Rupert Ridgewell

Rupert Ridgewell
Position
Lead Curator, Printed Music
Specialism
Music, Mozart, Print Culture
Department
Collections
Related Offices
Vice President of the International Association of Music Libraries

Rupert has worked as a curator in the music department of the British Library since 2000 and is currently responsible for the printed music collection, which consists of some 1.6 million items covering the period from 1501 to the present day.

His research interests encompass music bibliography, print culture, Mozart biography, and music-making by German internees in WW1. He has co-curated several exhibitions at the Library, notably Poetry in Sound: the Music of Benjamin Britten (2013) and Wagner in London (2007).

Rupert is also editor of the Concert Programmes Database, which resulted from a project he managed on secondment at the Royal College of Music, London (2004-2007) in collaboration with libraries and archives throughout the UK.

Publications

See Rupert’s list of publications on ORCiD.

Selected Book Chapters

‘Music and Print’, in A New Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019), vol. 2, p. 727–42.

‘Publishing’, in Mozart in Context, ed. Simon Keefe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 154–60 and

‘Editing Mozart’ in Mozart in Context, ed. Simon Keefe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 289–96.

‘Inside a Viennese Kunsthandlung: Artaria in 1784’, in Consuming Music: Individuals, Institutions, Communities, 1730–1830, ed. Emily Green and Catherine Mayes (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2017), p. 29–61.

‘A newly identified Viennese Mozart Edition’, in Mozart Studies 2, ed. Simon Keefe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 106–39.

Selected Journal Articles

‘Non-printed legal deposit and music in the UK: a progress report’, Brio 56/2 (2019), p. 87–95. [with Richard Chesser]

‘Spreadsheets as User Interfaces’, chapter in Proceedings of AVI 2016 (the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces), 7–10 June 2016 (Bari: ACM, 2016), 192–95. [with Alan Dix, Christina Bashford, Simon McVeigh, and Rachel Cowgill]

‘Biographical Myth and the Publication of Mozart’s Piano Quartets’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135/1 (2010), p. 41–114.

See also

Music collection guides

British Library Music Blog

Discovering Music

Subjects

Afton Water part 04

Music

The British Library has a world-famous collection of music