The Musici Database is online
Since May 24th, 2013 the Musici Database is online. It contains information on Europan musicians in Italy between 1650 und 1750. Many musicians in this period travelled to Italy in order to play music, to compose, or to learn from other musicians. For many of them their Italian journey was one of their most important steps for their carreer in their home country.
Among the travelling musicians were some composers which are still well-known today, as George Frederick Handel or Johann Adolf Hasse. Nevertheless, the Musici Database contains as well persons whose names have been forgotten for a long time and emerged only today after intense research work in the archives. Through the database, it is now possible to find these persons again. The database contained about 500 persons at the time of its publication and is continuously edited and enhanced.
The focus of the Musici Database are musical activities, but it contains information on origin and social networks as well. It produces insights on the musicians’ involvement in foreign communities and local minorities and on migration of instrument makers and the diffusion of their craft, and last but not least on development of certain musical styles and genres.
The database content is searchable through a user interface. For data experimentation the interface offers various visualizations, e.g. the results can be displayed as pie chart, bar chart, map, or timeline. Technically this is a modular composition of Person Data Repository components which utilize Google Chart API and Simile Timeline.
The project was based on a cooperation of the German Historical Institute in Rome and the École Française de Rome together with the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and was financed from 2010 to 2013. The HERA project „Music Migrations“ will continue and enhance the database in regard to content and to its technical dimension as well.
The direct link to the database is:
http://www.musici.eu/database
The project was also presented on the DH 2012 in Hamburg:
http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/conference/programme/abstracts/the-musici-database/
(This is an English translation of the article of Die „Musici“-Datenbank ist online, published on June 4th 2013 on digiversity.net.)
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Torsten Roeder (January 21, 2014). The Musici Database is online. Music migrations. Retrieved April 27, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/rpjy