Since the beginnings of the monastery, music has been played and the necessary music materials collected. The monastery fire of 1729 did not spare the music collections. Today’s music library mainly contains works from the time after the last monastery fire. These scores are all written on paper and there is a card catalog to find the works. In this way, however, one is always bound to a particular location and comparisons are sometimes difficult to make. In recent years, there have been two projects that can be seen as digitization.

Engelberg sheet music

The first project took place between 2019 and 2021 and aimed to partially digitize the card catalog. Driven by the idea of taking up the card-based organization of the music library and bringing it to a new, digital level, the digital music index of the music library was created as part of a project by three students from the Stiftsschule Engelberg (Georgio Stevanovic, Kevin Ehrler, Cyprian Feller). The aim of these students was to make information on the works composed by Engelberg monks more accessible to researchers and interested parties by creating a digital directory.

Digitization by RISM Switzerland

“RISM Switzerland indexes the manuscript and printed music and writings on music preserved in Swiss libraries and archives according to internationally binding scientific standards.” (https://rism.digital/de/rism-ch.html)

The first form of digitization was carried out a few years ago by RISM Switzerland, and today both manuscripts and prints from the music library of Engelberg Abbey (CH-EN) are listed in the RISM database at https://rism.online, as Dr. Claudio Bacciagaluppi, research associate at the RISM Digital Center, explained in an interview. The digitization step at that time involved a simple library description. In this year’s digitization project “Digital Music Unica in Switzerland” (D-MUS), the focus was now on unique musical items, whereby, according to Bacciagaluppi, printed sources can also be unique “if the present copy is the only surviving evidence of the edition or print run”. The second project, “Disjecta membra“, is concerned with incompletely preserved printed music. In view of the relatively small editions and the utilitarian, practical nature of the music market, it is not unusual that some complete sets of parts of a music edition have not survived. Parts of a work are often held in different libraries at home or abroad. Coordinated digitization can now bring together incompletely preserved musical works virtually. “Around 35 music prints in the monastery’s music library belong to one of these two categories: Either they are the only surviving copies of the respective editions (such as Franz Joseph Leonti Meyer von Schauensee’s ‘Quattro concerti armonici’ from 1764) or the incomplete parts in Engelberg optimally complement another incomplete set of parts (for example Joseph Stalder’s “Sei sinfonie”, which survives distributed between Engelberg and Brussels),” Bacciagaluppi continues. The works of the Lucerne composers von Schauensee and Stalder are of particular interest in terms of local history.

When compiling the collection, it turned out that around twenty of them are unique, i.e. they are not recorded in any other institution worldwide. As part of the two RISM Switzerland digitization projects mentioned above, seventeen unique music prints and four titles, of which no complete set of parts is known, have now been made accessible online.

Results of digitization

Both the RISM projects and the digital music catalog are of great importance. In the development of the “music index” project, it should be particularly emphasized that the focus here was on the work of the Engelberg monks as composers, making it possible to gain a good overview of their largely unexplored work as composers. It would be desirable to include the composers who are still missing.

Vera Paulus
Head of Music Library