News archive
RISM Modern Monday: Music Manuscripts in the Gustav Mahler-Alfred Rosé Collection
Did you know that music in RISM’s database extends beyond the year 1800? RISM has quite a bit from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Over the next few Mondays, we’ll put the spotlight on some of the newer pieces in the database. The first entry comes from Cheryl Martin (RISM...
11 January 2016 – Library collections
Oldest complete Finnish songbook discovered in Dresden
New year, new discovery: musicologist Suvi-Päivi Koski has uncovered the oldest known complete Finnish songbook at the SLUB in Dresden, according to the SLUBlog. It is entitled Yxi Wähä Suomenkielinen Wirsikiria (“A small Finnish songbook”), published by Hemmingius Henrici Maschoensis, and was printed in 1607 in Rostock, Germany. The first...
7 January 2016 – Rediscovered
Musical Anniversaries in 2016
Happy New Year! Once again, the new year brings us many opportunities to celebrate musicians who have big (sometimes very big) birthdays and remember those who have died. We’ve found over 800 people in the RISM database who will have their semicentennials, centennials, and various combinations thereof in 2016. These...
4 January 2016 – Musical anniversaries
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
