Overview: The year ending 30 June 2023 was transitional with a new Executive Director, Tina Frühauf, coming on board and with the COVID-19 pandemic ending. Productivity remained stable and progress was made on all resources and projects. RILM Abstracts remained strong, 11 full-text journals and with it many more articles were added to RILM Abstracts with Full Text, two encyclopedias were added to RILM Music Encyclopedias, the Index to Printed Music saw expansion, and the content of MGG Online grew. Progress was made on the planned RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines and a new edition of How to Write about Music: The RILM Manual of Style saw publication as an e-book. RILM’s thesaurus and authority records continued to expand. Noteworthy is the progress with the Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (DEUMM), which was digitized and is in the process of being published as DEUMM Online with continually updated and new content. The unification of RILM’s technology is nearly accomplished; the migration of EBSCO to S3 delivery for RILM Abstracts/RAFT updates completed. The year continued to be marked by staff turnover with two new hirings, three retirements, and Tina Frühauf succeeding Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie after her 30-year tenure at RILM. With further retirements being anticipated in the coming years, four active job searches are currently underway.
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (with Full Text)
Overview:
RILM Abstracts now includes over 1.5 million bibliographic records. When RILM Abstract started, it was Barry Brook’s vision to cover publications from every country in the world. RILM Abstracts embarked on decolonializing the world of music scholarship much before the concept of decolonization became popular in the academy. No bibliography is ever complete and it is easy to find publications that RILM Abstracts is missing, and that will always be true. But we should also remind ourselves that RILM’s bibliography represents music scholarship from 132 countries. Inclusivity and equal representation of writings on music from around the world is still RILM’s core mission, and also one of the reasons why RILM Abstracts has such a strong standing globally.
This year we developed relationships the Institute du monde arabe in Paris and expanded our contacts with Pakistan and Iran, among other places, for more comprehensive coverage. During 2022–23 over 78,000 bibliographic citations were added, as well as 4,570 reviews (an increase from 2,000 last year). RILM has created two new headwords this year: travel explorations and explorers and travelers, to cover the rising number of publications devoted to travelogues.
Full-text coverage: RILM has doubled the import of full-text record into its internal database over the previous year, thanks to an enormous loan of print materials and the acquisition of the materials for 11 new journals. The full-text collection on EBSCO increased to over 450,000 records.
The fourth annual installment of 11 new journals joined RAFT on 1 July 2023. The new content comprises more than 750 issues. The new addition represents nine countries (Austria, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and the U.S., China, Nigeria, Ukraine, and Uruguay—the last four of them represented in RAFT for the first time) —and seven languages. Five of these journals will be available online exclusively through RAFT, three others are available online behind the paywall through a national or society website, one is on MIFT, and two open access.
- 1/1: The journal of the Just Intonation Network. San Francisco: Just Intonation Network. 1985–2007. ISSN 8756-7717
- Beiträgezur Musikwissenschaft.Berlin: Verlag Neue Musik, Sonderpublikationen, 1973–1979. ISSN 0005-8106
- Етномузика: Збірник наукових праць і матеріалів [Etnomuzika: Zbìrnik naukovih prac’ ì materìalìv]. L’vìv: L’vìvs’ka Nacìonal’na Muzična Akademìâ ìmenì M. V. Lisenka. 2006–. ISSN 2523-4846 and eISSN 2523-4854
- Hortus musicus. Bologna: Ut Orpheus Edizioni. 2000–2005. ISSN 1129-4965
- Journal of the Association of Nigerian Musicologists. Ife-Ife: Association of Nigerian Musicologists. 2007–. eISSN 1597-0590
- Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music. Washington, DC: International Alliance for Women in Music, 1989–. ISSN 1082-1872
- Magyar zene: Zenetudományi folyóirat. Budapest: Magyar Zenetudományi és Zenekritikai Társaság. 1960–. ISSN 0025-0384
- Nachrichten zur Mahler-Forschung/News about Mahler Research. Wien: Internationale Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft. 1976/1977–. ISSNs 1608-8956 and 1609-0349
- Research perspectives in music education. Tallahassee, FL: Florida Music Educators Association. 1990–. ISSN 1947-7457
- Sinfónica. Montevideo: Sinfónica. 1995–. ISSN 1510-3544
- 中央音乐学院学报[Zhongyang Yinyue Xueyuan xuebao]/Journal of the Central Conservatory of Music. Beijing: Zhongyang Yinyue Xueyuan/Central Conservatory of Music. 1980–. ISSN 1001-9871
For a complete listing of the full-text journal titles included in RAFT, see https://www.rilm.org/abstracts/scope/fulltext-titles/.
Index to Printed Music (IPM)
Overview: Ian McGorray continued working as Assistant Editor, but due to his temporarily expanded workload in other areas of RILM, he spent less time on IPM work. This significantly altered the number of records created/edited/merged in IPM. At the end of FY 2023, IPM contained 551,640 published individual piece records (PMs). Progress has been made in several areas: 1) Instrumentation is now a searchable field and is also available as an access point in IPM. This allows users to find pieces with any instruments they like, or find every piece in IPM with an exact instrumentation. (2) RILM name equivalency terms are now active in searches in IPM, providing users more options for searching and leveraging our metadata in ibis. (3) Full-text limiting is also now available on EBSCO searches: this includes 9,992 records of full scores users can view through a direct link from EBSCO to the score. Among these full-text series is the Carl Nielsen-udgaven, which is a new addition to IPM for FY2023. As of 1 July 2023, Ian will be the IPM Product Coordinator with a strategy to vigorously develop it further.
RILM Music Encyclopedias (RME)
Content: In January 2023 RILM Music Encyclopedias expanded to include two new titles, bringing the list of titles to 65, published in print from 1775 to the present, and containing 338,995 entries. The additions focused on two eminent Yugoslav titles, important additions to other national encyclopedias in the collection:
- Krešimir Kovačević, ed. Muzička enciklopedija (2nd ed., Zagreb: Jugoslavenski Leksikografski Zavod, 1971–77) 3 vols., 713-[14] p. [7], 742 p., 789 p.
- Krešimir Kovačević, ed. Leksikon jugoslavenske muzike (Zagreb: Jugoslavenski Leksikografski Zavod Miroslav Krleža, 1984) 2 vols.; 589 p.; 575 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 2024:
- Warren Bebbington, ed. A Dictionary of Australian Music (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998) xiv, 361 p. In English.
- Nancy Groce. Musical Instrument Makers of New York: A Directory of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Urban Craftsmen (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1991) xxi, 200 p. In English.
- Felipe Pedrell, gen. ed. Diccionario técnico de la música (1st ed.; Barcelona: Isidro Torres Oriol, 1894) xix, 529 p. In Spanish.
- Felipe Pedrell, gen. ed. Diccionario biográfico y bibliográfico de músicos y escritores de música españoles, portugueses e hispano-americanos antiguos y modernos … (1st ed.; Barcelona: Tipografía de Víctor Berdós y Feliú, 1897) 2 vols., xix, 715 p., 88 p. In Spanish.
MGG Online
Content: MGG Online saw substantial new content for over 100 articles (major updates, newly written articles, and new entries). New articles on classical musicians of our time include some of today’s most prominent conductors (Andris Nelsons, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Jaap van Zweden) as well as icons of the recent past (violinist Ivry Gitlis, singer Barry McDaniel, and pianist Lars Vogt). There is also a thematic block of articles on 19th- and 20th-century women composers: new entries on U.S. composers Margaret Bonds, Julia Perry, and Florence Price; British composers Frances Allitsen and Amy Woodforde-Finden; and Alicia Needham from Ireland. New articles on musicologists such as Peter Cahn, Wilhelm Seidel, and Nicholas Temperley are joined by entries on representatives of the younger generation, such as Andreas Ballstaedt and Frank Heidelberger. From the world of jazz, new or soon-to-be-published articles comprise entries on Uri Caine, Terence Blanchard, Manu Dibango, Ahmad Jamal, and Ellis Marsalis; new lemma on popular musicians include Beastie Boys, Grace Jones, Annie Lennox, and Udo Jürgens. As it has done in the past, MGG Online continues to publish substantial new or newly written articles on geographies and general musical topics.
DEUMM Online
In 2021 RILM acquired full rights for the Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (DEUMM), edited by Alberto Basso, after its publisher UTET Grandi Opere went bankrupt. In summer 2022 the content was scanned by RILMs partner Aptara, and by early winter it was loaded on RILM’s Egret platform. Guillaume and the RILM technical team continue making improvements and revisions in the Egret database, creating new features and tools.
Having the content available in Egret, the editorial team (Antonio, Daniela, Bianca, and Zdravko) started analyzing it, planning the updates, and commissioning new articles and revisions. By the end of June 2023, 140 articles were commissioned of which three dozen were received, awaiting editorial treatment.
How to Write About Music: The RILM Manual of Style
Overview: On 10 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.
How to Write About Music is 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. In the future, after reviews have ideally accrued, it may be beneficial to consider a short print run of the book, and/or self-release it through a secondary online vendor.
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
- How to Write About Music: The RILM Manual of Style: EBSCO
- RILM Music Encyclopedias: EBSCO and Egret
- MGG Online: Egret
- DEUMM Online (forthcoming): Egret
Bibliolore
RILM’s blog: RILM’s 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 Nina Simone (Nina Simone and Black activism), and those less famous but no less worthy, like Oliver Mtukudzi (Oliver Mtukudzi: Instruction and reconstruction ).
Here are the top 10 posts (hyperlinked) from the past year:
Several 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; these include Thakur and Mussolini, The Nawāb’s musical bed), and–our most popular post so far–Mahler and Beyoncé.
Bibliolore has published more than 1640 posts and has been viewed more than 820,000 times since its inception in October 2009. Views since July 2021 averaged 240 per day. It currently has 2610 subscribers, and its Facebook page has 127 followers.