The Digital Project of the RAI Archive: Catalogue, Chronology and Study of the Italian Broadcasting Orchestra

The RAI music archive, located at the “A. Toscanini” Auditorium of Turin (Italy), contains five different types of documents: a valuable collection of rare, autographed manuscripts (letters and scores); printed music of symphonic and entertainment repertoire; a historical collection of opera librettos; an enormous corpus of arrangements for radiophonic orchestras; and the collection of concert programmes from the nineteen-fifties to the present. All of this material, practically unknown to the musicological community, was catalogued according to internationally adopted standards and has been the subject of a partial digitization. The collected information is now accessible on line (www.osn.teche. rai.it), thanks to the digital intervention of Rai Teche experts. The on line publication of the catalogued records made possible studies in various fields: the philological analysis and historical contextualization of the manuscripts preserved in the “Autographs and Rare Manuscripts” fund; a 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. The project, funded by MIUR (Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca) was completed between 2012 and 2016.