News archive
The Music Printing History Online Museum
We stumbled upon this interesting online museum: Music Printing History. It details different technological aspects concerning printing music and is richly illustrated. You can see examples of the technology that brought about the historical printed music that RISM currently covers (to about 1800): woodblocks, movable type (image, left), and engraving....
12 March 2018 – Electronic resources
International Women's Day: Women Pianists in RISM
Note: This post was updated in 2022. Today is International Women’s Day. Last year we published a list of the ca. 800 women composers who are found in the RISM online database. In June we added eight more names to the list and in October another twelve were added. This...
8 March 2018 – Events
Frisian and the European Capital of Culture 2018
We have received the following from Simon Groot (Universiteit van Amsterdam, RISM Netherlands): One of the European Capitals of Culture in 2018 is Leeuwarden, the capital city of the northern Dutch province Friesland (Frisia). Although a small country, in the Netherlands several dialects of the national language do exist. The...
5 March 2018 – In the news
The new database Medieval Music Manuscripts Online
We received this announcement from Dominique Gatté and is posted with kind permission: We are excited to announce that the new database MMMOd (Medieval music manuscripts online database) is now online. musmed.eu In June 2017, I published an initial version of this database using Google Fusion Tables. The new database...
1 March 2018 – Electronic resources
The 2017 Annual Report
The annual report for the RISM Central Office has been published on our website. Here are some of the highlights: Total records: Thanks to the hard work of our international contributors, the RISM online catalog currently has 1,090,000 records. Contributions from national groups: The following national groups created new records...
26 February 2018 – New publications
Music in Different Languages for International Mother Language Day
Today, February 21, is officially International Mother Language Day. This day was first commemorated in 2000 by the United Nations in order to highlight the significance of native languages as a cultural asset and to foster the linguistic and cultural diversity of people around the world. Over 6,000 languages are...
21 February 2018 – RISM online catalog
"Mein Herz ist viel zu schwach" – A Newly Discovered Aria by Georg Philipp Telemann
We have received the following from Helmut Lauterwasser (RISM Germany, Munich): In 2017, numerous concerts and other events marked the 250th anniversary of Georg Philipp Telemann’s death, especially in the places where he lived and worked. In CONCERTO magazine’s first issue of 2018, there is an article about a previously...
19 February 2018 – Rediscovered
Be My (Robert) Valentine
Today is Valentine’s Day, and the perfect Valentine for all music lovers is the music of Robert Valentine. Robert Valentine (1674-1747) was an English composer who spent most of his career in Rome beginning in the 1790s. In his publications, Valentine Italianized his name to “Roberto Valentine” yet also qualified...
14 February 2018 – Events
Ecco carnevale!
Today is Rosenmontag in our corner of Germany, the highlight of the Carnival season. It is hard to avoid colorful costumes, parades, and general revelry (in all its forms). Join us on our own parade of Carnival music through the centuries! Carnival has been marked by its unique regional and...
12 February 2018 – Events
Contract signed between RISM and UNAM
The Seminario de Música en la nueva España y el México independiente at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) has been building a database called Musicat for a number of years. Its contents include the music collections of the Mexico City Cathedral. A catalog of the polyphonic books from...
8 February 2018 – New at RISM
