1 July 2023 through 30 June 2024
Overview
In 2023−24, RILM was as strong as ever. Productivity remained stable given all circumstances. RILM is rejuvenating with several new hires to replace recent retirees. New products are on the horizon. RILM is preparing to release DEUMM Online and the RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines later this year. Progress was made on all resources and projects. RILM’s core, RILM Abstracts, remains strong and stable, 11 full-text journals and many more articles were added to RILM Abstracts with Full Text, four encyclopedias were added to RILM Music Encyclopedias, the Index to Printed Music is being developed with a new vision, and the content of MGG Online has grown. RILM’s thesaurus and authority records continued to expand steadily. The unification and updating of RILM’s technology was completed. RILM will soon launch a teaching program to support best practices in global music research, referencing and bibliography. The year ended on a high note with RILM being elected by UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage to be one of over 200 NGOs accredited to provide advisory services.
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (with Full Text)
Overview: In its continuing quest for more complete global coverage of the scholarly literature on music, RILM has added Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Korean, and Japanese to its collection of language skills available in the editorial office during the past year. The ability to work with these languages in-house will help expand the bibliographic coverage of literature from countries where these languages are spoken, not only to what is currently being published, and also to fill in the gaps from the past. This expansion of bibliographic coverage has also been facilitated by collaboration with several institutions: the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, which contributed bibliographic records for literature in the Arabic language; the National College of Arts in Lahore, which continued records from Pakistan; and the Archive and Research Center for Ethnomusicology in Gurugram, which added records for publications from North India.
Annual growth of RILM Abstracts: In 2023–24, 74,069 new bibliographic records were added. Editors indexed 44,789 records. The decline in the number of indexed records continues to be due to unfilled editor positions and the fact that several editors are still in training (or are training their junior peers). Two editors were on leave for part of the year. Some editors devote a significant portion of their time to other RILM products. Assistant editors have stayed strong in adding reviews to the database. RILM takes these numbers very seriously and we are confident that once additional editors have joined and others are fully trained, numbers will continue to excel.
Indexing: RILM has created the following new headwords this year:
- instrument builders—clar-o-sax
- instrument builders—componium
- instrument builders—di
- instrument builders—erhu
- instrument builders—guitarra española
- instrument builders—Hammond organ
- instrument builders—keyed guitar
- instrument builders—mechanical harp
- instrument builders—organ chimes
- instrument builders—organette
- instrument builders—saw sam sai
- instrument builders—saxie
- instrument builders—tablā
- instrument builders—xiao
- Liberian music (outside Liberia)
Full-text coverage overview: Thanks to excellent data acquisition and quality control coordination as well as clear prioritization, the RAFT team had another very strong year. As of 30 June 2024, iBis contains 562,832 PDFs, an increase of more than 31,000 records imported since July 2023, which is roughly the same as the previous year, and once again surpassing the pre-pandemic number of imported PDFs (compared to 48,140 PDFs in 2019). Nearly 489,000 PDFs are available through EBSCO.
The fifth annual installment of ten new full-text journals is scheduled for 1 July 2024. The new content comprises 200 issues/over 4,500 PDFs. The new addition represents nine countries (Australia, Belgium, Chile, Czechia, Lithuania, Russia, Spain, UK, and USA), and seven languages. Five of these journals will be available online exclusively through RAFT and five are available via open access.
- A handbook for studies in 18th-century English music. London: Gerald Coke Handel Foundation, 1987–. ISSN 0000-0000
- Context: A journal of the postgraduate students of the University of Melbourne School of Music. Melbourne: Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, 1991–. ISSN 1038-4006
- Contrapulso: Revista latinoamericana de estudios en música popular. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2019–. ISSN 2452-5545
- Hoquet: Revista del Conservatorio Superior de Música de Málaga. Málaga: Conservatorio Superior de Música de Málaga, 2001–. eISSN 2340-454X
- The Haydn yearbook/Das Haydn Jahrbuch. Bryn Mawr: Theodore Presser Company, 1962–1978. ISSN 0073-1390
- Lien: Revue d’esthétique musicale. Ohain: Musiques et Recherches, 1988–. ISSN 0776-4650
- Muzikologické fórum: Časopis České společnosti pro hudební vědu/Journal of the Czech Musicological Society. Praha: Česká Společnost pro Hudební Vědu, 2012–. ISSN 1805-3866
- Muzikos komponavimo principai/Principles of music composing. Vilnius: Lietuvos Muzikos ir Teatro Akademija, 2001–. ISSN 2351-5155
- Музыкальная академия [Muzykal’naâ akademiâ/Music academy]. Moskva: Kompozitor, 1933–. ISSN 0869-4516 and eISSN 2686-9284
- Southern music education journal. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2004–10. ISSN 1557-0835
Index to Printed Music (IPM)
Overview: Ian McGorray assumed the product coordinator role in July 2023 and wrote an IPM vision statement that addressed the past, present, and future possibilities of IPM. To assist the accession of more records in IPM, RILM hired Jackie Santos as an Assistant Editor. At the end of FY 2024, IPM contains 552,878 published individual piece records (PMs), 33,171 published CW records, which appear in 1,797 distinct series in IPM.
In the last several years, with challenges presented by the pandemic as a major impetus, IPM has added hyperlinks to open-access scores where possible to allow users to directly view the indexed score. Alongside this effort, IPM began to index collections of music that are only accessible online, notably the UCLA Contemporary Music Score Collection. This led to question not only the validity of the name IPM, as “printed music” does not accurately represent these digital-only sources, but also the scope of IPM as these are submissions by composers, not necessarily edited and engraved by a publisher. Moving forward, IPM will not only continue to cover printed music editions in collections, sets, and series as it always has, but will also officially expand to include digital editions. Music outside of the Western classical sphere will be included as well, where relevant, but there is not a large number of these editions at the moment.
Current and future projects:
- Instrument equivalencies: the old IPM codes used for instruments are full of inconsistencies, so we plan to streamline this process. We have reviewed and consolidated the codes, the next step is to add these IPM-specific instruments to
the I-terms in iBis. This will also allow us to use equivalencies in instrument searching on EBSCO. - Works with unhelpful and generic titles: We still have many records that exist with nothing more than “Werke. [4]” as their title. These need to be edited for their correct title and/or merged with the appropriate record already extant in iBis. This project is complete for many major composers, but around 7,400 records still exist with this kind of title.
- IPM collections: These are the only way (at the moment) to connect subseries of a composer in EBSCO. Because this is a leftover metadata construction from old IPM, we were not utilizing it fully with new records created since RILM’s acquisition. Now we can realize its potential by creating and editing collections so that there is some consistency between old IPM records and new.
- Preferred titles: Two editions of the same work are not linked to each other in IPM, so if a user wanted to see all editions of a certain piece, they would get a lot of extraneous records in their search. Because iBis has category W terms already extant, we can utilize these metadata points and connect IPM records of various editions and publishers through iBis. Several interns have worked on identifying W terms in iBis for major composers with several editions in IPM—Beethoven, Händel, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Schubert, & Schumann. The next step is for us to add a field in PM records that will connect W terms to multiple PMs where appropriate. EBSCO says this should be a simple enough task for them once things are set up properly on our side.
- Display AK records in IPM: Musical supplements are included with many publications and are currently displayed in RAFT. Currently there are 1,638 AK records in iBis that could also be indexed in IPM, as they are a perfect fit. EBSCO
has confirmed they would be able to add these document types, but we do have several questions on our end. We would need a way to attach PMs to AKs or have a way to represent printed music screen information on an AK record page. There is also a question of whether we can include the full-text links in IPM, but we should be able to link back to RAFT at least to let users know the score is available to view somewhere. This topic will need to be explored further before moving forward.
RILM Music Encyclopedias (RME)
Content: In January 2024 RILM Music Encyclopedias was expanded to include four new titles, bringing the list of titles to 69, published in print from 1775 to the present, and containing 351,833 entries. The additions included two historical Spanish titles, one title on Australian music, and one on New York, thus reflecting RILM’s global mission:
- Felipe Pedrell, gen. ed. Diccionario biográfico y bibliográfico de músicos y escritores de música españoles, portugueses e hispano-americanos antiguos y modernos: Acopio de datos y documentos para servir a la historia del arte musical en nuestra nación (1st ed.; Barcelona: Tipografía de Víctor Berdós y Feliú, 1897) 2 vols., xix, 715 p., 88 p.
- Felipe Pedrell, gen. ed. Diccionario técnico de la música (1st ed.; Barcelona: Isidro Torres Oriol, 1894) xix, 529 p.
- Warren Bebbington, ed. A dictionary of Australian music (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998) xiv, 361 p.
- Nancy Groce. Musical instrument makers of New York: A directory of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urban craftsmen (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1991) xxi, 200 p.
Coming updates and additions:
- David Damschroder and David Russell Williams. Music theory from Zarlino to Schenker: A bibliography and guide (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1990) xliii, 522 p. In English.
- Ilan Stavans, ed. Latin music: Musicians, genres, and themes (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2014) 2 vols., xix, xiv, 923 p. In English.
- Sokol Shupo, ed. Biographical dictionary of Balkan composers (Tirana: Asmus, 2005) 704 p. In English.
- TBD: One of Hugo Riemann’s early dictionaries.
MGG Online
Product development: New user-facing features include an archiving function for the MGG Online newsfeed, which can now be sorted by year, and a sample article openly accessible from the landing page that is refreshed 2–3 times a year. The largest improvement in the context of overall Egret work was the implementation of an updated editorial system, which has been in use since 1 March.
Content: MGG Online’s content has been augmented in the last year with over 100 articles (major updates, newly written articles, and new entries). New articles on popular musicians of our time include Whitney Houston, Adele, Public Enemy, and James Last, along with entries on international musicians such as Fela Kuti and the fado singers Amália Rodrigues and Carlos do Carmo. Other highlights include new articles on digital humanities and newly written entries on the Philippines, Chicago, and Braunschweig. MGG Online in addition continues its survey of music scholars active today, resulting in self-authored new articles on Martha Feldman, Henry Spiller, Thomas Grey, Walter Frisch, Stefan Weiss, Michael Stegemann, Frederico Celestini, Julio Mendívil, and Maria Caraci Vela, among others. A diversity of contemporary composers is represented in new articles on Peter Adriaansz, Alberto Posadas, Lothar Knessl, Francesco Filidei, Nikolaj Girševič Kapustin, and Robert Fürstenthal.
DEUMM Online
In 2021, RILM acquired full rights to the Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (DEUMM), edited by Alberto Basso, after its publisher, UTET Grandi Opere, went bankrupt. After the contents were scanned, converted and added to Egret, the editorial work began. Nearly 250 new articles have been commissioned to date. The launch of DEUMM Online, with ca. 150 new articles, is scheduled for 30 October 2024 in Rome at the Teatro Palladium. The Associazione fra i Docenti Universitari Italiani di Musica (ADUIM) and IAML-Italia agreed to be institutional sponsors of the launch events. ADUIM is celebrating its 30th anniversary and they may additionally include conversations about DEUMM in their celebratory events.
RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines (RAPMM)
The RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines (RAPMM) is a digital collection of independently published popular music magazines and fanzines that are not easily available in libraries and archives. At launch late 2024, RAPMM will bring over 125 of these publications together in one place, with front-to-back issues of titles scanned directly from their sources and made available in digital form. The RAPMM interface will be designed to preserve each publication’s unique identity and integrity, allowing readers to engage with the content individually and browse entire publications or search for specific subjects across all publications. Each year new titles will be added to the collection.
E-Books
In March 2023 RILM published the third edition of its Manual of Style as an e-book. The manual addresses a multitude of special problems faced by writers on music—problems rarely solved by general writing guides. It applies an international perspective to matters often handled piecemeal and in ethnocentric fashion: work titles, manuscript sources, transliteration, non-Western theoretical systems, opus and catalogue numbers, and pitch and chord names, to name just a few. Detailed guidelines are provided for the bibliographic handling of standard print, audiovisual, and electronic sources, as well as specialized ones such as program notes, liner notes, and music videos. A chapter on indexing is also included. Throughout, abundant examples illustrate each point. In November 2023, RILM made available Music’s Intellectual History (2009,) edited by Zdravko Blažeković and Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie, as an e-book. Both titles are available via EBSCOhost Collections Manager and Gobi. Institutions that do not currently subscribe to EBSCO may contact ebookinfo@ebsco.com for additional options, and individuals interested in purchasing the book can contact an affiliated library.
Platforms Hosting RILM Resources
All RILM databases are available by subscription on EBSCOHost 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
- RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines (forthcoming): Egret
- E-Books: EBSCO
Bibliolore
RILM’s blog, Bibliolore , continues to be very active, with new posts every week and increasing numbers of viewers. Bibliolore posts draw from RILM resources, including RILM Music Encyclopedias, MGG Online, RILM Abstracts (with Full Text) and feature content relevant to global music studies, from Western music to popular music, and are inspired by birthdays, observance days/months, and contemporary topical issues. As in previous years,
Bibliolore continues to celebrate musical figures—both well-known ones, like Louis Armstrong, Freddie Mercury, Public Enemy, and Joni Mitchell, as well as less-known artists such as Sara Gonzalez, Tanya Tagaq, and Isang Yun. Since July 2023, a series on the 50th anniversary of hip hop has featured posts on the culture’s history in New York City, an Indigenous hip-hop artist, and a history of women in rap music.
Here are the top ten posts (with the original posting date) from the past year:
| Post | Views |
|---|---|
| MC5 and the American ruse (23 February 2024) | 4,040 |
| Hip hop at 50—Part 1: Beats and breaks (22 August 2023) | 2,364 |
| Mahler and Beyoncé (19 October 2011) | 2,101 |
| Debussy and gamelan (22 August 2022) | 1,067 |
| Ellis Marsalis, jazz pianist, educator, and Marsalis family patriarch (24 November 2023) | 967 |
| The dark side of the rainbow (28 April 2023) | 942 |
| Smithsonian Collections Object: The Sony TPS-L2 “Walkman” Cassette Player, National Museum of American History (4 March 2020) | 914 |
| Earl Scruggs, bluegrass banjo innovator (5 January 2024) | 912 |
| Public Enemy brings the noise (9 April 2024) | 887 |
| The Britannic organ (7 May 2011) | 832 |
The mix of old and new on the top 10 list shows how many Bibliolore posts continue to live on well after their initial posting date. Classic posts, such as Mahler and Beyoncé from 2011, which remains the overall top post, still garner hundreds of hits monthly. Newer favorites, such as this year’s top post on the 1960s Detroit rock band MC5 in late February, coinciding with the death of guitarist Wayne Kramer earlier that month, and the post on hip hop’s 50th anniversary both had nearly 2,000 views just days after posting—both of these represented record highs for Bibliolore. Bibliolore has published more than 1,733 posts and has been viewed more than 918,000 times since its inception in October 2009. Views since July 2023 averaged 281 per day. It currently has over 2600 subscribers, and its Facebook page has a modest 129 followers.
RILM’s WeChat account publishes news about RILM, posts about the current state of musicological research based on RILM’s resources, and translated articles (with permission). In the past year, the account saw 11 posts of which the DEUMM Online post became the most popular of all time, with over 15,000 views thus far (multiple clicks from the same IP address count as one). By the end of FY 2024, the account had over 7,500 followers, up from 5,500 the previous year.
Here are figures about the latest posts (in the order of popularity):
RILM’s WeChat account has published 42 posts and has been viewed more than 109,000 times since its inception in November 2020, with an average of 2,600 views per article.