Uppsala University The Swedish Foundation For Humanities And Social Sciences



SweLiMuS: Swedish Liturgical Music Sources c.1520-c.1820

About the project
SweLiMuS (Swedish Liturgical Music Sources) aims at identification, scholarly cataloguing, digitization, and online publication of liturgical music manuscripts in Sweden from c.1520-c.1820. Inventory projects in recent years have left us with a large corpus of sources, scattered all over Sweden. While many sources have been known and studied for a long time, others have been located and identified for the first time by recent inventory projects. Taken together, this source material now receives systematic scholarly treatment for the first time.
About the sources
The first sign of different Reformation movements in Sweden in the 1520s caused little change in music, liturgy and manuscript culture. Until the late eighteenth century, the liturgy of the Mass and a reduced number of Office hours were sung from locally or centrally produced manuscripts and prints, in addition to services of baptism, burials, weddings and other rites. The Swedish liturgical tradition reveal in these sources a number of peculiarities, and in some respects a remarkable synthesis of consistency from late-mediaeval circumstances, and later local adaptations in the dioceses. The material is often a hybrid between print and manuscript, since Swedish music prints for a long time printed only texts and staff systems, while note heads were entered in manuscript. This gives the sources a unique descriptive, and not mererly prescriptive value - they testify to what was actually sung on different places, not just what was centrally intended or desired. Their historical importance is considerable on a number of fields in the humanities, besides musicology.
Collaborators

The director of the project is Mattias Lundberg, professor of musicology at Uppsala University. The physical examination on site, as well as the production of images is carried out by Fanny Stenback, book and paper conservator. The cataloguing and indexing of the source data is done by the Juliane Peetz-Ullman, Ph.D. candidate in musicology.

Scholarly advisory board

A scientific advisory board has been appointed for the project. The role of the scientific board is to guarantee standards of scholary work, librarianship and metadata. The board meets twice a year.

Mattias Lundberg, Professor of musicology, Uppsala University (project director)

Fanny Stenback, Paper conservator, Scriptum (collaborator in project)

Juliane Peetz-Ullman, Doctoral student in Musicology, University of Greifswald (collaborator in project)

Kia Hedell, Ph.D. in musicology Senior librarian, Manuscripts and Music, Uppsala University Library (contact person, Alvin)

Otfried Czaika, Professor of Church History, Norwegian Shool of Theology, Oslo

Martin Berntson, Professor of Church History, Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, Gothenburg University

Martin Kjellgren, Ph.D. in History, collaborator in separate inventory project in the diocese of Linköping.

Sanna Raninen, Ph.D. in Musicology, Research Fellow, Uppsala University Research Fellow, Uppsala University 2018–2021 (Funded by Koneen Säätiö)