Search guide

The database contains records of cantatas and arias, both manuscript and printed, composed over a period ranging from about 1620 to the early years of the nineteenth century. The bibliographic units are catalogued in their entirety, including the possible presence of other types of composition: sacred music, instrumental music, polyphonic works.

Search results are presented in order of relevance, calculated from the number of occurrences of the searched terms in the indices produced by processing the records. Occurrences in some indices (title, author, incipit) carry greater weight than others (notes, shelfmark, etc.), according to the values listed at the bottom of this page.

How texts are indexed

Before being added to the indices, the texts of the records pass through a series of processors that perform, in sequence:

• normalisation of uppercase, lowercase and accented letters;
• separation of words joined by an apostrophe or other punctuation (tokenizing);
• discarding of words shorter than two characters;
• discarding of words not significant for searching: definite, indefinite and partitive articles (stop words); prepositions are not discarded;
• reduction of the remaining words to their root form through stemming, using the Snowball algorithm (library wamania/php-stemmer).

In addition, to enable exact-phrase search (see below), adjacent word pairs (bigrams) are also indexed.

Simple search

By default the search is performed across all indices simultaneously, looking for all the words in the string with the AND Boolean operator, in whatever order they were entered.

Stemming means the search is by word root: searching for mortali the results will also include mortale and mortal; searching for partir you will find records containing parti, parte, partite, parto, partia, partirai, parta, as well as partir.

For example, searching for legrenzi rigide orme returns the record of Giovanni Legrenzi's cantata "Aureo serto real sei pur pesante", whose text contains the lines "Poiché con rigid'orme / Le calpesta 'i pensier sogno tremante".

Searching for gli orologi reale achille returns Giovanni Legrenzi's cantata "O grandezze reali", with work title "Orologio siete voi", referring to a work with the alternative title "Achille in Sciro".

Partial-word search is not active beyond stemming: if the root of the word orologio is orolog, searching for orologio, orologi or orolog will produce the same results, while searching for orol will return nothing.

Variant spellings

The search takes into account the most common historical spelling variants in the repertoire: searching for fuoco also returns records with foco; pietà also finds pietade and pietate; and so on for the registered pairs (core/cuore, città/cittade, h-spellings such as hora/ora, and others). The expansion applies both to the simple search and to the individual fields of the advanced search.

Phrase search

Enclosing several words in quotation marks — "rigide orme" — returns only the records in which those words appear in the exact order, one immediately after the other. Without quotation marks the same words are searched with AND, in any order and position.

Exact search

Enclosing a single word in quotation marks — "foco" — disables, for that word, the expansion of spelling variants: the exact form is searched, so "foco" does not bring fuoco among the results. Stemming remains active, so inflected forms of the same word are still found, but not the spelling variants.

Advanced search

The advanced search form provides a field for each index, plus an «All fields» field. Fill in one or more fields; the filled fields are combined with AND (all of them must be satisfied). Within a single field too, if several words are entered, they are combined with AND.

The available indices are:

• All fields — search extended to all indices, like the simple search;
• Work title — title of the linked work;
• Diplomatic title — title as it appears on the document;
• Poetic text — text transcription and incipit;
• Linked person — any role (composer, author of the text, dedicatee, owner, performer, copyist, etc.), including variant forms of the names;
• Scoring — natural-language description of voices and instruments;
• Library — name or city of the holding library;
• Shelfmark — call number of the document;
• Notes — general notes of the record;
• Watermark — description of the watermark.

Go directly to a record — at the top of the form a dedicated field lets you reach a record by typing its number and pressing «Go», without going through a search.

Facet filters

Alongside the results, the search page presents a set of facet filters: lists of values, each with the number of matching records, that let you narrow the results step by step without reformulating the search. Facets apply both to a keyword search and to the full list of records.

Selecting one or more values of a facet narrows the results accordingly, and the counts of the other facets update to reflect the current selection. Facets combine with one another using AND: choosing a country and a language shows only the records that satisfy both conditions. The chosen values remain visible and can be deselected to widen the results again.

The available facets are:

• Country — country where the document is held;
• Language — language of the text;
• Scoring (summary) — vocal and instrumental forces in normalised form;
• Library — RISM siglum of the holding library;
• Document type — manuscript, print, etc.;
• Record type — level of description of the record;
• Musical presentation — form of presentation (score, parts, etc.);
• Dating — chronological range, selectable as a span of years.

Because a single record may comprise several parts, in some facets (document type, presentation) the sum of the counts may exceed the number of records found: a record with several parts contributes to several values.

Modifying the active search

When search results are displayed, the active filters appear at the top of the page as labels. Each label shows the name of the index and the searched term. Clicking the "✕" icon removes that single criterion while keeping the others. The "Modify advanced search" link returns to the advanced search form with all current criteria pre-filled, ready to modify and run the search again.

Field weights (boost values)

When a search term is found, its weight in the relevance calculation depends on the index in which it appears. The applied boost values are: