New Volume in RISM's Series B: Balinese Palm-Leaf Manuscripts

Thursday, October 29, 2015

RISM announces the newest volume in its publication series B, which presents bibliographies of musical sources organized by topic:

Tilman Seebass, Catalogue raisonné of the Balinese Palm-Leaf Manuscripts with Music Notation. RISM B/XVI. Munich: Henle, 2015. 309 p. ISBN 978-3-87328-155-4

The sixteenth volume in series B, RISM’s first ethnomusicological publication, describes palm-leaf manuscripts (lontars) from Bali. This all-natural music must survive the challenging climate in Indonesia. Since the palm leaves can decay within three generations, the tradition of making copies, transliterations, and reproductions of lontars is essential to their survival.

Seebass, who himself copied lontars for over a decade, uses Latin letters to differentiate between the Balinese tonal systems. Generous indexes facilitate comparison of the manuscripts. Music lontars are described in this catalog from collections in Indonesia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States.

If you are curious about what palm-leaf manuscripts look like, watch this brief video that was filmed at Udayana University in Bali:

Share Tweet Email

Catégorie: Nouveautés


Browse the news archive by category below or use the search box above.

Categories

Top posts

- Joseph Bologne’s “L’Amant Anonyme”
- The Public Domain in 2023
- Scott Joplin and the St. Louis World’s Fair
- The Vienna State Opera in 1955
- Elizaveta, Elisabeth, and Elizabeth

Featured posts

- A Word about RISM
- Chopin Heritage in Open Access
- Sarah Levy
- Discovering Vivaldi Sources
- Finding Unica in RISM

Send us your news

Share your news with RISM and reach an international community of scholars, musicians, librarians, and archivists. Find out more here.

Copyright

All news posts are by RISM Editorial Center staff unless otherwise noted. Reuse of RISM’s own texts is permitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. In all other cases, please contact the individual author.

CC_license