News archive
RISM in Africa
The 2024 IAML Congress in Stellenbosch, South Africa marked several firsts: the first time a IAML Congress took place on the African continent, the first time so many of our colleagues from Africa could participate in a IAML event, and for many IAML members it was our first time in...
29 August 2024 – Events
The Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival greets Venice with a hearty “Moin”
The motto of this year’s Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, which runs until 1 September, is “Moin Venedig” – juxtaposing a characteristic North-German greeting with the distant “Pearl of the Adriatic.” Accordingly, the festival focuses on music directly or indirectly related to Venice, as with Gustav Mahler’s 5th Symphony, which (together with...
22 August 2024 – Events
Statement on Current Media Reports Concerning the Financial Perspectives of RISM after 2025
Over the past few days, reports and opinion pieces on the current and future situation of the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) have been circulating in various media. The catalyst was an article by Christiane Wiesenfeldt in the Feuilleton section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z.) published in print...
14 August 2024 – New at RISM
Herrnhut is World Heritage
On Friday, 26 July, Herrnhut became a UNESCO World Heritage Site! To be more precise, the settlements of the Moravian church in Herrnhut were added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list: Christiansfeld in Denmark has been on the list since 2015, and now Gracehill in Northern Ireland, Bethlehem in Pennsylvania, and...
8 August 2024 – In the news
Preserving Ukrainian musical heritage
In January we reported on an initiative of the German Musicological Society (GfM) to help Ukrainian institutions preserve their musical heritage. This time we are pleased to share the news that, at the instigation of RISM and the GfM, the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv (RISM library siglum:...
1 August 2024 – In the news
The Performance Material for Richard Wagner's “Tristan and Isolde” in Dresden
Tonight, the Bayreuth Festival opens with Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. A good opportunity to take a brief look at the sources of this work described in RISM. The composer prepared his first sketches as early as 1857, and an autograph album leaf, written in Paris in 1860, can now...
25 July 2024 – Events
‘The Seven Last Words of Christ’ by Haydn and Barbieri
An ambitious digitization project targeting the musical heritage collections of the National Library of Spain has provided access to 31,000 musical sources that were long accessible only in the reading room, thereby inspiring both musicians and scholars to new discoveries. In the following we reprint from the library’s blog –...
18 July 2024 – Library collections
What an anniversary year is good for
The following text by Eberhard von Oppen originally appeared on the Carus-Blog and is reproduced here with the publisher’s kind permission. The tendency to focus on “round” time intervals according to the globally dominant decimal system and celebrate the respective anniversaries is as widespread as it is justifiable, since the...
11 July 2024 – Events
A Musical Guide to the European Football Championship
On 14 June the European Football Championship 2024 started in Germany. 24 national teams had qualified for it; in the meantime two thirds of them have been eliminated. Now we look forward to the quarter- and semifinals, culminating in the final on Sunday, 14 July 2024. In the two-day break...
4 July 2024 – Events
New RISM Sigla for South African Institutions
The IAML Congress in Stellenbosch, South Africa, is underway. In anticipation of the congress, we have used the Directory of South African Music Collections by Santie de Jongh to update our sigla for South Africa. As part of our work to document musical sources worldwide, RISM assigns an abbreviation, called...
27 June 2024 – New at RISM