Introducing a Work Level in RISM: Abstracts
Conference and Workshop, 9-11 May 2019
Thursday, May 9
Constanze Schumann (Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek) and Jürgen Kett (Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek)
Work Titles in the GND (Gemeinsame Normdatei/German Integrated Authority File)
A general introduction will be given to the German Integrated Authority File (rules, experience, partnerships) and the perspectives connected to this (strategies, current developments, opportunities for participation). In so doing, we will focus on authority records for works and select some examples from music.
Caroline Shaw (The British Library)
The Musical Work: Pragmatic Approaches to an Abstract Entity
One of the tensions of cataloguing has always been that between emphasis on the source and recognition of the work it contains. The cataloguing content standard RDA (Resource Description and Access) focuses on new ways of capturing and clarifying this relationship, among others.
Music librarians have long used uniform titles as a means of collocating works. The uniform title is not a piece of musicological scholarship, but a pragmatic construction intended to facilitate scholarship. RDA provides a continuum between historic best practice and new ways of regarding, recording and manipulating work level information. Based on the four bibliographic entities Work, Expression, Manifestation, Item and, crucially, their relationships to each other, and to other entities such as persons, corporate bodies, places and subjects, it aims to make these entities function as linked data in the web environment. Related conceptual models (IFLA Library Reference Model, ICA Records in Contexts) and developing systems (BIBFRAME, RIMMF) also support linked (or graph) data.
“Work”, in the RDA model, is an abstract entity, not perceivable until expressed by notation or performance. Work-level metadata can enable discovery of sources of a work and also of related works and expressions (for example, editions, arrangements, sound recordings of performances, derivative works, and books and articles which have the work as a subject).
The work concept is fluid, and certainly not universally applicable, but it is a crucial element of any metadata relating to intellectual or artistic content.
Kevin Kishimoto (Stanford University, USA) and Trina Thompson (Independent Scholar, USA)
Superworks, Subworks, and Works with Fuzzy Edges
Work titles (i.e., work “access points” in RDA) are useful for collocating differentiated manifestations of a single “conceptual work” and are an important tool in music discovery. However, the utility of the work title is limited by our current “flat” encoding standard and cataloging practices.
From the metadata librarian’s perspective, there is often no way to adequately describe fraught work relationships (e.g., certain variants, fragments, sketches, and quotations) without using free-text notes—which are not machine-actionable. From the researcher’s perspective, this means that much work knowledge created by others must often be laboriously reconstructed/reassembled at the beginning of a new project.
Citing examples from Mahler, Debussy, and others, we demonstrate some of the weaknesses of the current “flat” approach to the work and suggest ideas for how RISM might record work metadata in more powerful ways.
Friday, May 10
María Teresa Delgado Sánchez (Biblioteca Nacional de España)
Standardization in the National Library of Spain: Name Authority Headings and Name-Title Authority Headings in Musical Works
The National Library of Spain (BNE) is at the head of the Spanish library system and is responsible for the bibliographic heritage of Spain as acquired through legal deposit. Dedicated to gathering, cataloging and conserving bibliographic collections, it holds around thirty million publications produced within the national territory since the beginning of the 18th century: books, magazines, maps, engravings, drawings, brochures, and scores.
As an institution with 300 years of history, the BNE guarantees that its musical heritage is preserved as part of the memory of our country. Our institution keeps valuable collections of music books, printed and manuscript scores, as well as magazines and minor publications (brochures, concert programs, catalogs of editors, etc.). Together, the written music collections of the National Library of Spain constitute one of the largest Spanish collections of the specialty.
In this paper, we will describe the management of authority records for musical works created in Spain within the collection of notated music that comes from the whole State, since we are the depositary library according to the Law of Legal Deposit (1958). Our institution, moreover, is already working on modern monographs using the new RDA regulations and music materials will also be described according to this standard.
Maria Aslanidi (Ionian University, Greece) and Michalis Stefanidakis (Ionian University, Greece)
The Library Reference Model and MARC 21 Format for Authority Data: A Case Study on the (Musical) Work Entity
In this study, MARC 21, as aligned to Resource Description and Access (RDA), is compared against the new IFLA Library Reference Model (IFLA LRM) in an effort to explore whether the latter can serve its purpose effectively as a suitable conceptual model for authority metadata in the domain of musical works.
The study proposes an approach regarding how IFLA LRM can best communicate the semantics of (Musical) Work entities to the MARC 21 community. In particular, the paper demonstrates best practices and identifies transition issues during the process of applying LRM as an implementation model for the conversion of MARC records within existing catalogues, emphasizing the (Musical) Work entity.
Nancy Lorimer (Stanford University Libraries, USA)
A Multitude of Works: Modelling Musical Works in BIBFRAME
As part of the Mellon-funded Linked Data for Production grant, Stanford Library led a sub-project with the aim of developing an extension to BIBFRAME to address the modelling of music resources. While aimed primarily at performed music resources, the most substantial work of this group also could be applied equally to notated music, particularly in the areas of medium of performance, musical events, and musical works. In this presentation I discuss the modelling developed by the project group to link and cluster works and work components in a way that better represents work to work relationships in music, while remaining compatible with standard BIBFRAME, FRBR and IFLA-LRM. Further, I will further discuss how a similar model is being applied to works of all types in MARC data conversion and transformation that will provide a data pool for catalogers working in Sinopia, the editor being developed for Linked Data for Production 2: The path to implementation.
André Guerra Cotta (UFF-CAPES/UNL-CESEM, Brazil)
Considerations on the Work Level, International Standards and ISWC
Although one should approach the concept of a “work” in the field of music critically as a historical construct, this concept fits most of the music registered in the sources which RISM intends to gather in its international database. Of course, one can think of the work concept as a “capitalist commodity” or even as evidence of “old-fashioned” musical performance, surpassed by more dynamic and digitally adapted musical practices. On the other hand, as occurs in almost all fields of art, especially in music, digital technologies have drastically changed the music market itself, eventually leading all music practices to digital streaming services like YouTube, Spotify, and other web-based services. In these media, the concept of the work prevails and is connected by the systematic use that the music industry makes of the International Standard Work Code (ISWC). This presentation discusses some reflections on the use of ISWC in music cataloguing.
Katrin Bicher (SLUB Dresden, Germany), Andrea Hartmann (SLUB Dresden, Germany), and Sylvie Reinelt (SLUB Dresden, Germany)
Work Authorities Workshop in SLUB/RISM
Authority records for musical works allow that which belongs together to be identified and brought together. Moreover, knowledge that can be reused in a variety of ways is carried in their contextual information that serves to disambiguate. The model that serves as the basis of authority records for musical works in the GND (Gemeinsame Normdatei, Integrated Authority File), the IFLA Library Reference Model (IFLA LRM), offers space for different stages of a work as well as the ability to link them to one another. The concept of the IFLA LRM and its application in the GND, as well as examples of their use in other contexts, will be presented (Katrin Bicher).
This part of the presentation, which is dedicated to more general structures, will be elaborated upon using specific questions that arise when linking the sources in RISM with other forms of the same work using work authorities (Andrea Hartmann): work authorities for operas, excerpts from operas, arrangements, and translations will be presented. Using examples, the approach of the GND will be presented. It will be discussed how the work authorities of the GND should be used for the RISM database, which additions could be useful, and what benefit this has for the RISM database.
The final part will treat concrete data mapping (Sylvie Reinelt): which data from the GND will be transferred to which fields in RISM and which data will not be transferred? Where are problems in the implementation?
Kristin Herold, Johannes Kepper, Kristina Richts
MEI Metadata in RISM
In November 2017, the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) organized an international workshop at the Akademie in Mainz to coordinate the use of music-related metadata. A large number of edition projects and institutions, archival and cataloging projects, and the large (music) libraries participated. A working group at this workshop focused specifically on the requirements of records for works so that these can be used in various contexts. In addition to the workshop, further working meetings took place, such as at the IAML congress in Leipzig and the Edirom Summer School in Paderborn (both in 2018). An aspect that is discussed again and again in this context is the question of to what extent RISM can and should offer an organizational framework for a centralized way of providing and managing authority files for works. If RISM is now planning to introduce such a work level, it would be extremely important to consider the discussions that have taken place so far in this respect in order to ensure international connectivity, especially with digital musicological projects.
Peter Stadtler (Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe, Germany), Irmlind Capelle (Universität Paderborn, Germany), and Kristina Richts (Universität Paderborn, Germany)
Creating Work Titles in the Context of Digital Musicological Editions
The projects Detmolder Hoftheater (Detmold Court Theater) and Carl Maria von Weber Gesamtausgabe (WeGA) will be used as examples to demonstrate how digital musicological projects deal with work titles. Even through both projects have a somewhat different focus (the Court Theater project more with cataloging and the WeGA more with editions), both have in common creating works and work titles using data standards from the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI). MEI has supported the FRBR entities from Group 1 since its Version 3.
It is relevant for both projects to be able to link work headings with external resources. For some time now, the GND (Gemeinsame Normdatei, Integrated Authority File) has offered its own entity type “musical work,” which is used as an external identifier to establish cross-project relationships. At the manifestation level (which, for manuscripts, is the same as the item level), both projects use RISM identifiers to enable linked data approaches. A pragmatic concept of the work is helpful to crosslink musicological datasets; a concept that is too narrow, on the other hand, would lead to individual data silos.
David Day (Brigham Young University, USA), Jeff Lyon (Brigham Young University, USA), and Greg Reeve (Brigham Young University, USA)
Work Authority Records and the Application of Linked Data Models
Conceived almost seventy years ago, RISM’s original objective consisted in the creation of an inventory of musical sources, i.e., a union catalog of specific print and manuscript objects associated with their library locations. With the passage of time and the evolution of descriptive standards (including RISM’s own cataloging rules, multiple MARC formats, evolving XML schema, RDA, FRBR, and linked data models), the basic RISM structure can now be re-envisioned to achieve its full contemporary potential. One foundational concept that requires rethinking is the approach to work authority. The current FRBR model of works, expressions, manifestations, and instances were not inherent in the original RISM platform. Until recently, RISM remained focused on the notion of sources as discrete objects and work relationships were only loosely established. In order to achieve the potential promise of linked data interrelationships, the concept of a work with multiple expressions and manifestations should be adopted. Adapting RISM to the FRBR model will be problematic in some areas, especially for pastiche and arrangements which can be considered as manifestations of other works. The work authority dilemmas of compositional adaptions can be illustrated in numerous examples of pastiche ballets and vaudevilles. Similar problems can be demonstrated in arrangements for the harp and other solo instruments based on popular folk and opera melodies. Other work-related challenges can be found in current national authority files and VIAF. Often the complexities of work authority are compounded when different derivatives works are lumped together in a single authority record. Solutions to these obstacles can be found in revised expectations for national work authority records and the application of linked data models. Rethinking RISM (and work authority generally) using these conceptual models offers the promise of a resource that facilitates research beyond the limited identification of specific documents. Beginning with its remarkable data set of primary sources, RISM can be expanded to offer exceptional connectivity to external digital resources, biographical and historical context, and tools for the analysis of musical relationships. Our presentation will offer specific examples of how to achieve these goals.
Richard Smiraglia (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Institute for Knowledge Organization and Structure Inc., USA), Marnix van Berchum (University of Utrecht, The Netherlands), J. Bradford Young (Institute for Knowledge Organization and Structure Inc., USA), Andrea Scharnhorst (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Netherlands), and Ronald Siebes (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Composers and Musical “Works” in the Linked Open Data Cloud
This paper discusses particularities which occur in the transformation of digital musicological resources into Linked Data format. The concrete case we discuss concerns the Computerized Mensural Music Editing (CMME) database and its transformation into Linked Open Data (LOD) done in the Digging into the Knowledge Graph project. As usual the workflow starts with mappings leading to an RDF (Resource Description Format) graph representation. To enrich the RDF, best practice is to re-use vocabularies, either generic or domain-specific ones, and when possible those which are curated resources themselves. In this paper, we focus on the case of the composers, the authors of musical works. CMME lists 438 composers (from Agricola to Nicolaus Zoilo, and the ubiquitous “anonymous”), and 3,671 identifiable individual musical works. We chose to link composers and works to curated access points in the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). Compiled and maintained as LOD by OCLC, Inc., the VIAF is a merger of the authorized access points found in national library authority files. We found that of the 438 composers, only 324 were represented in VIAF. This paper reports on our experiences to set up partnerships with those library organisations which curate authority files, such as the Library of Congress Name-Authority Cooperative (NACO). We report about the different viewpoints, priorities, and disentangled workflows we encountered in bringing new research concerning the documentation and presentation of musicological resources together with traditional ways to curate those resources. We discovered the importance of the complex role of the musical work, which differs from the exemplar of a musical idea (e.g., CMME) to the exemplar of instantiated sound (e.g., NACO). In particular, we discuss the impact of this complexity on our endeavours to find and define semantically rich expressions for the composers.
Andrew Horwitz (RILM Office, USA)
RILM: Interlinking Metadata Across Music Research Collections
RILM has expanded beyond the flagship RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, introducing full-text journal content, encyclopedia content, and a printed music index—each containing many thousands of work titles—into our ecosystem. This new content has been interlinked in a variety of ways: For example, encyclopedia headwords have been linked to RILM Abstracts indexing terms, composer names in the Index to Printed Music are assigned the same identifiers as they have in RILM Abstracts, and we have developed both a common thesaurus and storage format to facilitate the cross-referencing of metadata. While our linked data covers a variety of bibliographic information, we have found it difficult to parse the metadata needed to link work titles across multiple collections. In this paper, we present the accomplished and ongoing work involved in linking our collections, as well as the challenges we have yet to solve.
Emmanuel Signer (King’s College London, UK)
Ceci n’est pas un titre. Or: What We can Learn from Titles in Early Modern Printed Music
Various current databases of music printed during the Early Modern period contain paratextual information on the way how musical compositions are presented in printed books. Such information includes transcriptions of title pages, dedications, as well as titles, performance instructions, or also incipits or full transcripts of the sung text. This provides scholars with large datasets, an immensely useful resource, the evaluation of which allows to explore topics such as notation and material culture, compositional practice, and social contexts of music printing and patronage.
This paper will focus on a special kind of title within Early Modern repertoires: the titles, or ‘names’, of polyphonic settings of the mass ordinary, as they appear in printed music books from the sixteenth century onwards (and earlier, in the case of manuscript sources). Based on findings from my recently completed PhD thesis Polyphonic masses in Italian music printing 1550-1650: A ‘Big Data’ approach to paratext (2019), I will present a few examples that illustrate the possibilities of a paratextual database of titles for the historiographical discussion of style and composition in the period around 1600.
Based on this, I hope to start a discussion of the ‘work’ concept and its limitations regarding such Early Modern repertoires. These limitations have two main dimensions: On the one hand, Early Modern music in general is often problematic as a ‘work’ due to varying attitudes towards the notated text, its performance, and through this, its title (as explored by John Butt, and others). And on the other hand, masses constitute a particularly problematic ‘work’ concept, as has been the subject of an extensive scholarly debate about cyclicity in the last decades.
Although I will not delve into this debate in much detail, the problematic character of Early Modern mass repertoires will serve as the platform to ask questions relevant to current topics of Digital Musicology: If we have titles of musical pieces that might convey information about their compositional design, could this be of interest to (or even a responsibility of) scholarly databases, library catalogues, and other such corpora? What are the possibilities, challenges and limitations associated with the incorporation of such data? And are methodologies developed from Early Modern repertoires translatable to those of other periods or notated media?
Saturday, May 11
Daniel Boomhower (Dumbarton Oaks, USA)
J. S. Bach, the Meanings of Print, and the Implications for Work Records
Within the compositional output of J. S. Bach examples are plentiful where the composer revised, re-used, or re-composed existing music to serve a new purpose, producing a complicated complex of musical sources. For most of Bach’s keyboard compositions an endless number of contemporaneous variants survive, while all of the surviving Mass settings by Bach exhibit extensive parody of both secular and sacred cantata movements. More complex are instances such as the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244), for which a unitary source masks the complex origins of the composition, or the St. John Passion (BWV 245), for which surviving sources document a more protean identity than the unifying title and catalog number suggest. At the same time, some of Bach’s acknowledged masterpieces appear to reflect singular compositional acts and survive in cohesive contemporaneous editions. The Goldberg Variations (Clavier-Übung IV, BWV 988), for example, exhibits impressive internal musical cohesion and was printed under the composer’s supervision. However, Bach’s manuscript insertion of an additional fourteen canons (BWV 1087) into his personal copy of the Goldberg Variations belies the stability of the text suggested by the printed edition. Nineteenth century editions of the Mass in B Minor, the St. Matthew Passion, and the St. John Passion similarly obscur the fluidity of the music materials that make up these compositions. These circumstances can complicate efforts to establish discrete identities for compositions and to clarify hierarchical relationships between a work and its sources. However, these complications stem less from the inherent messiness of source materials and more from the changing social and economic functions of music. Examining the changing use of print helps to clarify how this conundrum developed. While work records serve an essential role in collocating sources, this paper seeks to evaluate the implications of hierarchically defined relationships in source cataloging by highlighting how ahistorical conceptions of musical works emerging in the nineteenth century continue to inform thinking about source materials.
Luca Lévi Sala (Université de Montréal, Canada)
The Textual Tradition of Muzio Clementi’s Output: Consistency and the Problem of the Work Title
“Tyson 1967” is the most recent and precise reference catalogue of Muzio Clementi’s whole output to date, yet it does not provide any genealogy of the secondary dissemination of the sources. A brand-new comprehensive and annotated thematic catalogue is now in production. Hence, the adoption of proper work titles is crucial in order to provide a conclusive setting of Clementi’s works and their textual tradition.
While this is primarily aimed at fixing inaccuracies mainly related to the classification of the composer’s production of authoritative revisions of early works, arrangements and musical selections, this might prove dramatically useful in resolving redundancies and inconsistencies affecting the opus numbering and the score setting of the reissues belonging to the secondary dissemination. Such a complex network of sources often leaves wide room for adopting diversified, arbitrary or incorrect solutions that somehow still encompass modern editions and the process of cataloguing in libraries and archives.
Jacek Iwaszko (The Fryderyk Chopin Institute, Poland), Marcelina Chojecka (The Fryderyk Chopin Institute, Poland)
The “Work” in RISM within Projects of the Polska Cyfrowa POPC (2018-2020 and 2019-2021)
In our presentation we would like to discuss the use of the “work” field in RISM in relation to the current project Polska Cyfrowa POPC (2018-2020), in which the Fryderyk Chopin Institute is taking part. The Institute needs to be able to link different kinds of objects to the general “work” term for Fryderyk Chopin compositions, such as video recordings, audio recordings, photographs, manuscripts, printed music editions, and digital music transcriptions.
We would like to present how it is done in the system Collection Index + based on the Spectrum standard for the purposes of the Fryderyk Chopin Museum.
In the newest current project Polska Cyfrowa POPC (2019-2021), in which we plan to publish 6,000 digital music scores, we would like to concentrate on improving the “work” field based on the ones that already exist in the RISM database. We will discuss what features the “work” field should contain to be able to be linked within different kinds of music scores, manuscripts, and printed editions. We would like to deliberate the creation of mandatory fields that should be filled in such as author, genre, melody, and catalogue number. We will discuss the author field according to the VIAF record. The genre field should be standardized and given in the plural. We understand the melody field as the first 10 or 15 music notes from the top part of the piece that are written down with numbers indicating half-tones as an addition to the Plaine & Easie Code-notated graphic incipits. We would like to discuss catalogue information, if possible, in connection with the “work” field. Our library would like to propose what this field should be named and what required information should be provided. For further improvement, we would like to discuss other fields like “work arrangement” and “work variant” where we propose, for example, adding standardized fields such as scoring and pitch that could be connected to IMSLP abbreviations.
Ulrich Leisinger (Mozart Institut/Digitale Mozart-Edition Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Austria)
Versions and Historic Titles of Instrumental Works by W. A. Mozart
Due to a favorable source situation and the catalog of works (“Köchel-Verzeichnis”) that was first published in 1862, the musical oeuvre of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart enjoys an above-average understanding. A difficulty, however, that has been underestimated so far when cataloging Mozart sources is presented by original genre-related work titles, which is not congruent with today’s standardization practices. This is particularly true for Salzburg and Viennese forms of the serenade and divertimento, along with additional designations such as “Cassation,” “Parthia”/“Partita,” and “Nachtmusik”/ “Notturno” that only appear to be vague. A second complication is the lack, so far, of documentation that allows different versions to be identified, not only for operas in Mozart but also for many instrumental works, ranging from mere additions to the instrumentation to adding or switching movements, and his own arrangements for other performing forces. A revealing example for the confusion that arises from this can be seen in the numerous sources of Mozart’s authorized symphonic version of the Serenade KV 320, which in RISM has sometimes been assigned the genre “Divertimentos” and other times “Serenades,” and often, but by no means always, marked as “Excerpts.” In the new edition of the Köchel catalog, which is currently being prepared for publication at the Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg using preliminary work undertaken by Neal A. Zaslaw (Cornell University), versions of works will be clearly differentiated from one another for the first time, which could also be useful for RISM cataloging.
Roland Schmidt-Hensel (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Germany)
Work – Version – Individual Movement. Thoughts on Work Titles and Work-Level Records for Operas from the 18th and 19th Centuries
Standardized titles of musical works have represented an important element in cataloging music materials for a long time, ensuring that different (printed and handwritten) sources of the same work can be searched uniformly. Compared to this, the concept of work-level records goes one step further, since it aims to create entity records for individual works. This idea, however, is based on the assumption that the “original form” of the work (possibly in several versions originating with the author) can be defined clearly. While in many cases this seems viable for works that are documented in work catalogs, or are preserved in the composer’s hand or in printed editions authorized by the composer, a number of questions are raised when a clear point of reference for standardization and work identification is absent.
This is especially true for operas from the 18th and early 19th centuries. They may be preserved in various versions that are generally equally good or poorly substantiated, without always being able to tell which of these versions originated from the composer and which ones are by someone else. Furthermore, in the case of individual opera arias that have been handed down individually, it is not difficult to figure out what opera the aria is or could be from based on the text incipit and/or any roles mentioned. However, since especially Pietro Metastasio’s aria texts were often used, including to compose individual arias – whether as a compositional study, as a concert aria, or as an insertion in an opera written by the composer or someone else – a seemingly obvious conclusion about the (once) existence of a corresponding complete work can sometimes be misleading.
This presentation will give a systematic overview of these and similar cases and attempt to derive requirements for the design of a work level for cataloging such material.
Sonia Wronkowska (Polish RISM Centre, National Library of Poland)
Parody or Contrafactum? Revising RISM Guidelines for Derivative Works of Music
The RISM format gives a set of flexible tools to catalog derivative works of music. However, the abundance of derivation types results in various strategies of the use of dedicated MARC fields, which generates some issues, namely: many possibilities of cataloging a single derivation and the ambiguity of some derivations’ descriptions. The result of the cataloging process should be an extensive description of the actual work, including unambiguous identification of the prototype and a clear indication of the derivation techniques applied.
The introduction of work authority files seems to be the proper moment to review the way of describing derivative works in RISM. The aim of the paper is to initiate a discussion and revision of existing guidelines regarding derivative works of music and derivation techniques.
Gesa zur Nieden (Universität Mainz, Universität Greifswald (Germany), Jonathan Gammert (Universität Mainz, Germany)
Is it a Work? FRBR-based Work Concepts of Opera Pasticcios
After being noticeably neglected by music history, opera pasticcios are currently emerging more and more as the paradigmatic musical practice of the 18th century. Working with pre-existing material, in which different arias were combined to form a new opera using a popular libretto, brings up questions concerning not only coauthorship between composers, singers, patrons, and even the public, but also about the appropriate categorization of its various entity levels, especially since both the libretti and the individual arias underwent multiple transformations during the production process. This presentation will present possibilities for integrating the opera pasticcio genre into the FRBR model that are informed by music history and library practice, and that equally allow the unity of the configuration and its different individual parts, which are in turn part of other operas. Only in this way is it possible to cross-link and portray 18th-century opera pasticcios in terms of transfer history over the long term while including central research tools such as GND numbers.
Andrea Zedler (Universität Bayreuth, Germany)
Chameleons of Music History: Opere buffe and the Problem of Work Levels
The genre opera buffa cannot be distinguished by any kind of work stability. On the contrary: opere buffe that were originally in three acts such as Orazio were condensed for new performance venues and reduced to two acts, roles were switched or passages in dialect were removed, arias or even entire scenes were added, and then finally the resulting piece was given a new title. When dealing with the body of sources that are part of the DFG-funded project “Die Opera buffa als europäisches Phänomen. Migration, Mapping und Transformation einer neuen Gattung” (Opera buffa as a European Phenomenon: Migration, Mapping, and Transformation of a New Genre), this downright chameleonlike adaptation of the works forces one to ask whether, for example, the 1749 performance of Orazio in Munich still has anything to do with the work that was premiered in Napes in 1737.
This project, as with the SLUB Dresden’s project musiconn.performance, has chosen a performance-oriented approach in order to be able to document the spread of opera buffa outside of Italy between 1745 and 1765. A database is being set up for this and it has been planned from the outset to interface with other projects. Connecting through RISM and authority data like what the GND delivers, among others, is an essential means for the project to link to (musicological) projects on a long-term and sustainable basis. Nevertheless, it has been found that only a very small number of records exist that can be integrated into the database that contain data on opera buffa and related theater personal (the latter concerns the GND in particular). This data-resource problem and further questions that come up when cataloging the mostly handwritten works in the database will be discussed in this presentation.
Barbara Haggh-Huglo (University of Maryland, College Park, USA)
Work Titles for Church Music: Chant, Polyphony, Sacred Keyboard Music, and Their Manuscripts to 1650, using Low Countries’ Repertory as Examples
Assigning work titles to early church music is no easy matter, but a RISM policy could improve online searching with remarkable results. The problems are known: much church music is anonymous, even untitled, and it comprises material ranging from tonaries to distinct offices and/or masses for saints, votive and festal polyphonic ordinaries or ordinaries whose purpose cannot be determined, untitled organ versets, and much more. I propose using several levels of specificity in work titles, always preferring that including the most material efficiently. Single chants, polyphonic entities (individual mass movements or motets), or untitled distinct compositions, should be referred to by their text incipit, purpose if possible or necessary, or genre (untitled [sacred] keyboard work, untitled textless [sacred] vocal monophony, Salve regina, Te Deum, Obrecht Missa Maria zart), with the place and date of origin of the source if appropriate. Collections, such as chanted offices or masses in monophony or polyphonic mass ordinaries or propers or plenary cycles, should be identified as such, without naming composite parts but with liturgical destinations and text incipits to distinguish offices (Arnold Vohburg, Office of St. Emmeram Sancte Emmeramme). Manuscripts, where appropriate, should be cited by shelf number and performer destination (vocal, keyboard), not content.
Drew Edward Davies (Northwestern University, USA)
Quae est ista? Multi-Generational Responsory Collections from Mexico City
In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Hispanic Church began to foster the liturgical responsory, rather than the vernacular villancico, as the principal genre of concerted music for the Matins service. Mexico City Cathedral was seemingly one of the first institutions in the Hispanic world to produce a sizeable corpus of Matins responsories, and pioneering musicologists had interpreted that legacy, which tends to consist of cycles of eight responsories, some with invitatory and hymn, as akin to operas. However, closer attention to the sources reveals that the earliest of these responsory cycles, namely those by Ignacio Jerusalem (1707-1769), do not represent single-composer, multi-movement works, but rather collections assembled and arranged piecemeal by others in the early 19th century. For example, the Matins for the Virgin of Guadalupe attributed to Ignacio Jerusalem and dated 1764 actually contains a mix of autograph and holograph Jerusalem scores from the 1760s, contrafacts of music by Jerusalem and Giacomo Rust crafted by Antonio Juanas (c1762-c1821) around 1800, and subsequent arrangements from around 1840. While issues of authorship concerning these works have been resolved, questions of identifying the “work” in these networks of pieces persist. This presentation will attend directly to the material sources from a cataloger’s perspective and not only discuss the decisions colleagues in the Seminario de Música en la Nueva España y el México Independiente and myself recently made concerning how to represent this music in a printed catalogue, but also explore potentially innovative ways to virtually map these repertoires without imposing a single taxonomy.
Edgar Alejandro Calderón Alcantar (Conservatorio de las Rosas, Mexico)
Reflections and Challenges for Cataloging Collections of Villancicos, Cantatas and Related Genres in Musical Archives and Libraries from New Spain
Researching, cataloging and creating editions of musical sources from New Spain is relatively young, and therefore the conditions for preserving manuscripts in Mexican archives and libraries do not always make it possible to collect complete works, much less identify when multiple titles of arias and recitatives can be determined to be from the same cantata or, as the case may be, find scenes, loas, coplas, jornadas, etc. that can be linked to Comedies, Autos Sacramentales and other musical-poetic forms preserved in the Music Archive of Colegio de Santa Rosa in Morelia (MEX-MOcr). Our interdisciplinary cataloging team has managed to identify musical and poetic authors by identifying concordances with printed material and manuscripts from other documentary collections. The main objective of our project is to establish adequate criteria for the documentation and cataloging of collections of works that allow a homogeneous management with RISM and international libraries.
