News archive
RISM at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The following is by David Floyd, Binghamton University and Kirstin Dougan Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Kirstin Some of you may recall my presentation at IAML 2018 in Leipzig where I reported on the early findings of my institution’s work to inventory our holdings reported in RISM under...
5 May 2022 – Library collections
Franz Liszt digital
Just eleven years ago at the opening of the international conference “Der ganze Liszt – Liszt-Interpretationen,” Prof. Dr. Detlef Altenburg lamented: “Even 125 years after his death, the works of Franz Liszt—unlike the oeuvres of Ludwig van Beethoven, Hector Berlioz, and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy—have still only received insufficient scholarly attention...
2 May 2022 – Electronic resources
Conserving creativity—the case of Beethoven’s ‘Kafka’ sketch miscellany
The following originally appeared on the British Library’s Music blog (© British Library Board, Creative Commons Attribution Licence). In this blog post we look at a recent conservation project involving an important Beethoven manuscript known as the ‘Kafka’ sketch miscellany (Add MS 29801). How did the manuscript come to be...
28 April 2022 – Library collections
Revival after 267 years
We have received the following from our colleague Helmut Lauterwasser (RISM Germany): Time and again RISM cataloging brings to light compositions that have been considered lost for centuries. A case in point is the oratorio Abraham und Isaac by Gottlob Harrer (1703-1755), Johann Sebastian Bach’s direct successor as cantor of...
25 April 2022 – Rediscovered
The 2021 Annual Report
The 2021 annual report for the RISM Editorial Center has now been published. You can read the report in its entirety on the RISM website. Here are some of the highlights: The year 2021 was still overshadowed by the COVID pandemic and the diverse social restrictions inevitably also hindered RISM...
21 April 2022 – New publications
Searching by City in the RISM Catalog
The Online Directory of RISM Library Sigla makes it easy to search over 8,500 institutions that have official RISM library sigla. Library sigla are the abbreviations that RISM assigns to any institution that holds materials related to music research. See this video on YouTube for a demonstration. The sigla make...
13 April 2022 – RISM online catalog
Music Manuscripts from the Święta Lipka Collection (Poland)
Our Polish contributors at the University of Warsaw have recently finished cataloging the collection of Święta Lipka (Województwo warmińsko-mazurskie), known historically in German as Heiligelinde (East Prussia), which is preserved at the Bobolanum in Warsaw (RISM library siglum: PL-Wb). The descriptions of the sources have now been published in the...
7 April 2022 – Library collections
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BEACON Files Published
As part of its efforts to provide its users with ever more technical tools, the Bavarian State Library is now offering RISM authority data in BEACON format. Such BEACON files serve to link external data providers with RISM references. The linking element is the identifier of an authority data provider,...
5 April 2022 – RISM online catalog
Royal Library of Belgium acquires César Franck autograph manuscript
We have received the following from Marie Cornaz (RISM Belgium): Last December, the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) acquired the complete autograph manuscript of the orchestrated version of the Messe for three voices in A major by the Liège composer César Franck (1822-1890), a work listed under the reference CCF...
30 March 2022 – Library collections
Maria Malibran
Maria Malibrán (1808-1836) was born on this day 214 years ago. The German Wikipedia page calls her the “first diva in opera history” but this gives an inadequate sense of the talents of this versatile musician. A few key biographical facts are striking. Malibran was a true European. As the...
24 March 2022 – Musical anniversaries
