Kapellmeisterbuch

The Benedictine abbey of Einsiedeln in Switzerland holds a uncommon handwritten music inventory, the Kapellmeisterbuch, in which each piece of music performed at the abbey on Sundays and other feasts between 1813 and 1852, and fragmentary from 1805 to 1884, were registered by the Kapellmeister. The book, which contains about 340 pages, is an unique document and an extremely valuable resource for musicologists for the study of the musical life in the 19th century in Switzerland.

See the Kapellmeisterbuch page for a detailed description of the manusrcipt.

The transcription

In order to make it available to the scholars and browsable in an appropriate way, the book has been fully transcribed in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) and published in this web application. The TEI transcription of the Kapellmeisterbuch enabled the creation of different indexes, which provide the user with browsing by date, by composer and by liturgical feast. The indexes contain normalised versions of the names appearing in the document.

In the transcription, the doubtfulness and the completions of the abbreviations were integrated according to the TEI recommendations for simple editorial changes. The text of the transcription can be searched using a full-text approach.

The transcription of the Kapellmeisterbuch is an online resource realized in 2009-2010 by the Institute of Musicology of Fribourg University and the Swiss RISM office, with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation („Musical Repertoire in Swiss Collegiate and Monastic Churches“, project No. 100012-124416).

Images: courtesy of P. Lukas Helg OSB (Einsiedeln)

Project team:

• Prof. Luca Zoppelli (head)
• Claudio Bacciagaluppi
• Luigi Collarile
  
• Laurent Pugin

The XSL stylesheet for generating the manuscript description page was kindly provided by the e-codices project.