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Alamire
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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.

May 2025: Rare carillon manuscripts: second series

In November 2024, the Alamire Foundation launched an ambitious project: the complete publication on IDEM of carillon manuscripts from the Ancien Régime (to roughly 1800). The first part included manuscripts from Antwerp, Leuven, Brussels, Paris, Asten, Sint-Omaars, and Delft. Now comes a second series of sources, this time from Gdańsk, Lake Wales Florida (Antwerp manuscripts), Salzburg, and Darmstadt. These music manuscripts date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Such historical sources are rare and inform us about performance practice on both hand-played and automatic instruments in specific cities in the Low Countries and Western Europe. Most of them have been published in recent decades (sometimes in facsimile, sometimes transcribed, sometimes in an arrangement), but the publications are often no longer available. That is precisely why the Alamire Foundation has committed itself to the digital accessibility of this corpus on IDEM.

In most cases, the images were made in situ by the Alamire Digital Lab, the Alamire Foundation's mobile, high-tech digitisation lab. On IDEM, they are provided with detailed metadata and often also with a table of contents that allows the user to click directly to the relevant image. All manuscripts can be viewed in excellent image quality. 

We are convinced that this carillon project will give a strong impetus to research into carillon culture in the Low Countries and offer new opportunities for artistic, musicological, and practical research.

Browse all carillon sources here.