The Information Value of a Music Inventory: "Musicalien und Instrumenten" listed in Sokolov (Falkenau) in the First Half of the 18th Century

Music inventories represent traditional terrain of musicological research useful for various inquiries. Within the project on historical music inventories in the Czech lands, several desiderata of previous research were identified including a lack of systematic investigation of inventories from the vast network of parish churches in Bohemia. The impulse for this article was the emergence of the 1736 inventory of the archdeanery church of St James the Greater in Sokolov (Falkenau) with the previously unnoticed specification of "Musicalien und Instrumenten" in three places: in the collection of church inventories of the Prague Archbishopric, in the parish chronicle, and finally in the parish archives with significant additions and within the whole series of church inventories (1707, 1731, 1736, 1769, 1781, 1798, 1815, 1827). The article follows both the scope of the local music collection, which is lost today, and the evolution of music items in the inventories judging their changing information value. It comprises the edition preserving the dynamic character of the sources. Their contents indicate that in the first decades of the 18th century, printed music still formed the core of the music collection. It was also possible to outline the position of the church choir within the presumed streams of music circulation and trace the links with the music centres of Prague (especially with the music collection of the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star) and Dresden (Cozzi, Ristori, Vivaldi, Zelenka). The inventorying method often consisted in the copying of the previous inventory and the later lists obviously strive more to keep the continuity with the preceding lists rather than reflect the real situation.