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 our 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.
For this installment in the series, we return to a post that caused quite a stir amongst the Bibliolore faithful when published here in 2017. In it, former RILM editor Jim Cowdery highlights a few tongue-in-cheek moments when musicologists, lexicographers, and even our staff injected some levity into their work. See if you can find them all, and check out Bibliolore’s recent post, Unique records in RILM Abstracts, which serves as a great companion piece.
The pointy end: Spoof articles
Many reference works for music—and presumably other topics—contain articles about fictitious characters. Sometimes writers for these works slyly slip them by their editors (an article on “Verdi, Lasagne” was almost typeset for printing in The new Grove dictionary); others are incorporated with the collusion of all parties.
For an example, look up Otto Jägermeier in Komponisten der Gegenwart (available through RILM Music Encyclopedias) or in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (available through MGG Online). You will find that Jägermeier composed, among other intriguing works, an opera called Der Idiot with a libretto by Fëdor Dostoevskij, and a work for solo clarinet called Psychosen. The name Jägermeier is a play on Jägermeister, a popular German cordial.
RILM is not above adding a spoof article or two to RILM Abstracts of Music Literature. Of course, we won’t tell you which ones they are, but we’ll give you a hint: One includes a reference to the very real and wonderful Malcolm Bilson, who favors us with a Mozart concerto below.
