Music Resources

An additional blog for St Cecilia's day!  Concert programmes abound in collections, including the John Johnson Collection and the Bodleian Music Room. There have been three major iniatives to document holdings of concert programmes. Cecilia (Mapping the music resources of the UK and Ireland) was followed by  the Concert Programmes database which focuses on describing concert programmes and enables searching by time, people, place, subject, tradition and institution.

(c) University of Cardiff, RCM London, MLA

Additionally, there is the Concert Life in 19th century London database and Research project.

The Royal College of Music, which has very important holdings of concert programmes, is also currently collaborating with the Wigmore Hall to catalogue concert programmes.   The Wigmore Hall has two podcasts of a study afternoon in May 2011 which discussed the archives of the Wigmore Hall, led by Prof Paul Banks, from the Royal College of Music's Centre for Performance History, and Paula Best, Head of Publications & Archive at Wgmore Hall.

The Royal Opera House is cataloguing every performance at the ROH from 1732 to the present.

(c) Royal Opera House

In 2011, the BBC launched the online Prom Archive in which all 7,168 performances at the Proms since 1895 are indexed. This is a search for Benjamin Britten (whose birthday is on St Cecilia's Day)

(C) BBC 2011