News archive
Riga, RISM, Līgo
Four people from the RISM Central Office attended the annual IAML Congress in Riga, Latvia in June 2017. The following is a congress diary from all four participants that was originally published on the IAML website. In keeping with the Congress Diary tradition, the reflections are presented in the native...
27 July 2017 – Events
Mark the Music! Uncovering Musical Sources in Sweden
Last month, the week before the IAML Congress in Riga, the Svenska musikbiblioteksföreningen (the Swedish branch of IAML) hosted a course called Mark the Music — a course for librarians working with music. Pia Shekhter (University of Gothenburg’s Music and Drama Library) invited me (Jennifer Ward) to give a presentation...
24 July 2017 – Events
Timothy Swan (1758-1842): An Early American Composer
We might be able to call Timothy Swan one of the first American composers. Born on July 23, 1758, in the British colony of Massachusetts, Swan initially worked as a merchant in his youth and learned the trade of hatmaking. He had very little music training (three weeks of vocal...
20 July 2017 – Musical anniversaries
A Musicological Summer in Frankfurt
Our intern in the summer of 2017 was Vivian Tompkins, and what follows is a report of her experiences: Musicology, music librarianship, and German language study are the three main interests that I discovered in the course of my undergraduate career, so it was thrilling for me to find out...
17 July 2017 – New at RISM
Eva Judd O’Meara: A Music Librarian in a New Profession
The series RISM A–Z brings us to the letter O, which today stands for Eva Judd O’Meara. Miss O’Meara is the first music librarian that features in our series. Richard Boursy, archivist at the Gilmore Music Library, Yale University, tells us about the life and career of someone who was...
13 July 2017 – RISM A-Z
Deciphered any initials today?
The following article is by Martin Bierwisch, a student worker at the Central Office. From time to time, diligent users of the RISM online catalog send us information regarding the identification of pieces, particularly printed editions, where the composers are named only by initials (these are the pieces with A/I...
10 July 2017 – RISM online catalog
A Century of John Milton Ward
The following is a guest post by Andrea Cawelti, Ward Music Cataloger at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, with contributions concerning the Ward materials in RISM by Christina Linklater, Keeper of the Isham Memorial Library and Houghton Music Cataloger. Today, John Milton Ward, the donor of the Harvard Theatre Collection’s Ward...
6 July 2017 – Musical anniversaries
Dr. Kurt Dorfmüller (28 April 1922 – 16 June 2017)
“RISM owes a great debt of gratitude to Herr Dorfmüller for his long-time service as a member of the Commission Mixte and as chair of his Advisory Research Committee.” So wrote the then-president of the Association Internationales Quellenlexikon der Musik e.V., Harald Heckmann, in 1998. The Advisory Research Committee, under...
4 July 2017 – In memoriam
Barbara Strozzi: A Woman Composer in 17th-Century Venice
The following was written by Vivian Tompkins, our intern at the Central Office in Frankfurt in summer 2017: 2017 is an important anniversary for Venice. This year the city celebrates the life and works of Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), who was born 450 years ago. While Monteverdi is certainly the best...
3 July 2017 – New at RISM
Eight More Women Composers
This past International Women’s Day, 8 March 2017, we published a list of 800 women composers who have sources in the RISM database. We are happy to say that since then, we have been able to add eight more names to the list. Some of the composers’ works had been...
29 June 2017 – New at RISM
