REPERTOIRE INTERNATIONAL DES SOURCES MUSICALES (RISM)
Zentralredaktion Frankfurt
Annual Report, 2010
Foundation: Internationales Quellenlexikon der Musik e.V. Kassel. Honorary President: Dr. Harald Heckmann, Ruppertshain; President: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Christoph Wolff, Cambridge/Leipzig; Vice-President: Catherine Massip, Paris; Secretary: Dr. Wolf-Dieter Seiffert, Munich; Treasurer: Dr. Martin Bente, Munich, and since 26 October 2010 Dr. Andreas Klug, Kriftel; Coopted members of the board: Prof. Dr. Ulrich Konrad, Würzburg; Prof. Dr. John H. Roberts, Berkeley.
Commission Mixte: Chris Banks (AIBM), Massimo Gentili-Tedeschi (AIMB), Dr. John B. Howard (AIBM), Prof. Dr. Ulrich Konrad (SIM), Catherine Massip (AIBM), Christian Meyer (SIM), Prof. Dr. Pierluigi Petrobelli (SIM), Prof. Dr. John H. Roberts (AIBM), Prof. Dr. Jürg Stenzl (SIM), Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Christoph Wolff (SIM).
Director of the Zentralredaktion: Klaus Keil, Frankfurt.
Address: Internationales Quellenlexikon der Musik (RISM), Zentralredaktion an der Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, Sophienstr. 26, D-60487 Frankfurt am Main, Tel: +49 69 706231, Fax: +49 69 706026, E-mail: contact@rism.info, Internet: www.rism.info.
Publishers: Series A/I, Volume VIII, Parts 1 and 2 of Series B as well as Series C: Bärenreiter-Verlag, Kassel; Series A/II, CD-ROM: K. G. Saur Verlag, Munich, Internet: EBSCO Publishing, Inc., Birmingham, USA; Series B (with the exception of Volume VIII, Parts 1 and 2): G. Henle Verlag, Munich.
Personnel: Susanne Büchner, Dr. Martina Falletta, Stephan Hirsch, Klaus Keil, Guido Kraus, Alexander Marxen, Jennifer Ward (since 1 September 2010), Isabella Wiedemer-Höll.
The Internationales Quellenlexikon der Musik (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales – RISM) together with the Zentralredaktion in Frankfurt, is under the patronage of the Association Internationale des Bibliothèques, Archives et Centres de Documentation Musicaux (AIBM) as well as the Société Internationale de Musicologie (SIM) and has the task to document printed and manuscript transmissions of music worldwide. Series A/I documents individual prints published between 1600 and 1800, and Series A/II music manuscripts after 1600 with their locations. Both series are arranged alphabetically by composer name, as it is in the volumes of Series A/I. Since Series A/II is published electronically as a database, far more access points can be offered. Series B is designed to cover specific categories of repertory, e.g. collected prints from the 16th to 18th centuries, as well as source literature on music theory in Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Persian. These Series A/I, A/II and B are supplemented by Series C, the Directory of Music Research Libraries.
Series A/I: Issued in 9 main and 4 supplementary volumes and on CD. The CD-ROM of Series A/I will be published in March 2011. It will encompass Volumes 1-9 and 11-14.
Series B: Thirty volumes in this series have so far been published. Recently published: RISM B/XV, Mehrstimmige Messen in Quellen aus Spanien, Portugal und Lateinamerika, ca. 1490-1630, edited by Cristina Urchueguía, Munich 2005.
Three special volumes entitled Das Tenorlied were published between 1979 and 1986.
Series C: Five volumes have appeared to date, as well as a special volume issued by the RISM Zentralredaktion in 1999, RISM Bibliothekssigel-Gesamtverzeichnis/RISM Library Sigla, Complete Index. A revised version of this listing has been available since summer 2006 via the RISM website and will be updated regularly. In collaboration with the AIBM Publications Committee it has been possible to issue revised versions of Volumes II and III/1. These replace the existing Volumes II and III, with the exception of the section containing Italian sigla which is intended for Volume III/2, still in preparation.
Series A/II: A complete documentation of manuscripts containing polyphonic music written after 1600. Series A/II is the most comprehensive endeavour and the main focus of the whole of RISM’s work at present. Colleagues from more than 30 national groups around the world document music manuscripts on location. The working groups key their descriptions mostly in computers and send them to the Zentralredaktion through the internet. The transmission of digital information reduces the amount of required editorial work and speeds up completion of the project.
Since the start of the project a total of 750,000 entries have been registered at the RISM Zentralredaktion at Frankfurt.
The following groups recorded data using Kallisto: Austria: Innsbruck (1,064 titles), Salzburg (334), Vienna—Akademie der Wissenschaften (472); Czech Republic: Brno (414), Prague (1,685); Germany: Dresden (4,833), Munich (8,646); Italy: Rome (31); Poland: Wrocław (513), Warsaw (256); Slovenia (262); USA (4,756). The Berlin Staatsbibliothek catalogued 7,931 titles in the course of a project focusing on the Singakademie collection. The data appeared for the first time in the new online catalogue.
Catalogue records on paper title cards were sent from Russia (200 titles) and Lithuania (1), in addition to 994 of such records entered into Kallisto by the Zentralredaktion from older holdings.
Some working groups use their own cataloguing systems and sometimes send in data after a longer preliminary period. We wish to mention the following in particular:
England/United Kingdom: The team at the British Library in London had been financed by the Arts and Humanities Research Council since 2001. This support terminated in October 2007. The project to catalogue the Julian Marshall Collection of the British Library, which was carried out during the same period and financed by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, was completed in September 2007. A database of the music manuscripts, which can be accessed free of charge on the internet, is being set up in cooperation with the Irish section of RISM. The database currently contains 66,000 titles. A transfer of files began in 2009 and is expected to be completed in the first half of 2011.
Switzerland: The Swiss working group did not participate in the changeover to Kallisto but they use a program that employs the same data model of the British working group. A data transfer is planned for the future. It will take place after the British working group’s data have been successfully transferred, and the developments made for that transfer will also aid that of the Swiss data.
France: The Bibliothèque Nationale has built a database for its own music manuscripts, from which it has also produced a catalogue. We have agreed to a data transfer and have already done tests using sample titles. At the same time, printed and manuscript holdings in the provinces have been processed and published within the series “Patrimoine Musical Régional”. Titles relevant to RISM A/II have been taken from many of these catalogues and entered into the RISM database by the Zentralredaktion.
Italy: Under the coordination of the Ufficio Ricerca Fondi Musicali (URFM) in Milan, various regional groups are working on the documentation of manuscripts, prints and other sources. Records are entered into the SBN Musica database. RISM is very interested in obtaining this data as well, but no agreement has been reached so far. However, the Roman working group Istituto di Bibliografia Musicale (IBIMUS) uses the program PIKaDo and delivers their records directly to the Zentralredaktion in the course of their projects. Kallisto will be implemented beginning with the next projects.
Within the framework of a project sponsored by the German Research Foundation, the German Historical Institute in Rome is undertaking work on the collections of two Roman princely houses. The sources are being digitalised and described using Kallisto in accordance with RISM standards.
A project to enter Haydn sources into the RISM database using source cards from the Joseph Haydn Institute in Cologne was not able to be continued in 2010.
During the year covered by this report, it was possible to extend the content of the RISM manuscript database by an additional 32,191 entries and it now contains a total of 726,000 titles.
The CD-ROM of Series A/II Music Manuscripts after 1600 was discontinued with the 16th edition (the 14th CD-ROM). It comprised a total of 614,000 titles, including a total of around 50,000 additional entries, as well as three special files – one with composers (31,000 entries), library sigla (6,870 entries) and an index of the literature consulted for describing sources (4,000 entries).
This is the material which EBSCO Publishing Inc. (successor to NISC) is still currently offering as an Internet database.
In June 2010, the online catalogue was made available free of charge on the internet. This development was possible through collaboration between RISM and the Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek in Munich and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz. The initial inventory numbered some 700,000 titles and the catalogue is updated monthly.
In August, the new RISM homepage was released, which arose out of cooperation with the Mainzer Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur—Digital Academy. The new web address, www.rism.info, was kindly given over by the Swiss working group, who had been previously using it to moderate a mailing list for RISM working groups.
Also in August, the report from the conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the foundation of RISM was published, entitled Academic and Technical Challenges of Musicological Source Research in an International Framework (Hildesheim: Olms, 2010).
Klaus Keil, January 2011
