Digitisation and Contextualisation of the Solesmes Musical Heritage
From nineteenth-century manuscript copies to early photographic negatives, the Solesmes archive encapsulates generations of musicological endeavour.
By bringing this material into the digital domain, REPERTORIUM connects foundational research—by scholars such as Eugène Cardine, Dom Jean Claire, and Michel Huglo—with modern computational methods, ensuring that this unique heritage continues to inform study, teaching, and discovery for years to come.
Within the REPERTORIUM project, one of the major musicological outcomes has been the digitisation, documentation, and online dissemination of the vast documentary heritage preserved at the Musical Palaeography Workshop of Solesmes Abbey.
Built over more than a century through manuscript copies and early photographic campaigns by the monks of Solesmes, this corpus represents one of the most important reference collections for the study of medieval chant traditions.
Through REPERTORIUM, the entire material has been systematically digitised, contextualised, and made available online in the Medieval Music Manuscripts Online (MMMO) platform, extending the infrastructures and expertise of the medieval music research community.
Digitisation and scientific documentation
1,474 historic reproductions digitised and enriched with structured metadata on provenance, identification, and location of original manuscripts.
Integration with international infrastructures such as DIAMM (University of Oxford) and an IIIF-compatible viewer within MMMO.
Specialised image filters enhance the readability of degraded or complex notation, supporting detailed analytical and palaeographic study.
Corpus key figures
138 manuscripts indexed
155,941 chants identified and linked
to the Cantus Index database.
Unique preservation outcomes
65 manuscripts known only through Solesmes documentation
34 destroyed,
31 with unknown current location.
These reproductions now constitute the only surviving witnesses of otherwise lost or inaccessible sources.
Musicological research and preservation
Provides scholars with unprecedented access to primary chant sources, supporting comparative and transmission studies across centuries.
Digital documentation and interoperability
Ensures all materials are openly accessible, interoperable, and reusable through IIIF, Cantus Index, and musmed.eu.
Cultural heritage continuity
Bridges historical musicological practice with modern digital tools, ensuring long-term availability and sustainability of Europe’s sacred-music corpus.
As part of REPERTORIUM’s commitment to open science and long-term sustainability, the digitised corpus of the Solesmes musical heritage has been made freely accessible to the international research community.
The platform allows scholars to:
Browse the complete Solesmes manuscript collection
Consult detailed descriptive and contextual records
View high-resolution images via IIIF
Search chant data directly at musmed.eu/chants
Download structured indexes (CSV)
Access the same datasets through the Cantus Index, ensuring full interoperability across major chant databases
This integration within established scholarly infrastructures ensures that REPERTORIUM’s results can be reused, verified, and expanded beyond the project’s lifetime, supporting comparative and large-scale studies in medieval musicology.
Special thanks: Gilles Kagan (CNRS) for his technical support in implementing the digitisation workflow.
