News archive – New at RISM
New People in the RISM Online Catalog 2021
Despite the limitations brought about by the pandemic, the growth of our online catalog was considerable in 2021. The number of new people named in RISM records grew by over 4,800 throughout the course of the year, in part through new records for musical sources and in part also through...
24 February 2022
International Mother Language Day
For 22 years, 21 February has been celebrated as International Mother Language Day. On this day, the United Nations highlights the significance of native languages as a cultural asset because many languages are endangered. And since many languages do not have an online presence, multilinguialsim online can be strengthened. The...
21 February 2022
200 Years of Print History: RISM B/I Now Entirely in the RISM Catalog
It all began with the famous first Petrucci edition from 1501 (see image). After around four years of editing, all of the entries from B/I, Recueils imprimés, XVIe-XVIIe siècles (over 2,700) have been revised and can be found in the RISM catalog. As with all records in the RISM catalog,...
17 February 2022
The New RISM Working Group in Gdańsk
The following is by Danuta Popinigis and Agnieszka Kubiak (RISM Gdańsk): The first RISM Gdańsk working group started in 1997 at the Stanisław Moniuszko Academy of Music in Gdańsk, Poland. The team consisted of four people: Danuta Popinigis (head), Danuta Szlagowski (†), Jolanta Woźniak and Barbara Długońska. Approximately 8,500 records...
24 January 2022
Autograph Manuscript—Engraver's Copy—Printed Edition: An Ideal Case
Emilie Zumsteeg (born 9 December 1796 in Stuttgart, died 1 August 1857 in Stuttgart) grew up with music as the youngest child of Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg (1760-1802), who had been a court musician with the Stuttgart court orchestra starting in 1781. After his death, her mother, Luise, founded a music...
17 January 2022
Looking Back on 2021
As with presenting the year’s musician anniversaries, it has become custom for us to take a look back on the past year and share what was most popular with our website readers. These are the year’s blog posts that were read the most often, according to our website statistics: ...
13 January 2022
Of Misspelt and Corrected Title Pages
Imagine you are an engraver and have spent hours if not days bent over the plate of a title page that you were asked to make by a music publisher – and then you notice an error. What now? Start over? Leave the error? Or is there some way of...
25 November 2021
André Printed Editions Now Dated to Plate Number 1400
We know that plate and publisher numbers are especially helpful when dating the music editions of many publishers from the 18th and 19th centuries. RISM’s A/I volumes, which documented printed music by a single composer, had very few editions from the Offenbach publisher Johann André that were dated. (One of...
25 October 2021
Martorell Collection of Opera Scores Now Online from the Library of Congress
We have received the following from Karen Lund (Library of Congress): The Music Division of the Library of Congress is happy to announce the launch of a new digital collection, the “Martorell Collection,” at: https://www.loc.gov/collections/martorell-collection/ The largest subset of the “Martorell Collection” includes 253 uniformly-bound volumes comprising well over 1,100...
21 October 2021
ICCU and RISM: An Immense Number of Records
RISM has now added over 60,000 records from the Italian union catalog, ICCU. The Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico delle biblioteche italiane e per le informazioni bibliografiche (ICCU) received its current name in 1975 after the Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali was founded. ICCU replaced the...
6 September 2021
