manuscript collection of chamber cantatas by Alessandro Scarlatti RISM Catalog | RISM Online.

The links to the digitized documents are already available for research on RISM Online; from April 2026, they will also be displayed in the RISM Catalog.

Oratorio libretti in the CRAI Library of the University of Barcelona and their music

2026-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

The CRAI Biblioteca de Fons Antic at the University of Barcelona houses an extensive collection of libretti, including a group of 173 titles once performed in the Cathedral of Barcelona. However, the music associated with these texts is scattered across various libraries, some of them in Catalonia, and until recently a direct connection between the textual and musical sources could not be established in many cases. One notable exception is the oratorical output of Francesc Queralt, thoroughly examined by Xavier Daufí in his dissertation: Els oratorios des Francesc Queralt (1740-1825). Història de l’oratori a Catalunya al segle XVIII (Lledia 2004).

Any effort to reconstruct the relationship between a libretto and its musical setting raises various questions and problems, since the textual and the musical sources, respectively, often contain no clear references to each other. Therefore, their connection must be established through preliminary bibliographic enquiries enhanced by further analysis. It is usually information contained in the libretti themselves – especially the text incipits and the names of characters or actual persons – that allow for direct comparison with the corresponding information in the musical sources, and thereby clarifies the connection between them.

For the abovementioned 173 oratorio libretti from the CRAI Biblioteca de Fons Antic, this in-depth research was carried out by two students – Linus Montolio and Antonio Cruzado – of the Escola de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC) as part of a three-month internship supervised by Neus Verger, head of the CRAI library, and Oriol Brugarolas, professor at the Institute of Art History at the University of Barcelona. Their findings not only established the connection between several compositions and their respective libretti, but also clarified that, in some cases, the music for these libretti was composed by none other than Francesc Queralt. Last but not least, their investigations led to the (re)discovery of 18th-century Catalan composers such as Josep Pujol, whose biographical details remain largely unknown.

A detailed report by Linus Montolio and Antonio Cruzado was published in the Blog de Fons Antic.

To date, only a handful of works by Queralt and Pujol can be found in the RISM database. With that in mind, the cataloguing for RISM of the oratorio compositions identified in this project would be a most welcome and important addition.

Image: Queralt, Francesc: Oratorio de Sta. Ana (1778), Tiple 1.° Coro, p. 2, Biblioteca de Catalunya, M 1549/2. Available online (public domain).

Annual Report 2025

2026-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

Approaching the closure of a decades-long project for which the RISM Editorial Center received support from the German Akademienprogramm, throughout the year 2025 we were busy clarifying how the core services earlier offered by the Editorial Center (better known as RISM Zentralredaktion) could be ensured in the future. While in this regard we received fruitful feedback also from the international RISM community, among others at the copiously attended “RISM Together” session of the 2025 IAML congress, the most pragmatic discussions involved the state libraries of Munich, Dresden and Berlin, as well as the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, as part of a planning project generously financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The last details of how all essential editorial duties could be continued, are finalized in these months, but we are already well in the process of transferring knowledge from the Zentralredaktion to the partner libraries, so that the inevitable fading out of the former (thanks to a very last Auslauffinanzierung for the long-term project, now planned only for the summer of 2026) would present the least possible disturbance for the vast international community regularly relying on RISM’s services.

With these imminent changes in mind, it is little wonder that (in comparison to the profusion of some earlier years) the RISM database could only expand at a moderate pace: we currently offer slightly over 1,347,000 manuscript descriptions for research (i.e., about 30,000 more than at the beginning of last year), even though by adding also the printed editions we arrive at an impressive total of over 1.6 million source records. It is also worth noting that the increase in manuscript descriptions strongly depended on the consistently outstanding productivity of the German RISM working group – which, however, is now also in its final ‘run-down’ project phase, and is expected to deliver significantly fewer records in the future. Thus, in the coming years it remains a central concern for RISM to intensify its coverage in countries where cataloguing could only get started recently (as with the project in partnership with the Ukraine Art Aid Center, aimed at cataloging Ukraine’s endangered musical treasures) and in regions where RISM is just about to take its first steps (a case in point being Peru, from where the first manuscript descriptions were entered in our database in the fall of 2025).

Notwithstanding all the challenges affecting RISM’s editorial side and the future growth of our database, in these years we are fortunate to be able to rely also on our younger international anchor, the RISM Digital Center in Bern. Financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation to develop and maintain RISM as an open-ended research infrastructure, the Bern team does not simply provide technical support for the work of the Editorial Center, but contributes many ideas of its own, providing an additional impetus that several new features of our cataloging software Muscat amply testify for as well.

Overall, while the imminent closure of the Zentralredaktion inevitably marks the end of an era in which Frankfurt served as the hub of the RISM universe, so to speak, attendees of our annual reporting session at the Salzburg IAML congress no doubt left with the impression that, rather than phasing out, RISM has recently undergone a crucial phase of revitalization. Some of the new features presented there – from the RISM-specific work authorities through the updated version of the RISM Catalog and the latest developments in RISM Online – testified for the ever more intensive development of the technical infrastructure, while others – like the publication of RISM’s cataloging guidelines on our public website (at the moment in two languages: English and German) or the systematic revision of our institution authorities in cooperation with IAML’s national branches – also exemplified how RISM has recently moved toward more inclusivity and cooperation, a tendency that should certainly be further intensified in the future.

It is also worth mentioning that the user statistics of the RISM Catalog, which have been monitored for many years, seem to show no signs of declining – even though the same data can in the meantime be accessed through RISM Online as well. Meanwhile, there is also steady international interest in cataloging new sources for the RISM database: in our workshops offered on the side of the annual IAML congress (both in person and online) an impressively diverse group of participants from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey and the United States got a first introduction to RISM’s cataloging principles.

In conclusion it should be mentioned that, while nowadays most of our patrons use RISM through the internet, in 2025 our series of printed catalogs could be expanded by yet another seminal volume: Les mélodies de l’hymnaire médiéval – IXe–XVIe siècles – France, edited by Christian Meyer and published by Henle Verlag in Munich (RISM Series B/XIX,1).

The entire 2025 annual report of the RISM Editorial Center can be found on the RISM website.

Special exhibition with new Bach sources from Leipzig

2026-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

In a special exhibition, the Leipzig City Archive (in cooperation with the Leipzig Bach Archive and the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig) presents recently discovered and yet unknown sources in regard to Johann Sebastian Bach, Johann Christoph Gottsched and Georg Philipp Telemann. The following exhibition announcement is reproduced with the kind permission of the Leipzig City Archive.

From 3 February to 23 April 2026, the Leipzig City Archive will open its doors for a fascinating special exhibition: “More than Music - New Bach Sources in the Leipzig City Archive”. Three previously unknown manuscripts from Johann Sebastian Bach’s circle were discovered, including an original letter from the composer himself as well as important documents from Johann Christoph Gottsched and Georg Philipp Telemann. The discoveries were made by project collaborator Dr. Bernd Koska as part of the “BACH Research Portal” research project of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig, based at the Bach Archive in Leipzig. The exhibition provides new insights into Leipzig’s musical life in the 18th century: in addition to Bach’s testimony for his bass singer Gottlob Friedrich Türsch, letters and applications are on display that shed light for the first time on the institutional support of musicians by the Leipzig City Council.

A must for lovers of Baroque music and all those who wish to take a look behind the scenes of historical source research – visitors are offered here more than music: a glimpse into the world that made Bach’s work possible in the first place.

Opening hours

Admission is free and the exhibition can be viewed during the opening hours of the city archive .

Image: Bach sources in the Leipzig City Archive © City Archive Leipzig/ Christian Kern

Unknown music from Central and South America in the so-called ‘Old Schott Archive’ of the Mainz-based publishing house B. Schott’s Söhne

2026-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

As part of the joint project “Cataloging, digitization and online presentation of the historical archive of the music publisher Schott,” in 2025 the Bavarian State Library completed the cataloging of the so-called “Old Schott Archive” in the RISM database. This task was carried out with funding by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) and assisted by the Munich RISM working group.

The historical archive of the Schott-Verlag consists of approximately 4,000 individual musical works – manuscripts, printed editions (some in multiple copies), librettos, theoretical and instructional works – as well as related documents, covering the period from the late 18th century (i.e., the founding of the publishing house) to the end of the 20th century. The vast majority of the archive consists of manuscripts primarily submitted by their respective composers, which however were not accepted – or at best put ‘on hold’ – by the publisher (the correspondence preserved in the Schott business archive frequently reveals intriguing details in this regard). But there are also compositions printed by B. Schott’s Söhne on commission for other music dealers, publishers, or private individuals, which therefore formed no integral part of Schott’s publishing program. The wide geographical spread of clients is striking. B. Schott’s Söhne printed music not only for European customers from countries such as the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, but it also had contacts in Latin America. The publishing archive contains various works by South American composers, often preserved in autograph manuscripts, which served as the engraver’s copy for an edition produced on a commission basis. As a rule, these autographs contain explicit instructions for the engraver with respect to the layout, as well as notes concerning the print run and the design of the title page.

One of the important South American partners of B. Schott’s Söhne was the music dealer and publisher Manoel José da Costa e Silva from Belém, the capital of the Brazilian state of Parà. A great number of his original editions from the end of the 19th century are preserved in the “Fundo Vicente Salles” in the library of the Museum of the State University of Parà. For some of these editions, the manuscripts once sent to the engravers can now be found in the Old Schott Archive, including works by the German-born Alfred Baer (1853-1886), the Italian Enrico Bernardi (1838-1900), as well as a series of composers from Brazil: Henrique Eulálio Gurjão (1834-1885), Vicente Ruiz (1845-1892), Jerônimo de Sousa Queirós (1857-1936), Roberto de Barros (1861-1926) and Julia Cesarina Cordeiro (1867-1947). Of special interest is Enrico Bernardi’s complete piano transcription of Gurjão’s Italian opera Idalia (1881) (D-Mbs Mus.Schott.As 571, RISM ID Nr. 1001285919 - RISM Catalog | RISM Online).

Schott Verlag also had a remarkable partnership with the Chilean publishing house E. Niemeyer & Inghirami (Valparaìso), which not only maintained a representative office in Peru’s capital, Lima, but also had a branch in Hamburg, the port of which was frequented by many merchant ships from South America. This is how the autographs of five works by Claudio Rebagliati (1843–1909) also found their way to Mainz. Although born in Italy, at the age of 14 Rebagliati traveled with his father and his brothers – all of them musicians – to South America. Following an initial stay in Chile, from 1863 Rebagliati lived in Lima. According to a note penciled on the manuscript Mus.Schott.As 3085 (Il Carnevale di Venezia) from 1874, the shipping was arranged by the Chilean publishing house E. Niemeyer & Inghirami (Valparaìso) through their Hamburg office. Three of the five Rebagliati works sent to B. Schott’s Söhne were eventually published by Sonzogno in Milan; the reasons for the composer’s submitting these also to Schott remain obscure. By contrast, the two compositions for coloratura soprano and piano seem to have survived only in the Schott archive. The concert waltz Il suo sguardo Op. 11 (D-Mbs Mus.Schott.As 3087, RISM ID Nr. 1001319124 - RISM Catalog | RISM Online) is dedicated to the young soprano Teresa Ferreyra, who later became a well-known singing teacher at the conservatory in Lima. Newspapers reported that the virtuoso variations on the “Carnival of Venice” Op. 15 (D-Mbs Mus.Schott.As 3085, RISM ID Nr. 1001319082 - RISM Catalog | RISM Online) (for which no printed edition can be found, either) were sung in 1881 by the soprano Elvira Trepetto-Risolini as an insertion in the famous “singing lesson” scene of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville at the Vienna Court Opera. One way or another, the piece seems to have found its way back across the Atlantic Ocean to old Europe.

Image: D-Mbs, Mus.Schott.As 571: Henrique Eulálio Gurjão, opera “Idalia”, piano arrangement by E. Bernardi, beginning of act 1.

IAML Online Event “Researching and Cataloging Historical Bookbindings: Two Perspectives”

2026-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

The following has reached us from the IAML Online Events Committee.

The IAML Online Events Committee and the Research Libraries Section are pleased to announce a new 2026 online event on Tuesday, February 24, 2026, at 14:00 UTC/GMT. See other time zones by clicking here.

Participation is free and open to all. The registration link is included below. Registration is required to take part in the meeting. Once registered you will get the event as a calendar item in your own time.

Event: “Researching and Cataloging Historical Bookbindings: Two Perspectives”

Duration: 90 minutes

Moderator: Dr Elisabeth Hufnagel, Berlin State Library

Speakers:

Dr Magdalena Herman (Institute of Art History, University of Warsaw)

Lecture with presentation: Hidden Histories: Recycled Materials in Early Modern Bookbindings (45 min)

Description: Early modern bookbindings are far more than protective covers: they are historical documents in their own right. The first part of this lecture introduces the basic elements of bindings, including materials, structures, and the most common types of ownership marks, to help librarians recognise what is worth noting in catalogues. Even a brief description can preserve information that is invaluable for researchers: traces of provenance, evidence of local workshop practices, and, increasingly, the hidden fragments of earlier texts and objects reused within bindings. For scholars, such details often provide the only surviving witnesses to lost manuscripts, ephemeral prints, or everyday artefacts, and they can help reconstruct the movement of books across different collections. For librarians, they offer a practical way to enrich catalogues and make collections more discoverable.
The second part of the lecture focuses on case studies of recycled materials in bindings, such as manuscript waste, printed waste, and unexpected objects repurposed by binders. Examples will include fragments of liturgical manuscripts, private correspondence, and even playing cards used as structural elements. These reused materials often preserve texts or images that survive nowhere else, offering insights into reading practices, local economies, the circulation of print, and many kinds of hidden histories.

Jennifer Ward (Editorial Center, Répertoire International des Sources Musicales)

Presentation: (Un)covering the musical past: Describing bookbindings in RISM (20 min)

Description: This presentation offers practical insight into how a bibliographic database can serve the needs of librarians and researchers in terms of describing bookbindings. Bookbindings serve a basic function of protecting what’s between the covers, but they also preserve information about owners and how the books were used. Moreover, bound music materials can uncover insights into musical practice and repertoire. The database of RISM, the foremost research tool for written historical musical sources, includes descriptions of bindings for handwritten documents, printed editions, and combinations of both. Examples will be given to illustrate how RISM catalogers approach bindings and how researchers can explore them in the RISM database.

Questions to the speakers, and other information (20 min)

Zoom registration link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/ZyyjwmGIRXusy2_aciqnlw

Image: Front flyleaf of a bound volume with its owners written in, 1759. Harvard University, Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library (US-CAe) MT870 .W34 1746. RISM ID no. 900022600 (RISM Catalog | RISM Online). Available online (public domain).

First recording of nine Renaissance pieces

2026-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

In December 2025, the Basel Forum for Early Music ReRenaissance released the album Lost & Found: Rediscovered Treasures of the German Renaissance, produced in collaboration with the RISM Digital Center. This is the first recording of nine compositions from the early 16th century that were long considered incomplete. These compositions were printed by Christian Egenolff in Frankfurt in 1536. A previously unknown Tenor partbook in the Swiss National Library (call number Ma 3549) was rediscovered by Royston Gustavson and David Fallows in 2018-2019, digitised and catalogued (RISM ID no. 993114959 - RISM Online | RISM Catalog). The musicians from Basel have now brought nine of these works back to life (some of them also as video recordings). All the pieces not known from other prints were selected and have been reconstructed for the first time from the music in the partbook in Bern. Further information can be found on the RISM Switzerland website.

Image: Title page, Cantiones selectissimae (Frankfurt, 1536), Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek (CH-BEl) Ma 3549 (2). RISM ID no. 993114959 (RISM Online | RISM Catalog). Available online (public domain).