News archive – Library collections
Another Exciting Collection from Spitz an der Donau
We have received the following from Gottfried Heinz-Kronberger (RISM Germany, Munich Office): Soon after completing work on a collection of musical sources from Niederalteich in southwest Germany (RISM siglum: D-NATk), an unexpected offer arose to describe an additional collection that had recently come to light right in Spitz an der...
29 May 2017
Major Acquisition in Belgium: Fonds Toots Thielemans
We received the following from RISM Belgium: The Music Division of the Royal Library of Belgium acquired a new important collection in December 2016: the Fonds Toots Thielemans, named after the Belgian musician who passed away on 22 August 2016 at the age of 94. The collection consists of hundreds...
24 January 2017
A Contribution to the History of Military Music in the Kingdom of Hanover
A unique collection of music manuscripts in the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek (Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek), Hanover The well over 1,000 handwritten scores of the first and last Royal Hanover Army Music Director Johann Viktor Gerold (1808-1876) form one of the most extensive collections of nineteenth-century military music. In a circuitous fashion...
16 January 2017
The Archive of the Sorbian Institute in Germany
The following has reached us from Annett Bresan: Sorbisches Kulturarchiv / Sorbische Zentralbibliothek am Sorbischen Institut Bautzen Serbski kulturny archiw / Serbska centralna biblioteka při Serbskim instituće w Budyšinje The Archive of the Sorbian Institute (Sorbisches Kulturarchiv) is the only archive for the Sorbian language and Sorbian studies that is...
17 November 2016
Presenting the Music Collection at Melk Abbey
The following is a guest post by one of our RISM contributors Johannes Prominczel, music archivist at Melk Abbey. The music archive of Melk Abbey in Austria consists of around 10,000 items of notated music and books as well as about 50 musical instruments. The focus of the collection is...
10 October 2016
Two sources, lots of material for research – the digital Annaberger Chorbücher
The two Annaberg choirbooks described below have been documented by the RISM working group in Dresden and are detailed in the RISM online catalog. The two manuscript collections can be found at the SLUB with the shelfmarks Mus.1-D-505 (link in RISM) and Mus.1-D-506 (link in RISM). The RISM records were...
28 July 2016
Women and music-making during the Bourbon Restoration
Emerson Morgan from the RISM US working group at Harvard University has written this article about a score newly cataloged for RISM, La naissance du sauveur (RISM ID no. 900022067). This manuscript of a unique Christmas cantata, authored by a woman composer and dedicated to a woman patron, offers a...
30 June 2016
The dating game
We bring you a post today by our colleagues at the MusiCB3 Blog of Cambridge University (CC-BY): What? Has MusiCB3 gone mad? TWO Valentine’s Day posts this year? Actually no. This is about a much more important topic – dating printed music. Now, I know this may not sound wildly...
29 February 2016
RISM Modern Monday: Marianne Teuscher (1903–2009), the "Queen Mum" of the Music Department
No, you’re not mistaken: the dates of birth and death for Marianne Teuscher are correct. She lived to the ripe old age of 106 and is quite likely the longest-lived person in the RISM database—and as the fifth and last person in our RISM Modern Monday series, she brings us...
8 February 2016
RISM Modern Monday: Composer Archives in RISM
In our series RISM Modern Monday, we mustn’t omit composer archives - collections of personal papers and/or manuscripts that are left to a library - particularly because they contain a large share of the twentieth-century musical sources that are documented in RISM. Processing these archival collections is done by the...
1 February 2016