The Felix Meritis Concert Programs Database, 1832– 1888

From Archival Ephemera to Searchable Performance Data

Abstract

The Felix Meritis Concert Programs Database 1832–1888 (fmcp Database) provides a full digitisation of the concert programs collection of the most long-standing Dutch concert hall in the nineteenth century: Felix Meritis. Formerly hidden in boxes with archival ephemera, the content of this collection is now unlocked by manually entering the program details into a searchable dataset. The programs give an extremely rich account of a local concert practice, the performed repertoire, and the musicians involved. However, archiving concert programs at item-level presents a challenge: due to inconsistencies in and incompleteness of work descriptions it is often hard to identify and categorize the musical works performed. For the fmcp database, the authors have developed a possible solution to this problem; a strategy for structuring and categorizing concert programming data that aims to include incomplete work descriptions and reflect genre categorizations used in local concert practice. In this paper, the authors will present this categorization method and discuss the attributes and the basic structure of the fmcp database.