RILM staff periodically contribute writings to EBSCOpost, a lively blog run by our partners that publishes pieces pertinent to librarianship, higher education, and beyond. Over time, some of these posts are removed, and even those that remain generally recede from view, following the ephemeral nature of much digital content. With 60 years of preserving the world’s writings on music and music-related topics behind us, we are now adding a small rescue project: bringing these blog posts back into circulation. However modest, they help document and construct our own history as an organization, and we hope they will continue to resonate with our international readership as well as with any music enthusiast who happens upon them.
One of the earliest EBSCOposts was a 2016 piece by editor Jim Cowdery, who also appears in RILM’s first RILMiniscences.
Helicopters in music encyclopedias
The cross-volume search capacity of RILM Music Encyclopedias offers some quirky surprises—for example, this resource currently includes nine different music-related articles with references to helicopters. These include entries on Madonna, Mickey Rooney, and the following excerpt from the article Highland region of Papua New Guinea in The Garland encyclopedia of world music:
The texts [of girls’ coming-of age songs] address topics broadly sorted in four sets: daily routine, recalling netted bags (made by all women), sores (irritated by flies), and pleasure over good food (grown or gathered); unusual events, like sighting a helicopter, European missionaries’ arrival, and death in a hospital; desires, including the romantic, with meanings often hidden in metaphor, but also the adventuresome, like wanting to ride in a vehicle; and the coming-of-age performance itself speaking of dancing together, laughing together, and becoming adults.
Above: Landing on a pile of logs on a knife-edge ridge in Nakanai, New Britain (image by Mark Beaman, BirdQuest)—perhaps the subject of the sighting; below, a performance by the Girl Guides Association of Papua New Guinea.
To learn more about RILM Music Enyclopedias, head to: https://www.rilm.org/encyclopedias/.
