Professional paper

MUSICAL COLLECTIONS IN CROATIA

Stanislav Tuksar ; Odsjek za muzikologiju, Muzička akademija, Sveučilište u Zagrebu

Abstract

While the actual collection and preservation of musical artefacts (sheet music, books about music and musical instruments) started sporadically in the Middle Ages, from the 10th
and 11th centuries onwards (church codices furnished with
various types of musical notation) and then much more vigorously and systematically from the 1750s, awareness of their
scholarly and archival articulation and the first campaign
systematically to list them date from 1930.
At the beginning of the 1980s the newly founded Institute for
Musicological Research of the JAZU Research Centre carried
out a second extensive questionnaire of the kind, and for the
first time undertook a series of systematic campaigns to find,
identify, put in order and catalogue musical collections throughout Croatia. This questionnaire was addressed to more than
1200 ecclesiastical and secular institutions (private collections, apart from one previously known, were not considered)
and the response was surprisingly good. Answers arrived
from more than 50% of the places, that is, from more than 600
addressees. Of these, 213 were positive answers, i.e., the questionnaire helped to reveal previously unknown information
about the existence of 213 musical collections and archives
in Croatia. As against the previous knowledge of some 50 of
them, this was a revolutionary turn in our knowledge about
the factual foundations of written musical culture in Croatia.
It should be pointed out at once that these were mostly not
organised collections, open to the public, rather localities
(parish and cathedral archives, monastic collections, museums) that, according to the answers on the questionnaires,
had manuscript or printed sheet music or books about music,
in either good or poor order. At the moment the questionnaire
was carried out, most of the collections were actually not
properly ordered according to the standards of libraries and
archives, and only a few of them had been catalogued, in
various mutually incompatible ways, with catalogue cards or
obsolescent inventory books. Approximately estimated, these
collections contained some 60,000 archival units, with a much
larger number of compositions, the age of the artefacts ranging from the 10th and 11th century to the 20th, mainly from the
period from 1750 to about 1960.
In the last thirty years, that is, from the beginnings of the
1980s until the present, taking this situation as a foundation,
a number of actions were taken in Croatian historical musicological and archival studies that to an extent improved the
situation in musical collections and archives.
With a series of five successive projects funded by the Ministry of Science and in the last decade the Ministry of Culture
too, as part of the Institute for Musicological Research of the
Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts, today the Section
for the History of Croatian Music of the Croatian Academy of
Sciences and Arts, the Croatian Musicological Society and the
Music Academy, a systematic survey, arrangement and cataloguing of the musical collections discovered by the questionnaire began. Within the scope of these projects, 44 musical
collections have been put in order and catalogued, and with
further research, the number of known musical collections in
Croatia has risen to almost 300.

Keywords

Hrčak ID:

176887

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/176887

Publication date:

2.9.2016.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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