News archive – Library collections
From Everyday Goods to Cultural Goods: The Music Archive of the Cistercian Abbey of Stams, Austria
Stams Abbey was one of the most important musical centers in Tyrol in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Stams Abbey Music Archive still bears witness to this today. The music materials, once used to organize the everyday musical life in this monastery, underwent a transformation over time from everyday...
21 June 2021
The First Ukrainian Collection of Medieval and Renaissance Music Manuscripts from Lviv is Online
We have received the following from Sofyja Holub (RISM Ukraine): The first Ukrainian collection of Medieval and Renaissance musical manuscripts that was cataloged in RISM is held at the Scientific Library of Ivan Franko National University in Lviv. Cooperation between RISM and the library began in February 2019 in Lviv,...
2 June 2021
Johann Michael Closner (1786–1860) and the historical music manuscripts and prints in the Trostberg City Museum
We have received the following from our colleague Helmut Lauterwasser (RISM Germany): One of the most important tasks for RISM is to catalog historical sources of music also in small libraries, archives, and museums. In extreme cases one encounters collections that contain very few historical music sources, sometimes only a...
21 April 2021
The Music Collection of the Church of St. John the Baptist in Teplice, Czech Republic
We have received the following from Ludmila Mikulášová (RISM Prague): During the 18th and 19th centuries, Teplice was an important spa town visited by many European celebrities and crowned heads (for example, Tsar Peter the Great in 1712; the Swedish King Gustav IV in 1804; the Prussian King Frederick William...
28 January 2021
Music Manuscripts from the Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg to the Mid-17th Century: Cataloging, Digitizing, and Watermark Thermography
We have received the following from Bernhard Lutz (Bavarian State Library): Starting November 2020, the Bavarian State Library will catalog and digitize ca. 80 music manuscripts from the dawn of music notation to the mid-17th century owned by the State and City Library of Augsburg (Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg; RISM...
2 November 2020
Diversity in RISM
There are over 138,000 people in the RISM online catalog: not all composers or musicians who ever lived, but only those who are connected with a musical source. Biographical information is recorded about each person in a separate record so that we can clearly identify the person and separate them...
26 October 2020
Announcing the new RISM UK Catalogue
The following originally appeared on the Music Blog of the British Library on 16 October 2020 (Creative Commons): RISM UK is pleased to announce the launch of the new RISM UK Catalogue. The catalogue is a subset of the international RISM Online Catalogue of Musical Sources. It contains all data...
19 October 2020
The Fondo Cappella Sistina in RISM
We have received the following from Thomas Schmidt (Dean of Music, Humanities and Media, Professor of Musicology, University of Huddersfield): The catalogue of the music sources of the Fondo Cappella Sistina in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana goes back to a research project under the direction of Ludwig Finscher, funded by...
8 October 2020
Taking on “Anonymous”
Thanks to numerous tips from several colleagues, we are now able to provide more specific information about collections of arias that are housed at the Biblioteca Estense in Modena (I-MOe). Many of the composers of unattributed arias have been identified, as well as the operas that the arias are from....
24 August 2020
The anonymous cantata "Chiuso è già Borea nevoso"
Over 230,000 sources in the RISM online catalog are anonymous and often languish unnoticed. One cantata, however, shows that it is sometimes worth it to leave trusted paths of inquiry: this beautiful manuscript from 1716. As a matter of fact, we know quite a bit about the work: Antonio Ottoboni...
20 August 2020