News archive
Happy Holidays 2015!
The RISM Central Office wishes you and your family all the best for a festive holiday season and a Happy New Year. We look forward to working with you again in 2016. Image: New York Public Library Digital Collections, postcard from early 1900s.
21 December 2015 – Events
An Interactive Map of Musical Institutions in Belgium
Patrizia Rebulla of RISM Belgium has assembled a map of musical institutions in Belgium. The map lists libraries, archives, churches, and private collections throughout the country. You can explore the map below and on the website of RISM Belgium.
18 December 2015 – New at RISM
Setting the RISM Records Straight
Since it’s the season for giving, we’d like to share what you, our RISM users, have given us recently: numerous corrections and identifications of anonymous compositions. Misattributions occur occasionally in the database, sometimes because of the wrong composer’s name on the source itself or misidentifications by later catalogers. And “anonymous”...
17 December 2015 – Rediscovered
Manuscript Tablatures and Partbooks up to the 17th Century in the Bavarian State Library
The manuscript tablatures and partbooks of the Bavarian State Library (BSB) up to the seventeenth century are, in addition to early printed music and choirbooks, the third and final type of universal music collection owned by the dukes of Bavaria in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The collection includes two...
14 December 2015 – Library collections
Poland's Bibliotheca Rudolphina
The Silesian duke Georg Rudolf von Liegnitz (1595-1653) of the Piast dynasty had a remarkable library. Polish music librarians and musicologists are currently cataloging parts of its music collection. As a result of World War II, the music collection was divided and distributed among four Polish libraries: the University Library...
10 December 2015 – Library collections
Jean Sibelius at 150
“We can say that Jean Sibelius is one of the most brilliant tone poets of the present time.” -Erik Furuhjelm, 1916 “Sibelius, the worst composer in the world” -René Leibowitz, 1955 (Quotations from the Finnish Club of Helsinki) For many people, Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) is the only Finnish composer they...
8 December 2015 – Musical anniversaries
Una colección de patrimonio musical español
The following originally appeared on RILM’s Bibliolore blog and has been reprinted here with kind permission: The Fons de Música Tradicional at the Institució Milà i Fontanals (CSIC-IMF) in Barcelona has more than 20.000 melodies, copied on paper, collected between 1944 and 1960 throughout Spain; most of them were compiled...
3 December 2015 – Electronic resources
Symphonic music in Great Britain
A new book crossed our desks recently: Jürgen Schaarwächter. Two Centuries of British Symphonism from the Beginnings to 1945: A Preliminary Survey. Hildesheim: Georg-Olms-Verlag, 2015. 2 volumes, 1201 p. ISBN: 978-3-487-15227-1 This book is a comprehensive survey of symphonic music in Great Britain and serves to dispel any remaining myths...
30 November 2015 – New publications
The Musical Couple Maddalena Lombardini and Lodovico Sirmen
Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen (1745-1818) grew up in Venice’s Ospedale dei Mendicanti and was a composer, violinist, and cellist. In 1759, she took violin lessons from Giuseppe Tartini, and Ferdinando Bertoni taught her in composition. In 1768, Maddalena went on tour with her husband Lodovico Sirmen (1738-1812), who was also a...
26 November 2015 – New publications
Johann Kuhnau (1660-1722)
Johann Kuhnau – wasn’t he Johann Sebastian Bach’s predecessor as Thomaskantor in Leipzig? Correct, but are you also familiar with his compositions? Maybe not so much. Kuhnau became especially famous through his works for keyboard instruments, which included Musicalische Vorstellung Einiger Biblischer Historien (6 sonatas for harpsichord; Leipzig, 1700), Neuer...
23 November 2015 – New at RISM
