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IDEM
Integrated Database for Early music
IDEM – Integrated Database for Early Music

IDEM is an interdisciplinary and multifaceted database of manuscripts and printed books that are relevant to the Alamire Foundation's research and activities. It therefore especially focuses on the musical heritage of the Low Countries from the early Middle Ages until 1800.

IDEM contains digital images of manuscripts and prints digitized by the Alamire Digital Lab, the high-technology photography centre of the Alamire Foundation (KU Leuven – Musicology Research Unit). Its state-of-the-art equipment allows musical sources to be photographed following the strictest standards and quality requirements.

The core database is complemented by interrelated sub-databases that enable the consultation and study of manuscript and printed sources from multiple perspectives. IDEM will eventually contain information about every aspect of the manuscripts and books concerned, including their physical characteristics, their content and illumination, as well as recordings, editions and so-called 'fake-similes' (adapted versions of the original images, facilitating performance from the original notation).

IDEM is thus designed to be an online, freely accessible platform and tool for the preservation, study, and valorisation of the music heritage of the Low Countries.

February 2026 – In the spotlight: A-Wn, ms. Cod. 11883

This source from the Austrian National Library preserves a substantial polyphonic repertoire by both well-known and lesser-known Franco-Flemish composers from the second half of the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries. In total, it comprises 32 compositions, most of them settings of the Mass Ordinary. Since fourteen of these works survive in no other source, this manuscript accounts for a significant share of our knowledge of the musical landscape of the Low Countries at the time—especially given that several compositions draw on Flemish secular melodies, such as the Missa Ghy syt die wertste boven al by Johannes Ghiselin or the anonymous Missa Noch weth ic ein son scoen joncfraw.

What immediately stands out is the codex’s lack of illumination and its rough-draft-like notation. The volume consists of several fascicles, each usually containing a single composition. These are often preceded by a flyleaf that occasionally includes a composer attribution. Could this be a practical manuscript whose compositions served as exemplars for the more polished copies in formal manuscripts, produced by the Alamire scriptorium? Indeed, several readings within the Alamire corpus appear to derive directly from the works preserved in manuscript 11883. Yet because the number of such parallels remains limited, this theory cannot be definitively proven.

It also remains unclear when—or even whether—the various fascicles entered the workshop as a group. Nor is it certain that they were bound together there at all. The codex should therefore be regarded as a collection of individual fascicles, produced at different times, in different places, and by multiple scribes. The watermarks on the pages offer no evidence of a shared origin or moment of production; only a broad time range between 1475 and 1540 could be determined from them. After the gatherings were eventually brought together, the volume came into the possession of the wealthy Fugger family of Augsburg. In 1656, Emperor Ferdinand III purchased their collection, at which point the manuscript made its way to the capital of present-day Austria.

View the source here.

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