index.html.en - index.html.en

Text music in the Romania - Chanson-Archive Innsbruck

The research unit Text Music in Romania, which was established in 1985 at the University of Innsbruck and allocated to the Department of Romance Studies, is a unique documentation and research center in the field of Romance text music for the German-speaking world. It is dedicated to the archiving of artefacts in which text and music meet or overlap. Archiving and research are especially focused on:

• modern popular song forms like chanson, pop, rock, rap, songs of political agitation, world music etc.
• traditional mixed forms of text and music like opera, operetta, zarzuela, musical etc.
• the varieties of the romanesque art- and folk song
• Recitation texts with instrumental accompaniment
• recordings of literary texts (partly with, partly without music)

Countries of origin include France and the francophone countries, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Latin America. The material gathered here also includes special collections such as the Centre d'étude de la chanson québécoise, the largest collection of Quebec and francophone North American recordings in Western Europe, as well as special collections such as the Pierre Seguy collection, one of the largest collections of records on French chanson (1960-2000) in Europe, and the Albert Gier collection, a comprehensive documentary archive on libretto research. In addition to these two collections, which are the result of donations, over the years the Center of Text Music in Romania has been entrusted with the archiving and management of bequests and various other collections (see Record collections from Austria, Germany and Quebec).

In addition to a well-stocked library (whose new acquisitions have been managed by the University Library since 2009 and are therefore no longer kept in the archives), the Center for Text Music in the Romania has an extensive collection of sound recordings (LPs, CDs, cassettes, MP3 files) with well over 60,000 individual titles. These can be accessed via an online database. The sound recordings can be borrowed and can also be transferred for research and teaching purposes in the sound studio of the Faculty of Language, Literature and Culture for a fee.

The archive's research activities, which are compiled on the website, have received particularly valuable input since 2016 through the online journal ATeM (edited by Gerhild Fuchs, Ursula Mathis-Moser and Birgit Mertz-Baumgartner), an online journal with open access and peer-review procedures that emerged from a predecessor publication (BAT).