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In June 1695, Maria Elisabeth Kusser offered the Duke of Württemberg her late husband's music collection, describing it as consisting partly of works "from the imperial and other electoral and princely court musical establishments, composed by the best and most celebrated Kapellmeister, and partly also by many superb Italians". Having held major positions in both Pressburg (now Bratislava) and Stuttgart, the extant inventory of Johann Kusser's private music collection (today held in Stuttgart's Landeskirchliches Archiv) features listings for more than 483 individual compositions. This paper examines this important document, which offers valuable clues regarding the ways in which a wide range of sacred music – by both Lutheran and Catholic composers – was disseminated throughout the Holy Roman Empire during the second half of the seventeenth century.

The town of Nitra has long been an important historical town and an important episcopal residence. Remarkable music inventories were preserved from the 18th century and the early 19th century, although sheet music was preserved only to a smaller extent. From the monastic background, only the Inventarium Chori Nitriensis scholarum Piarum 1749 is preserved. Another centre of the cultural as well as musical life in Nitra was the seat of the bishop, the Nitra Castle, where other significant inventories of sheet music can be found from 1802 and 1814, which are among the largest inventories from this period in the territory of today's Slovakia. These sources are stored in the Diocesan Archive in Nitra and contain registries of music from the 18th and 19th centuries. The study presents the specificities of the records from these inventories, the method of their registration, and their transformation, with an emphasis on the presence of Italian music in them.

The music inventory from 1763 is one of the most important sources of sacred music in Brno related to the parish church St. James. The paper focuses on the methodological aspects as well as on the heuristic problems of working with this source. This is shown in the example of the records, which were registered between 1763 and 1781. In this time was Peregrin Gravani the chapel;master and he should buy and register all new music sheets in the inventory. Furthermore, the results of the concordance of the entries and the St. James music collection, as well as with the database RISM are presented.

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.

In the Catholic Southern Netherlands and the Prince-bishopric of Liège a lot of music from c. 1650–1790, as well as contextual archival information, is lost because of changes in fashion, wars and negligence. This is particularly regrettable since it caused some underestimated gaps in our music history. Among other things, often interesting, local composers remain unnoticed. So we are missing a lot of information about the music itself, circulation of music, music prices, performance practices. Sources that can certainly help in reducing this gap are the more than 40 historical music inventories. No doubt more inventories will be found, but the current knowledge is representative enough to draw some conclusions concerning the music history of the Catholic Low Countries and its place in Europe. It is quite clear that especially the Italian style had an enormous influence, also on local composers.

The music inventory, as a specific type of administrative document, is one of the most important kinds of sources for music historiography. Although an inventory does not prove that the music it lists was really performed, it still offers a broad range of information, and is therefore of high value. Inventories offer not only rare (sometimes even unique) and multilaterally exploitable bibliographic data, but also record the distribution of a certain type of repertoire and its transformation across decades. A whole collection of inventories from a given time and geographic region is even more valuable. This paper describes how the primary phase of research can be enlarged, widening the scope of the research to include late medieval sources. The paper also discusses the role of liturgical books in inventories, mentions some types or collections of archival sources which have not yet been taken into consideration (church inventories from the archival collection of the Archdioecese of Prague), and discusses the issue of estate inventories from the Czech lands in the early modern period.