[MEI-L] RISM musical incipit search site open for business

[Eleanor Selfridge-Field]

It's a great pleasure for me to forward Klaus Keil's and Jürgen Diet's 
announcement of the opening of the new (free) RISM website in Munich. The 
URL is http://opac.rism.info.

I've been beta testing this for about two months and have found it 
infinitely useful. The user interface is in German, but the language is not 
really a problem. Enter any title or composer's name appropriate to 
repertory composed between 1600 and 1800, press "Suche", and you should see 
besides the listing of works a series of filters for genre (Gattung), 
composer, chronological period, scoring (Besetzung), and library sigla. For 
prolific composers, the possibilities are endless.


Eleanor Selfridge-Field
(RISM Advisory Board)
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-3076
http://www.stanford.edu/~esfield/
http://www.ccarh.org


The announcement is below:

Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2010 4:14 AM
Subject: [iaml-l] Press release

*New online music catalogue: over 700,000 references*

The new catalogue of the International Inventory of Musical Sources
(RISM) provides insight into treasures of music history inaccessible until 
now.


A new music catalogue has been available free online since June 2010 under 
_http://opac.rism.info <http://opac.rism.info/>_. This database offers 
around 700,000 mainly manuscript sources catalogued in detail according to 
academic criteria. The manuscripts are currently stored in hundreds of 
libraries and archives around the world. They pass down to later generations 
the musical works of 30,000 composers. The catalogue was made possible 
through cooperation between the International Inventory of Musical Sources 
(Répertoire International des Sources Musicales, /RISM/ for short), the 
Bavarian State Library (Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek) and the State Library of Berlin (Staatsbibliothek zu 
Berlin).

Even though there has been music printing for 500 years, manuscripts 
remained an integral basis of the musical legacy until well into the 19^th 
century and much - whether opera, symphony or sacred music – was never 
printed. /RISM / has set itself the task of making this vast fundament 
accessible for music research and practice, and its database, compiled by 
researchers in over 30 countries, can now be accessed free of charge on the 
Internet. Many of the stocks catalogued by libraries and archives in these 
countries were recorded for the first time in the course of this project and 
so are only now available to a wide public.

The catalogue entries comprise among other things information about the 
composers (including dates of birth and death), title, instrumentation and 
casting requirements of the works as well as references to them in the 
specialist literature. The manuscripts themselves are described in detail in 
respect of scribe, and place and time of origin. In addition, practically 
every work can also be identified unambiguously by means of a music 
incipit – ie the beginning of the most important parts in written musical 
form.


The database provides information not only about the dissemination of works 
by composers who are still well known today, but also a wealth of knowledge 
about those many creative musicians who were highly regarded in their day, 
but are currently either little known or even forgotten.
This makes the database invaluable for music historians, and also makes it 
possible for performing musicians to “excavate” and rediscover many things.

A variety of search fields makes it possible to investigate not only 
according to particular composers, work titles or performance forces, but 
also by place and time of origin or various people like librettists, 
previous owners or dedicatees.

The catalogue on the Internet: http://opac.rism.info

*Contact persons / **Ansprechpartner**:*
Klaus Keil
RISM-Zentralredaktion an der Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian 
Senckenberg
Sophienstr. 26
60487 Frankfurt am Main, DE
Tel.: +49-69-706231
email: _k.keil at ub.uni-frankfurt.de <mailto:k.keil at ub.uni-frankfurt.de>_

Jürgen Diet
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library)
Referat Digitale Bibliothek (digital library department)
Ludwigstr. 16
80539 München, DE
Tel.: +49-89-28638-2768

email: _juergen.diet at bsb-muenchen.de <mailto:juergen.diet at bsb-muenchen.de>_

--
RISM Zentralredaktion
Leiter: Klaus Keil
Sophienstr. 26
D-60487 Frankfurt am Main
Tel: +49-69-706231
Fax: +49-69-706026
homepage: http://RISM.UB.uni-frankfurt.de