Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (DEUMM) to be published online
New York, 31 January 2022
Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (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 winter 2023 on RILM’s platform Egret, which offers advanced search and browse capabilities. DEUMM Online will be an essential electronic resource for music scholarship world-wide.
Under the leadership of the distinguished musicologist Prof. Dr. Antonio Baldassarre, who will serve 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 Prof. Dr. Antonio Baldassarre of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Prof. Dr. Daniela Castaldo of the Università del Salento, and Dr. Zdravko Blažeković, who will manage DEUMM Online on RILM’s side. They will be advised by an editorial board consisting of experts in a variety of music-related topics.
Dr. Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie, the Director of RILM, states, “RILM is thrilled to be bringing this core resource of musical knowledge, so expertly created under the leadership of Alberto Basso, into the digital age. Our goals are to preserve and make accessible DEUMM’s original and important content as well as to expand and update this content with articles reflecting current trends of music research.”
The general editor of DEUMM Online, Prof. Dr. Antonio Baldassarre, adds, “The volumes of DEUMM’s printed edition were a trustworthy and faithful companion throughout my academic education; I am therefore deeply honored to contribute my enthusiasm and knowledge to DEUMM Online and to continue my companionship with DEUMM into the age of digital music resources.”
The founding editor of DEUMM, Dr. Alberto Basso, said, “I feel particularly honored and therefore happy to have been included among the initiatives that RILM is proposing to the world in the context of scholarship and musical history. The fact that DEUMM has been taken into consideration satisfies me in a particular way and certainly would have satisfied the management of the former UTET that is unfortunately no longer present on the market. I hope that the work I have done creating DEUMM some forty years ago will continue and that DEUMM will be updated.”
Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), New York: RILM publishes a suite of online reference works for music research, including the German music encyclopedia Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (as MGG Online) and the lexicographic collection RILM Music Encyclopedias. Its well-known bibliographic database RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text has over one million records representing publications concerning all types of music, published in more than 170 languages, coming from some 150 countries, and includes several hundred journals in full text. RILM is sponsored by the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres; the International Musicological Society; and the International Council for Traditional Music. RILM’s international center is housed at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in New York City.
The Italian musicologist Alberto Basso was the founder and General Editor of DEUMM. He has produced several seminal editions published by UTET, including Storia dell’opera (1977), and Musica in scena: Storia dello spettacolo musicale (1995–1996), as well as an important corpus of scholarship on J.S. Bach, the history of the Teatro Regio in Turin, music at the Savoy court, and the music of Freemasonry.
Antonio Baldassarre is Vice Dean, Professor and Head of Research and Development in the School of Music at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. He holds a PhD from the University of Zurich, and has held research and teaching positions as Research Fellow, Lecturer, and Visiting Professor at the Research Center for Music Iconography at the CUNY Graduate Center, the universities of Basel and Zurich, the Faculty of Music of the University of Arts in Belgrade, the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, the Facultad de Música of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and The University of Tasmania. He is President of Association Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM), and Member of the Directorium of the International Musicological Society. His main research subjects are historical and empirical musicology, including the history of music and of music culture from the late 18th century to the present, Italian nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opera, performance studies, music reception, music journalism, music iconography, the sociology of music, and the historiography of music.
Daniela Castaldo is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Università del Salento, Lecce (Italy). She holds a PhD from the University of Lausanne and has held research and teaching positions as Visiting Professor and Research Fellow at the University of Bologna and the Collegium de Lyon. Her research fields are ancient Greek and Roman music, music iconography and archeology, and the reception of the visual Classical tradition in art from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. She is President of MOISA: The International Society for the Study of Greek and Roman Music and its Cultural Heritage.
Zdravko Blažeković is Executive Editor of Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale and Director of the Research Center for Music Iconography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He holds a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the founder and Editor of the journal for music iconography Music in Art, and the monograph series Music in Visual Cultures (Brepols). He is Chair of the ICTM Study Group on Iconography of the Performing Arts. His research areas concern eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music of Southeast and Central Europe, music iconography, historiography of music, the reception of Greek and Roman organology in modern times, musical contacts between Europe and China, and music symbolism in Medieval and Renaissance astrology.
Contact:
Zdravko Blažeković
Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale
365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016
zblazekovic@rilm.org