Overview: The year ending 30 June 2022 was Year Two of the Pandemic for everyone, RILM included. Productivity remained high and progress was made on all resources and projects. RILM Abstracts grew significantly, many more full-text journals and articles were added to RILM Abstracts with Full Text, three encyclopedias were added to RILM Music Encyclopedias, the Index to Printed Music expanded to include more records, and the content of MGG Online grew. Progress was made on a new edition of How to Write about Music: The RILM Manual of Style, which will be published as an e-book and in print later in 2022. RILM’s thesaurus and authority records continued to expand. Particularly exciting was RILM’s acquisition in the fall of 2021 of the Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (DEUMM), which we intend to digitize and publish as DEUMM Online with continually updated and new content. The unification of RILM’s technology proceeded, single sign-on for all RILM staff accessing RILM enterprise applications and data was achieved, and multi-factor authentication was more fully integrated throughout. In January 2022 RILM was delighted to welcome the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) as our fourth sponsoring body, joining IAML, ICTM, and IAML. And this year, RILM searched for and found its next Executive Director, Tina Frühauf, who will take over when Barbara retires at the end of the summer after a 30-year tenure at RILM.
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (with Full Text)
RILM Abstracts now includes over 1.3 million bibliographic records. No bibliography is ever complete and there will always be missing publications from certain geographic areas, yet such a collection of records—covering all types of music and publications from around the world—is a resource that many disciplines in the humanities do not have. RILM Abstracts has become a monument documenting and helping to preserve the world’s music scholarship. With its ever-expanding coverage, its vision for linked data within RILM products and to external authorities, and the potential of modern data visualizations, the best days for RILM Abstracts are yet to come.
RILM Abstracts grew by 69,668 new bibliographic record this year. RILM continues to focus on geographic areas that are not adequately represented in RILM Abstracts, in part by the gradual hiring of area experts and by creating stronger networks in such regions. Gene Lai joined the RILM staff on 30 August 2021. He has a PhD in musicology from Wesleyan University. His interests/expertise is in the Tamil diaspora in Singapore and Malaysia; South Asia; Southeast Asia; and Folk Hinduism. He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and Hakka Chinese, and has competencies in Tamil Bahasa Melayu and German. Further, this year we developed relationships with scholars in Arab countries, Egypt, Kenya, and Pakistan, among other places.
Full-Text Coverage: Many of the COVID-related difficulties in shipping and processing full-text content last year fell away this year, resulting in the publication of many more journals and issues in RAFT (RILM Abstracts with Full Text). By the end of June 2022, RAFT had expanded to include the full text of 421,003 articles from 260 journals. And the licensing of new journals is moving at a brisk pace. The full-text of eight more titles, as follows, will be available in RAFT in early July 2022:
- Aspekty muzyki. Gdańsk: Akademia Muzyczna im. Stanisława Moniuszki, 2011–. ISSN 2082-6044
- Ad Parnassum: A journal of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instrumental music. Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2003–. ISSN 1722-3954
- Feedback papers and Feedback papers: Weltmusik. Köln: Feedback-Studio, 1971–2009. ISSN 0000-0000
- Informazione organistica: Rivista della Fondazione Accademia di Musica Italiana per Organo. Pistoia: Accademia di Musica Italiana per Organo, 1989–. ISSN 1724-4315
- Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute. Los Angeles: University of Southern California – Arnold Schoenberg Institute. 1978–1996. ISSN 0146-5856
- Journal of Czech and Slovak music: The journal of the Dvořák Society. Newcastle-under-Lyme: Dvořák Society for Czech and Slovak Music, 1974–. ISSN 2515-6292
- Music therapy today. World Federation of Music Therapy, 2001–2007, 2011–. EISSN 1610-191X
- Neuma: Revista de música y docencia musical. Talca: Universidad de Talca, 2008–. ISSN 0718-7017 and EISSN 0719-5389.
For a complete listing of the full-text journal titles included in RAFT, see https://www.rilm.org/abstracts/scope/fulltext-titles/.
Indexing: RILM has created the following new headwords this year:
- psychotherapy
- postcolonialism (earlier subsumed under colonialism)
- Karṇāṭak music (replacing margin term Karṇāṭak tradition)
- Hindustānī music (replacing margin term Hindustānī tradition)
Index to Printed Music (IPM)
Overview: Over the course of FY 2022 IPM was expanded to include 586,557 records for individual musical pieces. This represents 31,928 collective volumes appearing in 1,640 series and sets. Among the newly indexed scores are a number of works by contemporary U.S. composers available online at UCLA’s Contemporary Scores Collection.
RILM Music Encyclopedias (RME)
Content: In January 2022 RILM Music Encyclopedias was expanded to include three new titles, bringing the list of encyclopedias and dictionaries contained in this full-text repository to 63, with a total of 320,354 entries. The additions, emphasizing RILM’s mission to include the music scholarship of all countries and in all languages, were as follows:
- François Henry Joseph Blaze (Castil-Blaze). Dictionnaire de musique moderne (2nd ed.; Paris: Au magasin de musique de la Lyre moderne, 1825) 2 vols; xvi, 324 p. [25]; 389 p.
- Terry Moran. Vietnamese musical instruments: A monographic lexicon ([Singapore]: author, 2020) 384 p.
- Sokol Shupo. Enciklopedia e muzikës shqiptare (Tiranë: Asmus, 2002) 318 p.
For the complete current title list, and information about each work, see http://www.rilm.org/encyclopedias.
Coming updates and additions: In addition to the quarterly updates to Komponisten der Gegenwart and to new search-term equivalencies, the following new titles are planned for inclusion in 2023:
- Krešimir Kovačević, ed. Muzička enciklopedija (2nd ed., Zagreb: Jugoslavenski Leksikografski Zavod, 1971–77), 3 vols., 713-[14] p. [7], 742 p., 789 p.
- Leksikografski Zavod Miroslav Krlea, 1984) 2 vols., 589 p., 575 p.
MGG Online
Content: In addition to ongoing platform enhancements, MGG Online content has been augmented in the last year with substantial new content for approximately 100 articles—major updates, newly written articles, and new entries—continuing to target topic categories such as Canada, contemporary composers, contemporary musicians, singers, the USA, popular music, and especially jazz (including new articles on Geri Allen, Gary Peacock, Bud Freeman, and Buddy Bolden). There is also a thematic block of articles on 20th-century women song composers to be published throughout the rest of 2022: This includes new entries on the English composers Florence Aylward and Teresa del Riego, as well as Guy D’Hardelot (real name Helen Rhodes) and the Australian song and ballad composer May Brahe.
DEUMM Online
Overview: RILM has acquired the full rights to the Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (DEUMM), published between 1983 and 2005 by the renowned Italian publisher of reference works, UTET Grandi Opere, under the editorship of Alberto Basso. With its three thematic sections (Le biografie; Il lessico; and I titoli e i personaggi) containing some 35,000 entries, DEUMM is the most important modern music dictionary in the Italian language. The content of the original printed edition along with some updated and new entries will be the starting point for DEUMM Online, to be offered as one of RILM’s suite of reference works. RILM plans to launch DEUMM Online in 2023 on Egret, the RILM platform, which offers advanced search and browse capabilities.
Under the leadership of Antonio Baldassarre, who serves as general editor, DEUMM Online will be supplemented continuously with new entries reflecting the current directions of music scholarship, expanding particularly in the areas of popular music, film music, jazz, traditional music, world music, and music in antiquity. At the same time, given the significance of Italian music over the centuries, DEUMM Online will remain the ultimate resource for the study of all aspects of Italian musical culture. Entries will include links to references in other RILM resources (MGG Online, RILM Abstracts of Music Literature) and bibliographic databases (e.g., VIAF). Over time such links will gradually be networked with other resources, allowing DEUMM entries to become nodes for efficiently searching authoritative data.
The core editorial team includes Antonio Baldassarre of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Daniela Castaldo of the Università del Salento, and Zdravko Blažeković, who manages DEUMM Online on RILM’s side. They are advised by an editorial board consisting of experts in a variety of music-related topics.
Platforms Hosting RILM Resources
All RILM databases are available by subscription on EBSCO or on Egret, the RILM platform, or both, as follows:
- RILM Abstracts of Music Literature: EBSCO
- RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text: EBSCO
- Index to Printed Music: EBSCO
- RILM Music Encyclopedias: EBSCO and Egret
- MGG Online: Egret
- DEUMM Online (forthcoming): Egret
Bibliolore
RILM’s blog: The RILM blog, Bibliolore, continues to be very active, with new posts every week and increasing numbers of viewers.
As we have done for some time now, this year we continued our tradition of celebrating “round birthdays” (those ending in zeros) of musical figures—both well-known ones, such as Rita Moreno (Rita Moreno, EGOT), and those less famous but no less worthy, like Choe Seung-hui (Choe Seung-hui and modernism).
Here are the top 10 posts (hyperlinked) from the past year:
Three of the posts on this year’s top-10 list are ten or more years old, illustrating how Bibliolore has taken on a life of its own, beyond its continuous updates: George Breed’s electrified guitar (average 3 views per day since 2011), Debussy and gamelan (average 3.8 views per day since 2012), and–our most popular post so far–Mahler and Beyoncé (average 5.7 views per day since 2011.
Three posts were added to the RILM History series:
- RILM and the IBM Selectric
- Barry Brook in Dijon
- Répertoire international de la littérature de l’art (RILA)
Bibliolore has published more than 1600 posts and has been viewed more than 735,000 times since its inception in October 2009. Views since July 2021 averaged 205 per day. It currently has 424 subscribers, and its Facebook page has 112 followers.