Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

typos fixed #2702

Merged
merged 4 commits into from
Nov 16, 2023
Merged
Changes from all commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
4 changes: 2 additions & 2 deletions _posts/en/2023-11/2023-11-16-harald-heckmann-in-memoriam.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -10,15 +10,15 @@ email: ''
author: ''
---

In Harald Heckmann, the world of music archivists and documentors has lost one of its most distinguished personalities. Those of us who had the privilege of working with him have also lost a wise mentor and fatherly friend.
In Harald Heckmann, the world of music archivists and documenters has lost one of its most distinguished personalities. Those of us who had the privilege of working with him have also lost a wise mentor and fatherly friend.

Born the son of an art historian and teacher in Dortmund, he studied musicology in Freiburg im Breisgau with Wilibald Gurlitt, among others. In 1952, he completed his doctorate with a dissertation on “Wolfgang Caspar Printz (1641–1717) and his theory of rhythm.” He remained Gurlitt’s assistant until 1954, while working on the renowned Handwörterbuch of musical terminology and lecturing on the history of Lutheran church music and hymnology at the Musikhochschule Freiburg.

After completing his studies, he gained his first experiences with archival work at the Freiburg Folk Song Archive. In 1954, he moved to Kassel to set up the German Music History Archive (not to be confused with the German Music Archive of the German National Library) meant to become the central microfilm archive of German musical sources.

Heckmann was presumably a founding member of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML), founded in 1950 under the leadership of Vladimir Fedorov (1901–1979), and at that time usually abbreviated as AIBM after its French name Association Internationale des Bibliothèques Musicales. From 1959 to 1974 he served as Secretary General, then as President until 1977, eventually becoming Honorary President of the association. Even earlier he was involved with the founding of the international documentation projects operating under the auspices of IAML and often mentioned as the “R-Projects”: RILM, RISM, and RIdIM. (RIPM was only added later.)

He was particularly concerned with RISM, serving as its secretary from 1960 and as its president after 1988. Together with his friend, the Mozart scholar Wolfgang Rehm (1929–2017), he succeeded in setting up a second office under the name RISM Zentralredaktion, alongside the original RISM Sécretariat based in Paris. Initially, the new office in Kassel was responsible for the production of the A/I series, including individual prints before 1800. Only in the early 1980s did the Zentralredaktion also take over the A/II series, dedicated to music manuscripts from 1600 to 1800 (but later extended to 1850 and beyond). It was a milestone when, together with Wolfgang Rehm, Heckmann managed to secure funding for the latter project from the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. After his retirement in 2004, he also became honorary president of RISM.
He was particularly concerned with RISM, serving as its secretary from 1960 and as its president after 1988. Together with his friend, the Mozart scholar Wolfgang Rehm (1929–2017), he succeeded in setting up a second office under the name RISM Zentralredaktion, alongside the original RISM Sécretariat based in Paris. Initially, the new office in Kassel was responsible for the production of the A/I series, including individual prints before 1800. Only in the early 1980s did the Zentralredaktion also take over the A/II series, dedicated to music manuscripts from 1600 to 1800 (but later extended to 1850 and beyond). It was a milestone when, together with Wolfgang Rehm, Heckmann managed to secure funding for the latter project from the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. After his retirement in 2004, he became honorary president also of RISM.

A central theme of his work, both professional and voluntary, was the introduction of information technology into music documentation. He was one of those managers who were themselves not closely familiar with such tools (and how could they have been), but nonetheless recognized the vast perspectives they opened up, which we tend to take for granted today. It is thanks to him and his like-minded colleagues, above all Barry S. Brook (1918–1997), that the RISM A/II series came to be conceived in terms of computers from the very beginning, and that publication in book format was ruled out – even though at the time no one could have a clear idea about how the database might be published later.

Expand Down