Waving or drowning? — the growth of the music catalogues in the British Library
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Transcript of Waving or drowning? — the growth of the music catalogues in the British Library
Waving or drowning? —the growth of the music catalogues in the British LibraryAuthor(s): Malcolm TurnerSource: Fontes Artis Musicae, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Oktober-Dezember 1989), pp. 297-304Published by: International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres(IAML)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23507489 .
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M. Turner: Waving or drowning^ — the growth of the music catalogues 297
fied customers. In addition the availability of ISMNs should enable retailers to make use of tele-ordering, and in their turn librarians who have access to the appropriate
systems would be able to link into and interrogate data files of dealers and even place orders through them. If this latter sounds like Utopia, certainly the ability to down-load
bibliographical information must represent an enormous opportunity to cut out waste
ful cataloguing time and rationalise staffing. However the most basic benefit of a Stan
dard Number is the ability to identify the exact title required and to avoid mistakes. To sum up, a standard numbering system increases efficiency and accuracy.
The term 'standard number' is capable of two interpretations. It implies that the
number is standard to all users, but it also can denote the imprimatur of the Internatio
nal Standards Institute (ISO). With the support of the Secretary of the relevant ISO com
mittee (TC 46), Frau Baxmann-Krafft, ISMN has recently been proposed to and accepted
by ISO as a New Work Item and a committee has just been appointed to examine the
proposals in detail.3
Much help has been given in recent months by the International ISBN Agency in Ber
lin which has welcomed the proposals which we have put forward and has agreed to
help progress them. Meanwhile IAML itself has been consulting on these proposals
through its Bibliography Commission and a decision in the light of the consultation is planned at this year's Congress in Oxford. There is still much work to be done, includ
ing trying to find sources of finance for setting up the administration of the ISMN. The
consultation paper on library cooperative projects issued recently by the European Commission4 appears to offer a way forward and its acceptance by the European Parlia
ment is therefore eagerly awaited by us.
Finally, the author would like to acknowledge with gratitude the help given to him and his colleagues in IAML (UK) in particular by Dr. Joachim Jaenecke (Chairman, IAML Bibliography Commission), Frau Eva-Maria Baxmann-Krafft (Secretary, ISO/TC 46) and Dr. Hartmut Walravens (Director) and his colleagues of the International ISBN
Agency, Berlin, as well as by financial support from Blackwell's.
3 A report of this and other proceedings during the past twelve months is given in: A. Pope, "Progress Report on the Introduction of an International Standard Music Number ((ISMN|," in: ISBN Review, 1989, v. 10, p. 25—26. 4 Plan of action for libraries in the EC, First draft for discussion, revision 2, Luxembourg 1987.
Waving or drowning? — the growth of the music catalogues in the British Library Malcolm Turner (London)'
The first music catalogue in the British Museum was not begun until 1840. The principles on which it was compiled continued to be used, with modifications, until the publication of the
Catalogue of printed music in the British Libiaiyto 1980 [CPM], in 1981. At this point a new auto mated catalogue was begun, no doubt beneficial to users but a mixed blessing from the point of view of the staff concerned. Future developments planned for the new British Library building at
St. Paneras will necessitate the retrospective conversion of CPM. Urgent discussions on this are
being held with a publisher, with a view to providing an on-line version of CPM for internal use
together with a CD-ROM version for public sale in time for the opening of the Music Library at
St. Paneras, planned for early 1992.
* Malcolm Turner is Deputy Music Librarian of the British Library, Opinions expressed in this article are those
of the writer, not necessarily of the British Library.
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298 M. Turner: Waving or drowning! — the growth of the music catalogues
It is a commonplace of socio-economic history that the engine of technological change, once merely ticking over, is now accelerating at an ever-increasing and indeed bewilder
ing pace. Libraries, too, including music libraries, are caught up in this process. Even
the Music Library of the British Library, which has occasionally been considered with
its parent institution to be variously a backwater, an ivory tower, a low-profile area or a
haven of peace and sanity, depending on one's point of view, is no stranger to this form
of progress, or at any rate progression. For the first 90 or so years of the British Museum's life there existed neither a music
section nor a music catalogue.1 During this period the music manuscripts became part of the collections of the Department of Manuscripts, while music literature joined the
literature of virtually all other subjects in the general collections of the Department of
Printed Books.2 The cataloguing rules for printed books, however, could not easily
accommodate printed music, and there was no music specialist on the staff. So the
printed music, augmented continually if sporadically by the operation of the copyright
deposit laws, literally accumulated in piles until finally the growing protests of the
musical establishment at the state of this unexploited resource led to the appointment of a music cataloguer, Thomas Oliphant, in 1841. In his memorandum to the Trustees
of 1840, which resulted in Oliphant's appointment, the Principal Keeper, Antonio
Panizzi, had suggested a simple but effective set of eight cataloguing rules (one of them
never in fact applied). Armed with these and with his own ingenious and space-saving
system of pressmarking, Oliphant set about the backlog and had effectively conquered it by 1850, when the apparently ungrateful Trustees decided to dispense with his
services.
His pressmarking system survives today and should see us happily through the next
couple of centuries, assuming books and libraries still exist; his cataloguing rules
lasted, with minor modifications, until January 1981, when they were swept away by AACR2 (the Music Room not having followed suit when the rest of the British Museum
Library gradually moved more towards AACR1 oriented rules in the late 1960s and
early 1970s). The system of catalogue production used by Oliphant and his successors
involved first cataloguing the items by hand on special slips of blue paper, confusingly known as 'titles'. The entries were then copied out onto smaller slips made of an early form of carbon paper, by which means a duplicate copy was produced so that two copies of the catalogue could be maintained, one for staff use and one for reading room use.
These slips were pasted into large loose-leaf volumes in such a way that they could
be detached and re-spaced, to permit the intercalation of later entries. This system too
survived until January 1981, when it was replaced by a UKMARC format automated
catalogue. But it should not be supposed that nothing changed between 1840 and 1981. In 1884
the hand copying of carbon paper slips was replaced by the typesetting of catalogue
entries, saving a good deal of space and incidentally making them much easier to read. It
was not all gain, however. To make typesetting economically viable, given the relative
ly small number of entries involved, an annual cycle had to be introduced. The hand
written 'titles' accumulated for a 12 month period and were then sent to the printer,
eventually appearing as a book known as an annual Accession Part, printed on one side
of the leaf only. The separate entries were then cut up and, over the next 12 months or
1 A full account of the catalogues is given in: A Hyatt King, Printed music in the British Museum: an account of the collections, the catalogues and their formation up to 1920. London: Bingley, 1979. The account is continued beyond 1920, covering in addition the manuscript music collections, in: Malcolm Turner and Arthur Searle, 'The music collections of the British Library Reference Division', in: Notes, March 1982, v. 38 (3), p. 499—549. 2 These names and even the administrative divisions within the organisation as a whole have changed several times over the years. I use the name appropriate to the period about which I am writing at any given point.
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M. Turnei: Waving 01 drowning! — the growth of the music catalogues 299
so, gradually pasted into their correct places, a process referred to as 'incorporation'. Thus an unlucky entry could easily take two years or more from being catalogued to
appearing in the catalogue. By contrast, the old entirely manual system could be a con
tinuous process, with entries appearing soon after being written.3 So this is an inter
esting early instance of technological change actually slowing down some elements, at
least, of the process it was supposed to facilitate.
As the pace of change hotted up, the first half of the 20th century saw the first three
published (as opposed to merely internal) catalogues of the music collections. The
Royal Music Library, as a loan collection,4 and one which included important manu
script as well as printed material, was dignified by a specially compiled printed cata
logue,5 the entries from which were not incorporated into the general music cata
logue. The Hirsch Library, on the other hand, bought in 1946, was catalogued as part of
the normal work of the British Museum Music Room, and filled two of the annual
Accession Parts mentioned above which were, exceptionally, put on sale to the general
public.6 The third catalogue was Barclay Squire's Catalogue of printed music published be
tween 1487 and 1800 now in the British Museum, 2 vols, (London: The Trustees of the
British Museum, 1912). This was rather different from the other two, for it was not a
catalogue of a special collection but the first published catalogue of a major part of the
general collections of the Music Room. In order to compile it Barclay Squire extracted
all entries for pre-1800 music from the main catalogue and revised them in such a way as to make the re-unification of the catalogue extremely difficult. For example the
entries for major composers were filed according to schemes of sub-headings specially devised for each composer and differing considerably from the schemes used for the
same composers in the post-1800 catalogue. They were also printed in smaller type. The division of the catalogue at 1800 thus had to be perpetuated, and proved a major
stumbling block in attempts during the 1960s and 1970s to devise a practicable way of
publishing the catalogue as a whole. So here is a second example of a development
designed to facilitate access to the collections which in the longer term inadvertently had the effect of hindering it.
This difficulty was finally resolved in heroic fashion when the publisher K. G. Saur decided to have the entire pre- and post-1800 catalogues, together with the Royal Music
Library catalogues and various other bits and pieces which, for the sake of simplicity, I have not touched on, keyboarded for computer typesetting and interfiled into a single
alphabetical sequence. The result was the 62 volumes of the Catalogue of printed music
in the British Library to 1980 [CPM], published between 1981 and 1987. The team of editors assembled by Saur did splendid work in ironing out as they went along many
of the inconsistencies, ambiguities and mistakes that are inevitable in such a large cata
logue assembled over such a long period of time. The opportunity was also taken by the
staff of the Music Library to carry out a considerable editorial programme on the cata
logue as a whole, before work began on volume one. For example, the Royal Music
Catalogue had to be compared with the main catalogue so that duplicate copies, other
issues and re-issues could be matched up and re-catalogued appropriately. Over the,
3 Whether in fact it was so used is not clear. Some batching of items took place, and there were delays in copying the 'titles'; but the time taken for an item to appear in the catalogue, in principle at least, ought to have been a
good deal less than two years. 4 It was placed on loan in the British Museum by George V in 1911, and finally given outright by Queen Eliza
beth II in 1957, to mark the 200th anniversary of the gift of the Old Royal Library by George II. 5 W. Barclay Squire, Catalogue of the King's Music Library, 3 vols. London: The Trustees of the British
Museum, 1927—29. 6 Accession Part 53, published in 1951, was devoted to music in the Hirsch Library, while the music literature was catalogued in one of the similar series of Accession Parts from the General Library (Third Series, No. 291B,
published in 1959).
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300 M. Turner: Waving or drowning! — the growth of the music catalogues
years, rules for dealing with anonymous works had changed, and the resulting incon
sistencies needed to be corrected. Finally, during his work on the 1912 Catalogue of
printed music published between 1487 and 1800, Barclay Squire had untertaken the
immense labour of reading through the entire catalogue of printed books in order
to copy from it entries for books on music, which were duly entered into the music
catalogue. Unfortunately this system had not been kept up for later acquisitions owing to lack of staff time; consequently the music catalogue gave an entirely false and
misleading picture of the extent of the music literature collections. It was out of the
question to repeat and update Barclay Squire's undertaking, so the only solution was
to read through the entire music catalogue and remove all entries and cross-references
for music literature.
In some sense a spin-off from CPM is the most recent of the Music Library's publish ed catalogues, the British catalogue of music 1957—1985, published in 10 volumes by Saur in 1988. BCM was established in 1957 as a commercial publication under the
auspices of the Council of the British National Bibliography. Its contents were initially based on the current intake of the Music Library by copyright deposit,7 with the
important distinction that whereas the Music Library's catalogues formed an unpub lished author-title sequence, with no subject or classified access, BCM was essentially a
published classified catalogue with author, title and subject indexes. Although BCM,
along with its parent, the British National Bibliography, eventually became part of the
British Library, it had adopted ACCR1 in 1971, unlike the Music Room, so that dupli cation of cataloguing had to continue until 1981, when both the Music Library and
BCM embraced AACR2 and UKMARC; since then the database compiled by Music
Library cataloguers has effectively produced both the current Music Library catalogue and BCM, through different output profiles. Meanwhile, as an annual publication BCM
was becoming increasingly unwieldy and difficult to consult. A cumulation was urgent
ly needed and frequently requested by the British music library community, and the
Music Library was delighted when Saur agreed to use the expertise gained in publish
ing CPM to produce a uniform series of volumes cumulating BCM down to 1985,
preserving its distinctive organisation as a classified catalogue (and hence a valuable
supplement to CPM for the period it covers). From its inception BCM has used the
Coates classification, devised especially for BCM. Subsequently PRECIS subject index
ing and a version of the Dewey classification have been used in addition, but applying these retrospectively to 1957 would have been too large an undertaking; the cumulation
accordingly is arranged by the Coates classification, with a full subject index in the final
volume. No doubt in future years it will become apparent that both CPM and BCM have
their drawbacks, as was the case with the 1884 typesetting and Barclay Squire's cata
logue of pre-1800 music. But for the moment they seem wholly beneficial, and have
been of enormous help in all aspects of Music Library work, from acquisitions to
photographic orders. As described below, we hope that CPM will also prove a stepping stone to the next major development in the Music Library catalogues.
Mention has already been made several times of the date 1st January 1981, dies ilia
lacrymosa, when the whole of the British Library (except the Lending Division) changed over to AACR2 — and this time the Music Library was not able to opt out. It must be
remembered that most of the Library was already using AACR1, whereas the Music
Library was still using a modified version of Panizzi's 1840 rules. Furthermore, the de mise of the Catalogue Shop (the section of the Library devoted to the art and mystery of
incorporation, as described above) meant that at the same time the Music Library had to
change from a manually maintained catalogue to an automated one using the UKMARC
7 From January 1981 it has also included the Music Library's purchases of foreign publications.
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M. Turner: Waving or drowning} — the growth of the music catalogues 301
format. With the small staff available, and a commitment to keep up the currency of
BCM, the work of cataloguing had to continue, with no time for the luxury of a period of training; we had to learn as we went along. In fact the staff of the Music Library were
very much in the same position as Mr. Squeers' pupils at Dotheboys Hall: "We go upon the practical mode of teaching ... C-l-e-a-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, to scour.
W-i-n, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a casement. When the boy knows this out of the book, he
goes and does it." And so we read our copies of AACR2 and the UKMARC Manual and
went and did it, or as much of it as we could remember from their 900 odd pages.
Naturally a great many mistakes were made, and a great deal of time was spent putting
right the things that had at first been done wrongly.
However, even allowing for our inadequacies (now long overcome, I hasten to add), three things soon became clear. Firstly, AACR2 was by no means as comprehensive as it
appeared to be. Whereas the very generalised old British Museum rules had comfortably accommodated the quirks and peculiarities of music publishing, a surprisingly high percentage of publications failed to fit neatly into AACR2 rules, despite their com
plexity and accumulation of detail. Much time and ingenuity had to be devoted to dis
cussing how to interpret (read: bend) the rules, or how to fit a particular piece of pub
lishing oddity into the AACR2/MARC straitjacket. Secondly, the system is inherently about two or three times slower than our old
system, largely because of the sheer quantity of extra information that the cataloguer
must supply. Some of this is, so to speak, useful information, but much of it consists of
the repetition in coded form (to facilitate searching the database) of information already
contained elsewhere in the record, or of complicated and hence error-prone instructions
designed to force the computer to do imperfectly what human beings used to manage
without any difficulty, that is, to interfile the catalogue entries in a sophisticated,
structured order.
Finally, the system is unforgiving and inflexible. In part this is due to the computer's inability to distinguish between minor and major errors; a misplaced punctuation mark,
a single slip of the pen in writing a name, a single wrong number in the coded designa
tion of an information field, can have disastrous consequences, creating unwanted or
failing to create wanted entries, or sending entries off to file in wildly wrong parts of the
alphabet. In part too it is caused by problems peculiar to the Music Library's task of
using one set of information for two not entirely compatible purposes: producing our
own catalogue, which is cumulative, is (at present) for internal use only and is con
sequently free of time limits or deadlines; and producing BCM, which is in annual un
cumulated volumes (each of which must therefore have its own full complement of
cross-references from differing forms of names and titles), is published, and has a com
mitment to being as up-to-date as possible (two interim issues are published at four
monthly intervals between each annual volume). These conflicting demands affect not
only cataloguing but other Music Library processes, such as pressmarking. The result
is that when a mistake enters the system, for whatever reason, its consequences can
ramify considerably, making it difficult to track down and correct. The batch processing
system that we are obliged to use does not make matters any easier, because of the time
lags that intervene between the various stages of the cataloguing, keyboarding and
amending cycles. On-line cataloguing will, one hopes, eventually lighten this particular
burden, but that will not even be feasible, let alone developed, until the present anti
quated BLAISE [British Library Automated Information Services] software is replaced,
probably within the next two or three years.
We may perhaps have too jaundiced a view of the present system because we were for
some years denied its principal benefit. Only since November 1988 has the catalogue
been available on-line, and we are only just beginning to appreciate the benefits that on
line searching can bring to many aspects of the Music Library's work, both traditional,
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302 M. Turner: Waving or drowning! — the growth of the music catalogues
such as answering enquiries from readers and remote users, and novel, such as shared
cataloguing.8 In the context of on-line searching, it may be objected too that some of our difficulties
described above are of our own making, and spring from inappropriate use of the
system. The computer can manipulate enormous amounts of information to produce
with some ease results that were not formerly possible; instead we are trying to make it
manipulate that information to produce with some difficulty results with which we are
already familiar and comfortable, in the shape of structured linear catalogues. We are in
the position of the first printers and typographers, devoting misguided effort to making
printed books look like manuscripts, to making the results of new technologies look
like products of the old.
That this is so is undeniable. The question is whether we cannot have the benefits of
both on-line information retrieval and a structured catalogue, or whether we must settle
for the former at the expense of the latter. This is of course a question whose answer
affects the whole British Library, not just the Music Library, and the subject of much
debate as we approach the even more automated environment that will prevail in the
Library's new home at St. Paneras.
In the new building, existing linear catalogues, whether on fiche or in book form, will
of course still be available, but the main mode of interrogating the catalogues9 will be
via OPAC [On-line Public Access Catalogue] terminals. These in tum will be linked to an automated book request system, so that having found an item on the OPAC terminal
the reader will, at the press of a button — well, perhaps several buttons — be able to
receive information on the availability of the item (whether for instance the original can
only be seen in a certain reading room or must be seen in microform substitute, or is
away for conservation or photography, or is in use already elsewhere) and to send off
a request for it to the appropriate section of the closed stacks, without the necessity of
filling in a request form as at present. In order to make this possible there will need to be a further major development in the
music catalogues, of which at present the Music Library has three (soon to be reduced to
two). The main catalogue, CPM, as its full title suggests, contains entries for all items
published before 1981 and acquired before the closing date for the relevant volume of
CPM. Since CPM was published seriatim, an item printed before 1981 and acquired as
late as 1987, when the last volume of CPM was published, could have been included in
that volume provided that its main entry and any cross-references fell within the letters
WITV-Z. CPM is of course at present a closed catalogue, by virtue of having been
enshrined in print. The next most important catalogue, referred to as the Current Catalogue, began in
January 1981 and uses AACR2/UKMARC to produce a database containing all the
Music Library's acquisitions of items published after 1980. It contains some 20,000
records and is for the moment growing at the rate of about 4,000 records a year. Its
output is available in three different forms: firstly as a cumulative fiche catalogue,
updated monthly, in three sequences (author/title, verbal subject and pressmark); this is for internal use only and is not available to the general public; secondly, as
the non-cumulative published interim issues and annual volumes of BCM, with main
entries in Dewey order supported by author/title and subject indexes; and thirdly as an
8 A topic discussed elsewhere in this issue of Fontes in the article by Hugh Cobbe. 9 An expression which itself casts an interesting light on the present state of affairs in the library world. In
quieter times one merely consulted a catalogue, or looked things up in it. Interrogating it seems characteristic of the more aggressive, dynamic, thrusting, environment prevailing in so many aspects of library work and indeed of the world in general.
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M. Tuinei: Waving or drowning! — the growth of the music catalogues 303
on-line database to BLAISE subscribers and hence susceptible of highly sophisticated on-line searching.
The decision to have only post-1980 imprints in this catalogue, just as CPM contains
only pre-1981 imprints, was taken in order to make life easier for readers, who would
thus know in which catalogue to look for the items they wanted. It does however leave
a gap, for pre-1981 imprints acquired after the closure of CPM. This is filled by a third
catalogue, designated CPM Supplement. Of necessity an automated catalogue, since the
old manually operated Catalogue Shop no longer exists, as mentioned previously, it
has a hybrid nature. All its headings and most subheadings conform to those in CPM
because it was hoped that at some future time its contents could be merged with CPM
to produce a continuously updated catalogue of pre-1981 imprints. The uniform titles
and the descriptive parts of the entries however conform broadly to AACR2/ISBD(A)
(because much of the material in it is antiquarian, and we wished to retain more exact
titlepage and imprint transcriptions than AACR2 permits), in order to accommodate the
machine format, an in-house derivative of UKMARC designated GKMARC. GK, for
reasons no-one has ever been able satisfactorily to explain, was and is the universally used abbreviation within the British Museum and British Library for the General cata
logue of printed books, and GKMARC was devised to fill exactly the same gap in the
printed books catalogues as CPM Supplement fills in the music catalogues. For reasons
too lengthy to discuss here, GKMARC has now been abandoned, and with it the cata
logues it supported. Exceptionally however CPM Supplement will continue to use it
until the end of 1990, at which time it is hoped to publish its contents as a two or three
volume supplement to CPM in the same format. This will make available records for all
pre-1981 imprints catalogued in the Music Library between 1981 and 1990, amounting, it is estimated, to some 30,000 records. Discussions on this publishing project are how
ever still at a very early stage. From 1991 onwards, all acquisitions of whatever publica tion date will be entered in the Current Catalogue. Whether this will be a help or a
hindrance to both staff and readers is a moot point.
Clearly, if the music catalogues are to participate in the St. Paneras OP AC and auto
mated book request systems it is an indispensable prerequisite that CPM should be
retrospectively converted and mounted for internal purposes at least as an on-line
database.10 CPM was published from phototypesetting tapes containing typographic instructions which can be mapped on to standard MARC fields. As a simple (and slight
ly simplified) example, a change at a defined point in each record from roman to italic
type will indicate the start of the imprint, which will generally be in a standardised
form (publisher colon place comma data), enabling MARC field and sub-field codes to
be assigned automatically. Information for certain other MARC fields can be extra
polated, again automatically in the main, from information already present elsewhere
in a CPM entry. Furthermore, during keyboarding, with this very problem in mind, the
opportunity was taken to insert a few simple codes marking essential elements in each
entry (for example the heading, sub-heading, title and pressmark). All these factors
taken together should allow a high percentage of the work to be carried out automati
cally, though some manual intervention will certainly be needed.
The staff resources of the British Library will without question be inadequate for this
task, given all the other automation projects in the pipeline for St. Paneras. The Library
is therefore seeking to involve an outside publisher, who would, in return for their
investment, be enabled to market the catalogue, probably together with the CPM
Supplement and possibly the Current Catalogue; it would most likely be made available
10 And of course CPM Supplement; but as that is already an automated catalogue, mounting it on-line would be a comparatively simple task.
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304 R. Walter: Das Musikalien-Inventar der Breslauer Kathedrale aus den Jahren 1824/25
in CD-ROM format. Discussions, though at an early stage, are proceeding with some
urgency, because the on-line catalogue, or at least a substantial and representative sub
set of it, must be ready for testing in the OP AC system by the end of 1990.
The Music Library will be among the first few sections of the British Library to move into the first stage of the new building at St. Paneras, in late 1992, and we expect to
open our doors to the public early in 1993. „Soll es das Vorspiel neuer Lieder seinl".
Das Musikalien-Inventar der Breslauer Kathedrale aus den Jahren 1824/25
Rudolf Walter (Mainz)'
Das Musikalien-Inventar der Breslauer Kathedrale aus den Jahren 1824/25 bildet die unmittelbare
Fortsetzung des Musikalien-Inventars der gleichen Kathedrale von 1761, das in Jg. 35 der Fontes
Aitis Musicae publiziert ist. Kleinere, zwischen 1790 und 1800 entstandene Notenaufstellungen der gleichen kirchenmusikalischen Pflegestätte wurden 1988 gedruckt in Florilegium Musicolo
gicum, Tutzing 1988. Zusammen mit zeitlich anschließenden Berichten in Fliegende Blätter für katholische Kirchenmusik und Musica sacra (seit 1866 bzw. 1868 in Regensburg erschienen), in
J. E. Haberts Zeitschrift für kathohsche Kirchenmusik und im ostdeutschen Kirchenmusikorgan Cäciha (seit 1893) sowie mit den Aufführungsverzeichnissen Domkapellmeister Paul Blaschkes
für die Jahre 1925—1945 machen sie die Pflege der Figuralmusik an der Breslauer Kathedrale von
1760—1945 überschaubar.
Das Inventar von 1824/25 umfaßt ca. 547 Titel, infolge wiederholter kumulativer Einträge sind das ca. 650 Kompositionen. Das Material wurde in die bei Kirchenmusik-Inventaren üblichen
Großgruppen: Meßgesänge, Offiziumsgesänge, Spezialia gegliedert. Diese sind unterteilt in die Rubriken: Missae (solennes, solennes breviores, dominicales, pro Adventu et Quadragesima), Gradualia, Offertoria, Te Deum laudamus, Vesperae, Hymni vespertini, Antiphonae Marianae,
Requiem [diese gehörten eigentlich als 5. Untergruppe zu den Missae), Proprien für Advent, Proprien für die Fastenzeit, Karwochengesänge, Fronleichnamsstationen. — Eine Studie, die Ent
stehung, historische und landschaftliche Einordnung diskutiert, publizierte der Herausgeber in Bd. 30 des Jahrbuchs der Universität Breslau, Sigmaringen 1989.
Das Repertoire an Figuralmusik, das zwischen 1735 und 1945 in der Breslauer Kathe
drale gesungen wurde, ließ sich um 1950 für die erste Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts in An
deutungen erschließen. Die Dissertationen von Hans Erdmann Guckel, Katholische
Kirchenmusik in Schlesien1, und Waldemar Matysiak, Bieslauer Domkapellmeister von 1831—19251, wiesen für die Amtszeit der Domkapellmeister Joseph Ignaz Schnabel
(1805—1831) und Bernhard Hahn (1831—1852) auf örtliche Quellen, auf Notizen der Allgemeinen Zeitschrift für Musik, Leipzig, der Zeitschrift Eutonia, Breslau, und auf Artikel im Lexikon Die Tonkünstler Schlesiens von Carl Julius Adolph Hoffmann hin3.
* Rudolf Walter ist Professor der Universität Mainz.
1 Leipzig 1912, S. 66ff. 2 Düsseldorf 1934, S. 2ff. 3 Breslau 1830, u. a. Artikel Johann Georg Clement (S. 61 ff.), Joseph Gottwald (S. 137ff. J, Joseph Ignaz Schnabel (S. 389ff.).
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