Fontes Artis Musicae
vol. 52, no. 1, Jan-Mar 2005, pp. 65-66
When American musicologist Barry Brook died in 1997, he was widely praised for his many significant contributions to music research and bibliography. Chief among these accomplishments were Brook’s groundbreaking study of the early symphony, his annotated bibliography of thematic catalogues, and his promotion of the field of music iconography with the 1971 founding of Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM). Most important, however, was his pioneering vision in applying computer technology to the documentation and retrieval of information about music, through the establishment in 1966 of the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), which today stands as an essential bibliographic source for music literature and a model of international scholarly cooperation.
Brook’s dogged persistence in shepherding RILM through its precarious formative years is well known. Under his leadership and that of his successors, Earl Terence Ford, Adam P.J. O’Connor, and Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie, the current executive editor of RILM, the original initiative has expanded to include scholarly conferences as well as the RILM Retrospective Series. This series, which began in 1972 with the publication of the first edition of Brook’s Thematic Catalogues in Music: An Annotated Bibliography (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1972), is principally devoted to significant research materials published before RILM issued its first volume in 1967.
As James R. Cowdery, one of Speaking of Music’s general editors, notes in the preface, this volume has had an exceedingly long gestation period. Brook announced to music librarians in a 1978 letter that this work was nearing completion. At his death nearly two decades later, however, it remained unpublished, set aside in boxes, still awaiting compilation. It was up to his heirs at RILM to recognize Brook’s initial conception, enlarge his original scope, and see the work through to completion. Brook intended his project to serve as a continuation and expansion of Marie Briquet’s La musique dans les congrès internationaux (1835–1939) (Paris: Heugel, 1961), filling in gaps and adding abstracts, which Briquet did not provide. Meanwhile, a similar source by John Tyrrell and Rosemary Wise, A Guide to International Congress Reports in Musicology 1900–1975 (New York: Garland, 1979), appeared. Although it also lacks abstracts, that book has served as a useful source for information on scholarly music conferences, especially for the years before RILM began. Also, the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., v.28, App.B (London: Macmillan, 2001), includes a chronological listing of congress reports for the years 1860–1998. These works represent the chief attempts at providing some sort of bibliographic control of congress reports that pertain to music.
While building on these previous efforts, Speaking of Music stays true to Brook’s original vision but greatly expands upon it as well. The book covers more than 130 years and has a worldwide scope, though Western Europe remains dominant. As Cowdery notes, RILM was fortunate that one of the editors possessed a large number of difficult-to-obtain Eastern European conference proceedings, which have been included in this volume. The book also lists unpublished materials—papers that were presented but that never appeared in published reports, and whose citations are incomplete or only include abstracts. While some people may question the decision to include these citations, the justification for doing so is based on three sound and logical reasons: first, these unpublished papers give a more complete view of each conference; second, they can provide biographical information about an author (including the state of that author’s research at a particular time); and finally (and perhaps most importantly), they often offer significant leads or pointers for other researchers doing research on similar topics.
Although Speaking of Music’s chief purpose remains bibliographical, the work also includes another less immediate but perhaps ultimately more enlightening aspect. The sweeping survey of conferences and their contents in the book’s chronological section shows us in concrete and specific terms how the discipline of musicology came to be, and the important role that music conferences played in the formation of this new discipline. We are provided with what Cowdery calls a “window on intellectual history,” reflecting the rise of the nascent field of musicology in the midnineteenth century, and demonstrating how early French dominance of the field gradually subsided as Germans came to predominate in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
These conferences also reflect cultural trends, political agendas, and even social turmoil. For example, at the first International Congress of Music, held in Florence in 1935, Alfredo Casella, in his “Scambi musicali” (“Musical Exchange,” entry 2299as), decried the “ruinous protectionism” of “nationalist campaigns” such as German radio’s banning of Jews, and BBC’s “tight control” that virtually excluded all foreign performers from its programs. We can also see the increasing interest in ethnography and folklore as displayed in the late-nineteenth-century rise of nationalism and the concomitant Darwinist perspective preponderant in these studies, as well as their subsequent coalescence in what we know today as ethnomusicology, now a discipline with a much different purpose and scope. Historiographers of the “New Musicology” will also want to take note of entries under the index headings “Sexuality and Gender” and “Women’s Studies”; the papers listed here could quite possibly reveal new perspectives on these topics and change our perceptions of how past scholars dealt with these issues. Finally, Cowdery observes how this volume documents an “ever-expanding intellectual universe,” one that demonstrates the interrelationships of music with other disciplines and its place in a “metacultural consciousness.” The whole, as he notes, truly is more than the sum of its parts.
Users who have worked with the print volumes of RILM will recognize immediately this book’s similarities with the look and organization of that resource. The editors have wisely chosen to follow the same familiar layout and classified subject arrangement. RILM-style index numbers are given for each citation, along with English translations of titles, full bibliographic information, and abstracts wherever possible. The first main section, the “Chronology and Contents,” is followed by the classed portion of the bibliography, beginning, just as RILM does, with “Reference and Research Materials” and concluding with “Music in Liturgy and Ritual.” The prefatory “Notes on Using this Book” provides helpful instruction in navigating the volume and there are useful indexes for conference locations and sponsors, as well as an integrated author-subject index that reveals RILM’s usual exemplary depth and thoroughness.
With the publication of this complementary retrospective volume, combined with RILM abstracts of conferences from 1967 to the present, bibliographic access to these types of documents should now be much more nearly complete. As bibliographically thorough and intellectually enlightening as this new volume is, however, in our digital, online-obsessed environment, RILM’s wisdom in issuing such a lavish print-only source might be questioned. If at some point the RILM editors decide to make these citations available electronically and integrate them with the rest of the RILM database, Barry Brook’s original vision will truly be fulfilled.
--Mark McKnight, University of North Texas