New RISM Site in Germany: Tower Library, Nürtingen

Helmut Lauterwasser

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Time and again, one finds that archives and libraries with rare and interesting musical sources manage to exist under the radar of scholars. Often these are smaller church or city archives that have just recently arranged their materials and made them accessible to the public, or whose collection strengths lie in areas where one might not expect to find music. Such was found to be the case when a member of the RISM Munich office recently visited the Turmbibliothek, a library housed in the tower of the Protestant church St. Laurentius in the southern German town of Nürtingen. Albrecht Braun, the curator of the collection and a retired teacher, showed the astonished visitor a well-organized historic collection with an impressive number of incunabula and manuscripts, especially in the areas of theology and liturgy.

But the library also has plenty to offer in the field of music. There are several rare items of printed music from RISM series A/I (Individual Prints before 1800) such as EPITAPHIVM | IMP. PHILIPPI, SEX VOCIBVS, | WOLF. RAHI (RISM A/I: R 351; see picture), of which only two copies are recorded: one in Rome and one in London. There are further addenda to RISM publications B/I and B/II (printed anthologies from the 16th-18th centuries), B/VI (printed writings on music), and B/VIII (German hymns). We can very likely include two prints, a treatise and an anthology from 1658, which have not yet been recorded. In addition, the Turmbibliothek and the archives of the church choir (Kantorei) in Nürtingen hold music manuscripts (RISM A/II) and two printed collections that include texts for church cantatas and arias. Now that the RISM Zentralredaktion has assigned the new siglum D-NUEtb to the library, all of its musical sources will be fully cataloged by the RISM Munich office in this or the coming year.

If you have any questions about the Turmbibliothek at thechurch of St. Laurentius in Nürtingen, please contact the curator of the library, Albrecht Braun.

If you have any questions about the project to catalog this collection through RISM, please contact Dr. Helmut Lauterwasser.

Category: Library collections