Looking Back on 2016

Thursday, January 12, 2017

The year 2016 was a big year for us: we released our long-awaited and well-received cataloging program Muscat, we invited thirteen colleagues to speak on the state of source research in Central and South America at the conference Documenting Musical Sources in Latin America, and we published another volume in Series B (Die Triosonate). Not to mention all the work contributed by our colleagues around the world—we will have a separate post about that later on.

Let’s take a look back at 2016. Allow us to share the top ten stories from the past year, at least from the point of view of our website statistics:
 
 
 
 

1. First Music Manuscript Discovered in Antarctica: Our April Fool’s joke (we tricked some of you!)
2. Musical Anniversaries in 2016: Don’t miss our 2017 installment!
3. Welcome, Muscat: The day we were all waiting for!
4. 18th-Century Music Manuscript “Libro Sesto” Tells of Colonial History in Chile: the fascinating story of an enslaved woman responsible for the music at her household
5. Mozart Autographs Online: To mark the 225th anniversary of the death of Mozart
6. Jane Austen’s Music Collection Now Online
7. RISM at IAML, Part 1: Muscat – (almost) ready to go: Drumming up excitement about Muscat
8. Cheryl Martin In Memoriam: We said goodbye to the coordinator of RISM Canada
9. Oldest complete Finnish songbook discovered in Dresden
10. Announcing the Bohemian Watermark Database: an ongoing project from the National Library in Prague

But in 2016—as in 2015—the post more often read than any other story, from any year, was Listen to the world’s oldest piano from 2014.

Social media highlights:

• A long-lost Mozart-Salieri co-composition has been found!: “Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia,” discovered in Prague
• Listening test to evaluate algorithms for the automatic generation of chorales in the style of Bach
• Christoph Wolff, Bach scholar extraordinaire and RISM’s honorary president, who was awarded the medal “Pour le Merité”
• How early music was printed using movable type - featuring the Plantin workshop in Antwerp:

Early music printing from Cantum Mensurable on Vimeo.

RISM in publications
RISM was also mentioned in a number of articles in 2016, including an update of the article in Grove Music Online, but also articles where RISM is used as a resource in digital humanities projects. See the full list in the RISM bibliography.

We are looking forward to a productive and newsworthy 2017!

Image: www.publicdomainpictures.net

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Category: New at RISM

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