Musical Collections in the Jagiellonian Library Through the Ages
Monday, July 15, 2019
RISM is heading to Kraków this week for the IAML congress hosted by the Jagiellonian University. A full week is planned with congress sessions, excursions, and concerts, and a special highlight will be an exhibit in the Jagiellonian Library:
The exhibit will show a selection of musical manuscripts and printed books with music kept at the Jagiellonian Library (PL-Kj). The exhibition will “illustrate a chronology of acquisition and growth of the collection as well as to show historical changes in the profile of the amassed collection.” The library plays a particularly important role as being a Bibliotheca patria to preserve items of cultural importance in Poland. The exhibit will be on view until 26 July 2019.
There are 6,700 items in RISM from the Jagiellonian Library. While this number includes only ca. 70 manuscripts so far, the rest reflect the rich holdings of printed music editions housed at the library. Many of these editions are relatively new to RISM: when RISM work in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in published inventories of printed anthologies and single-composer prints (A/I, B/I, B/II), it was not known at the time that the Jagiellonian Library was home to a large collection of printed music that was owned by the Preußische Staatsbibliothek in Berlin before World War II. (Other editions already in the Jagiellonian Library before the war were included in the A and B volumes, however.) The publication of Aleksandra Patalas’s important catalog in 1999 documented all of the early music prints (to 1700) of this provenance, and these ca. 2,500 titles (excluding the German hymn books) have been added to RISM relatively recently. Patalas’s catalog continues to be indispensable as we work on improving our coverage of printed music in our database.
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