The Musical Documentation of the Archive of the Brotherhood of the Clerigs of Porto

Proposal of Archival Description

Abstract

This text tries to establish a connection between music and information science, a subject still little explored due to the complexity of the archival description and the inherent specificity of documents of a musical nature. For this purpose, the study object used for this work was the Music Collection of the Irmandade dos Clérigos Archive of Oporto (Brotherhood of Clerics Archive of Oporto). In 2015, a team of archivists organised and described archivistically all the documents about the actions of the Brotherhood. This Music Collection belonged to the Brotherhood Choir, founded in 1768, and was mainly constituted by music manuscripts and some printed editions. In this article, and for a better understanding of these documents, several aspects at a historical level as well as musical and archivistic level will be studied. Some of the information published here is unprecedented in Portuguese Musicology, as these documents have never been scientifically studied. From the twenty-eight pieces of music which constitute this Music Collection, only three names of composers were identified, one of them being unknown in the Portuguese music context. They are David Perez (1711-1778), António da Silva Leite (1759-1833) and Francisco da Cunha Teles e Meneses (without known information). Thus, this report also has the purpose of reflecting on the connections between music and archives, pointing out the lack of technicians specialized in both areas, for the treatment of similar collections in public and private archives. We propose that music is faced only as a different typology and/or subject of a document, not discriminating against and treating it as any other archive document.