Looking Back at 2015

Thursday, January 14, 2016

The year 2015 is behind us, so we’d like take a moment to look at the stories that helped shape the past twelve months. We enjoyed a year full of thousands of new musical sources in the RISM database, exciting discoveries from our users, and fantastic new databases and digital collections.

The five most popular stories that we published on our website in 2015 were:

1. New CD Box Set: The RISM Complete Incipits Edition (our April Fool’s joke)
2. ‘Earliest’ polyphonic music discovered in British Library - published in partnership with our colleagues at the British Library
3. New Discoveries of Vivaldi in Dresden - by RISM user Francisco Javier Lupiáñez Ruiz
4. Digitized Opera Scores at the German Historical Institute in Rome - by our colleague Roland Pfeiffer at the DHI
5. Antonio Cesti’s Orontea- our spotlight on an opera that was playing in Frankfurt

But in 2015, the story more popular than any other story (from any year), was “Listen to the world’s oldest piano” from 2014.

These posts show the cooperation we enjoy with our RISM partner institutions as well as RISM users like you.

Social media highlights:

1. Christoph Graupner’s unfinished (!) canon with 5,626 inversions
2. The Bodleian Library’s entire maps and music collection now searchable online- from the IAML (UK & Irl) blog
3. The Portuguese Early Music Database: free access to a large number of manuscripts with musical notation written before c. 1650 preserved in many different libraries and archives in Portugal and surrounding Spanish locations
4. The “original” source of a familiar Christmas tune? “Reno erat Rudolphus” from medieval times
5. Original Mozart autograph found in Budapest: an interview (2014) with our RISM Hungary colleague Balázs Mikusi

RISM in Publications
RISM was also mentioned in the following articles, which we have listed on the RISM bibliography:

• Capelle, Irmlind and Kristina Richts. “Kontextuelle Tiefenerschließung von Musikalienbeständen mit MEI und TEI. Einblicke in das Detmolder Hoftheater-Projekt.” Forum Musikbibliothek 36, no. 2 (2015): 20-26.
• Chae, Hyun Kyung. “From the First [最初] to the Best [最高]: Ewha Music Research Institute.” Ewha’s Research Power for Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences (February 2015). Available online.
• Gustar, Andrew. “Quantitative perspectives.” Early Music 43:2(2015):365-66. Available online.
• Lisken-Pruss, Marion. “Pater Dariusz Smolarek erforscht geistliche Musik.” Rheinische Post, August 11, 2015. Available online.
• Martin, Cheryl. “CAML 2015 Annual Report: RISM Canada.” CAML Review 43:2 (August 2015): 18. Available online.
• Nägele, Reiner. “FID Musikwissenschaft an der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek.” Bibliotheksmagazin. Mitteilungen aus den Staatsbibliotheken in Berlin und München (2015/2): 10-13. Available online.
• Rose, Stephen, Sandra Tuppen, and Loukia Drosopoulou. “Writing a Big Data history of music.” Early Music (2015). doi: 10.1093/em/cav071 Available online.
• Schmitz, Christina. “Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium – Schreiber- und Wasserzeichenforschung im digitalen Zeitalter: Zwischen wissenschaftlicher Spezialdisziplin und Catalog enrichment.” Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie 62:1 (2015): 49-53. Available online in 2016.

We are always interested in hearing about work from our RISM national groups as well as news about manuscripts and other historical sources. If you have anything you’d like to share, please drop us a line.

Image: Postcard, 1909. Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “A happy New Year.” New York Public Library Digital Collections.

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Category: New at RISM

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