An "art treasure of masterpieces, largely in original manuscripts". Cataloguing and digitisation of the archive of the Berlin Sing-Akademie

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Achim Bonte
• Subject Area: Musicology ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 537804797

The Sing-Akademie zu Berlin was founded in 1791 by Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch. It is the oldest existing mixed choir dedicated to the performance of historical music in concert since its founding. For this purpose, an archive of sheet music was created, most of which was compiled and built up by Fasch's successor, Carl Friedrich Zelter. Zelter's collecting activities focused on music of the 16th to 18th centuries. In accordance with Zelter's educational ideal, the collection soon took on an encyclopaedic form in the spirit of the Enlightenment, thus surpassing its original purpose, i.e. the choral music. As a result, all styles and genres of European vocal and instrumental music are represented in this extensive collection - from folk songs and salon music to large oratorios or operas, from short piano pieces and solo concertos to large-scale overtures and symphonies. The acquisition of various musical estates (including those of Carl Jakob Christian Klipfel, Sara Levy, Friedrich Nicolai or Georg Poelchau) and the inclusion of music from various monasteries in Silesia resulted in a very diverse and rich musical score material, which includes numerous unique items - be they autographs or copies. The archive of the Sing-Akademie also includes the world's third largest collection of musical sources of the Bach family as well as sources with music by Georg Philipp Telemann and the Graun brothers. Operas by various baroque composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti, Antonio Vivaldi and Johann David Heinichen are also found here, some of them in form of unique sources. The music archive of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin was considered lost for decades after the end of the Second World War, until it was finally recovered in the State Archive - Museum of Literature and Art in Kiev. Since its restitution in 2001, it has been on permanent loan to the music department of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (SBB) for research purposes. A smaller part of the archive, which has always remained in Berlin, has also been on deposit at the SBB since 1974 and 1977. This includes numerous textbooks, offprints, programme notes, membership directories, diaries, files, pictures and letters. In addition, there are documents from more recent times that were until 2022/2023 in the archive of the Sing-Akademie. The aim of the project is to catalogue and digitise the historical holdings of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, which are held in the SBB as a deposit. The cataloguing data and the digitised items are to be made freely available via the catalogue of the SBB (Stabikat/GBV), the (music) manuscript databases RISM and Kalliope as well as the SBB's Digitised Collections.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)