Music Collectorship

Giuseppe Greggiati and his collection at Ostiglia

This project is a joint initiative of the City of Ostiglia (Mantua, Italy) and the Musicology Department of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, in collaboration with the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature. The project focuses on the activities of Giuseppe Greggiati (1793–1866) and his impressive private collection of music manuscripts and printed books, in all, some 11,000 items—one of the largest collections of its kind, and one of the few to have remained essentially intact since it was bequeathed to the city of Ostiglia at the collector’s death. The integrity of the collection, the wealth of its repertory, and the presence of remarkably detailed information concerning the collector’s activities make this an ideal subject for the study of music collecting in the 19th century.

The project combines research and graduate training: every year between 2012 and 2016 five doctoral students in musicology and one faculty member traveled from Bloomington to the Biblioteca Musicale “G. Greggiati” in Ostiglia for a one-month intensive seminar on codicology, manuscript cataloguing, and music collecting in the early 19th century. After completing this first on-site campaign on the banks of the river Po, the team is now studying and processing data and images to create an online resource illustrating the Greggiati collection and its historical significance.