IL PROGETTO DI CATALOGAZIONE E STUDIO DEI DOCUMENTI MUSICALI CONSERVATI NELL’ARCHIVIO RAI DI TORINO: STRATEGIE E OBIETTIVI DELLA RICERCA

The music archive of the Rai, located at the “A. Toscanini” Auditorium of Turin, contains five different types of documents: a valuable collection of rare, autographed manuscripts (letters and scores); printed music of symphonic and light repertoire; a historical collection of opera librettos; an enormous corpus of arrangements for radiophonic orchestras; and the collection of theatre programmes from the nineteen-fifties to the present. All of this material, practically unknown to the musicological community, is being catalogued according to internationally adopted scientific standards and has been the subject of a partial digitization. The collected information is coming together in a database that will become accessible online, thanks to the informatics intervention of Rai Teche. The progressive stratification of the catalogued records is also making it possible to further studies in various fields: the philological analysis and historical contextualization of the manuscripts preserved in the “Autographs and Rare Books” fund; thorough research on the repertoire of the arrangements for radiophonic orchestras; a complete history of Rai concerts performed in Turin; a series of studies about the activities of the Rai orchestras in Turin, and an essay, including annotated inventory, on the collection of librettos. The project, funded by MIUR with a FIRB call for an adequate cost equal to Euros 340,000, was launched in March 2012 and is expected to last 36 months.