Report on the conference closing session

The RISM online catalog offers 847,797 records free of charge for searching (July 2013).
The Zentralredaktion is pursuing the goal of enlarging the database as much as possible. The RISM working groups contribute the main part of this. In addition, external databases are going to be incorporated. There are databases from RISM working groups or individual projects led or published apart from the RISM database, i.e. UK database (incorporated 2012) or the database of RISM France and some individual databases from RISM contributors. The last data exchange took place with the Richard Strauss Quellenverzeichnis (Richard Strauss list of sources).

A part of RISM B /I, printed collections between 1500 and 1550, revised by Howard Mayer Brown, has been converted to a database and will soon be published as part of the RISM online catalog. For series A/I, the same procedure is planed for 2014. To this end, the CD-ROM data have been converted to MARCXML and loaded into the British/Swiss program MUSCAT. RISM working groups will be able to make corrections soon and add new records. For further information, see the article New Prospects for Printed Music with RISM in the next issue of Fontes.

For the past few years, RISM has included (permanent) links to digital resources in the data. Links can lead to digital images of the source itself, a watermark, a sample of the writing of a copyist, etc. There are now ca. 8,000 links in the data.

The RISM online catalog has been available as open data since the end of July under the license CC-BY. At the beginning of next year it will be available as linked open data as well.

A new search engine release is planned for 2014. It is planned to implement special views on the data (like all data of a country, region, or library), a search for digital images, and a lot of further improvements.

Together with RISM UK and RISM CH, the Zentralredaktion is developing a replacement for the input program Kallisto that is based on MUSCAT. We hope that it can be ready for use in the middle of 2015.

We would like to extend a warm welcome to the newest member of the RISM Association Dr. Leonardo Waisman of Córdoba, Argentina.

Thank you for your contributions to the RISM projects.

Klaus Keil

Thursday, August 1: RISM (public session)

  1. RISM-Katalogisierungsarbeiten in mehreren oberösterreichischen Musikarchiven seit 2009 (RISM Cataloging Projects in Upper Austrian Music Archives since 2009)
    Stefan Ikarus Kaiser (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Kommission für Musikforschung, Wien)

  2. Throwing some light on the history of Verdi and Wagner reception in Tyrol.
    Hildegard Herrmann-Schneider (RISM Landesleitung Tirol-Südtirol & OFM Austria - Institut für Tiroler Musikforschung, Innsbruck)

  3. Im Schatten fürstlicher Hofhaltung - musikalische Quellenfunde in kleineren Klöstern und Landkirchen. (In the Shadow of Princely Courts: Musical Sources in Smaller Monasteries and Regional Churches)
    Annemarie Bösch-Niederer (RISM Arbeitsgruppe Vorarlberg, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Bregenz)

(The talk by Zuzana Petrášková announced in the program was cancelled.)

RISM Cataloging Projects in Upper Austrian Music Archives since 2009

In this presentation, I will report on ongoing RISM research projects in Upper Austrian music archives since 2009. Among the cataloged music collections are church and private libraries including the music archive of Wilhering Abbey, the former Augustinian monastery in Ranshofen, theGramastetten parish, the Ansfelden parish, the Schwanenstadt parish, the cathedral parish in Linz, and the Linz-Glisic private collection. This work is being supported by Wilhering Abbey, the State of Upper Austria, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Throwing some light on the history of Verdi and Wagner reception in Tyrol

The process of systematically taking inventory of historical musical sources is carried out by RISM Tyrol-South Tyrol & OFM Austria in various ways. One of our most important goals is that we catalog and document hitherto unknown materials. Through such scholarly evaluation, new and multifaceted insight into music research is made possible for the first time. As a current example of this, in the anniversary year of the 200th birthdays of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, I will present relevant sources from Tyrol and South Tyrol that were cataloged for RISM in the past few years and are related to the reception of both composers: music manuscripts, printed music, and finally some concert programs as well. They date from the 1840s to the 1930s. An overview will be provided in which the contents of these sources, their provenance, and the original musical context will be discussed. In so doing, it will become apparent that Vedi and Wagner were popular and a continuous presence through remarkably varied arrangements from their stage works. These covered a considerably broad spectrum, particularly in the area of wind music (ever-representative for Tyrol), men’s choruses, music-making in the home, and the domain of music pedagogy. In contrast, the stage presence of both composers at the time was rather sparse in the Tyrol region.

As an example of the phenomenon of Wagner reception in Tyrol, I will comment upon the case of the Benedictine Magnus Ortwein (1845-1919) from Marienberg Abbey in South Tyrol. On the one hand, Father Magnus Ortwein was committed to the Cecilian movement and was recognized as such in professional circles, and on the other hand he was a great admirer of Wagner. He applied Wagner’s leitmotiv techniques to his two large orchestral masses and in his study room he is said to have always had three music stands with the breviary, a Palestrina score, and a Wagner score opened on them.

In the Shadow of Princely Courts: Musical Sources in Smaller Monasteries and Regional Churches

The Austrian province of Vorarlberg, located in the far west of the country, is embedded in the culturally and historically significant region of Lake Constance. Up until the 19th century, we find many different spiritual and secular forces present with various sorts of cultural relationships. These forces didn’t display great pomp, yet musical life flourished here in its own modest way, owing to wide networks of cooperation and migration.

Since 2006 there has been a RISM office at the regional archive of Vorarlberg (Vorarlberger Landesarchiv) to catalog the old collections in monasteries and regional music archives. Contributing to this international project now adds a new dimension to the musical history of this region and beyond. Initial results of this research in monasteries and larger churches can now be presented.

Publishers

Bärenreiter
Series A/I; series B, volume VIII, parts 1 and 2; series C
 
Henle
Series B (except for volume VIII, parts 1 and 2)
 
DeGruyter
Series A/II CD-ROM (1995-2008)
 
NISC
Series A/II subscription database (2002-2006)
 
EBSCO
Series A/II subscription database (2006-present)
 
OLMS
Congress report (2010)