ENABLING ACCESS TO BYZANTINE MUSIC MANUSCRIPTS IN AN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT: THE CASE OF NIKOLAOS MAVROPOULOS ARCHIVE

Abstract

There has been a growing interest in digital archive development in academic music libraries over the past years in national and international level. Traditional and new descriptive cataloging standards have changed the way libraries and cataloging agencies formulate their bibliographic metadata in general and music metadata in particular. Music archives and special collections with emphasis on Hellenic music collect documents of any form or format from various composers, performers, scholars and so on. Yet, the music library community both in and out of Greece is still faced with unique descriptive issues regarding printed and manuscript music among others. Moreover, by taking into account that the vast majority of music sources in Greece, dated from the 9th to the 20th century, record music of the Byzantine and post- Byzantine eras, a sacred music repertory of distinctive characteristics in terms of modality, notation and performance practice, makes the descriptive endeavour even more complicated. Within this frame, the paper aims at: a) providing a basic set of guidelines and best practices for describing and providing access in regard with print and manuscript music archival resources in general, as well as ith Hellenic music in specific, through the example of the collection of Byzantine music manuscripts of Nikolaos Mavropoulos, b) bringing out interoperability issues between Byzantine Musicology and Music Librarianship, c) stressing the importance of Muscat (RISM’s international database) for the dissemination of Byzantine music across the world, and d) emphasizing on issues regarding the necessary professional experience and knowledge to accomplish efficiently such tasks.