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.
We follow up an inquiry into What is musicology? with a piece written by Executive Director Tina Frühauf that inspects how music education is conceived and practiced across cultures and time periods, as well as its establishment as a discipline, modern institutionalization, and more.
What is music pedagogy? Universality of education in sound and sound in education
Learning music is as old as music-making itself, tracing back to the earliest times of civilization, that is prehistory. Since then, the world’s cultures have developed different systems of teaching and learning – one may think of maguru panggul, literally, “teaching with the mallet” in Bali and Java; or the system of the Xhosa in Ngqoko, South Africa, which is based on the progression incentive–songs–techniques–terminology. Master–apprentice approaches have been common in many cultures around the globe and throughout history, from the troubadours to the guru-śiṣyaparamparā tradition in India to the Bach family. But as a field of study, music education has only been established in later modernity and it was not until the 20th century that it moved towards becoming a discipline in its own right: music pedagogy.
In its broader sense, music pedagogy refers to all practical, application-oriented, as well as scholarly efforts aimed at teaching and instruction. The tasks of music pedagogy focus on ability, knowledge, experience, understanding, and interpretation in all areas of music. As such music pedagogy includes the related concepts of music education, didactics, teaching, and instruction in music, although their distinctions are neither clear nor consensual.
In its narrower sense, music pedagogy has come to refer to the scholarly reflection of and theory formation within all its fields. Systematic music pedagogy thus provides the practical, applied areas with a theoretical basis for their actions and reflects on aesthetic, psychological, and sociological questions on the meaning and effect of music and on the reception of art in the most diverse forms of music. As such it serves artistic, scholarly, and didactic practice.
With music pedagogy’s evolution in the 20th century, many distinctive approaches further developed or received refinement and new methods came to the fore. Among them, the Kodály method named after Hungary’s charismatic composer and pedagogue, eurhythmics developed by the Swiss musician and educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, the Schulwerk of Carl Orff in Germany and the Suzuki method created by the Japanese violinist and pedagogue.
Paralleling its establishment as an independent discipline, the institutionalization of music pedagogy began as well. Aside from its place in the academy, music university or college, and school, music education also takes place in individualized, lifelong learning and community contexts. Both amateur and professional musicians typically take music lessons, short private sessions with an individual teacher. In all these diverse efforts and approaches, all share the goal to educate people how to produce organized sound, make and transmit music, and do it well.
RILM abstracts and indexes music pedagogy topics, representing as many countries and languages as possible. RILM also offers a selection of music-pedagogy journals in full text, which you can explore at https://www.rilm.org/abstracts/.
Above: Phnom Penh, Cambodia. 2002. Ek Son (top left), one of the first four masters hired to teach for the Cambodian Master Performers Program in 1999, along with students, including sisters Yim Chanthy playing kloy (bamboo flute) and Yim Poukunthy playing takhe (behind Chanthy in white shirt); below, an excerpt from Music für Kinder (Music for children), Orff and Keetman’s own realizations of the Schulwerk material.
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.
This next installment in this series, written by editor and MGG Online product coordinator Georg Burgstaller, shines a light on the discipline of musicology, reflecting on its origins, offshoots, interdisciplinarity, and more.
What is musicology?
Since its formal inception in 19th-century Europe, musicology has come to cover the gamut of music making worldwide. In its original conception the discipline was, and to a large part remains, distinct from solely enjoying or even making music, although scholars tacitly understood from the outset that it would or rather should benefit any given listener and, especially, the performer. Seeking to mirror the artistry of composers and the virtuosity of singers and players, musicologists aim to discover—usually having developed a background as musicians themselves—why music sounds the way it does, what it wishes to express, and how this is best achieved in performance.
Adding to this, the cultural study of music known as ethnomusicology has created awareness of music’s meaning in societies around the globe. While ethnomusicology and popular music studies frequently remain institutionally separate from musicology, their concerns have come to increasingly influence all music scholars, encouraging them to look beyond musical structures codified in musical notation and emphasize other ways of thinking about musical production and consumption, often broaching historically marginalized themes and considering historically marginalized people.
At the same time, musicology intersects with a host of other disciplines, often in complex and unexpected ways. These include the power of music to evoke any range of emotions in listeners and the application thereof in medicine and therapy, music’s interplay with other art forms and interactive media, and inquiries into music’s acoustic and metaphysical dimensions unfolding in time and space. At its most ambitious, musicology helps to uncover, recover, and reposition the way we view a universal human activity that is likewise telling of the human condition. To that end, musicologists are perhaps less preoccupied with their discipline’s scientific status (as signaled by the suffix -ology), but rather inspired by their own curiosity about, enthrallment with, and deep love for music.
Above: Guido Adler (1855–1941), one of the founders of musicology as a discipline; below, an introduction to Shashmaqom, one of many musical traditions studied by ethnomusicologists.
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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.
One of the earliest EBSCOposts was a 2016 piece by editor Jim Cowdery, who also appears in Bibliolore’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/.
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In the early 1960s, Barry S. Brook created a standardized form that RILM’s New York offices used to collect abstracts. Printed on thin, color-coded paper, these forms enabled RILM’s first editors to organize and edit submissions efficiently. Each color represented a different language: green for German, yellow for English, orange for Italian, pink for Spanish, and red for Russian. RILM distributed these forms worldwide. As Executive Editor Zdravko Blazeković recalls, the forms were a familiar sight on university campuses around the globe–he first encountered them as a graduate student in Zagreb, long before he later joined RILM in New York.
Editors first filled out the paper forms by hand before transferring the information into an IBM SG360 computer. Used from 1965 to 1978, the SG360 was the first family of computers designed to support both commercial and scientific applications, offering models that ranged from small entry-level systems to large mainframes. The early data-entry program the editors worked with was WYLBUR, a text editor and word processor introduced in 1967. Beyond RILM, WYLBUR was also used at institutions such as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and numerous other sites.
The greater RILM organization is a global network comprising national, supranational, and regional committees responsible for ensuring that significant writings on music from their respective countries or regions are included in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text. These committees, made up of musicologists and librarians affiliated with major universities, national libraries, and research institutes, play a critical role in advancing RILM’s global mission.
From its inception, the core principle of the RILM project was to encourage authors, journal editors, and publishers worldwide to contribute abstracts. RILM’s founder, Barry S. Brook, recognized early on the necessity of having dedicated committees in major music literature-producing countries to gather, process, and forward abstracts to the International Center in New York City. To achieve this, hundreds of letters were sent out to solicit cooperation. Additionally, the project received invaluable advice and support from the International Association of Music Libraries, which helped establish 33 national committees by the time the first issue was published. At that point, however, many of these committees were still small, with some consisting of just a single person.
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On 6 April 2026, Innocence, the final opera by the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, receives its Metropolitan Opera premiere in New York, marking a significant moment in the work’s ongoing international circulation and scholarly reception. Coinciding with this event, the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation hosts the conference Voicing Innocence: Trauma, Memory, and Contemporary Opera in the Work of Kaija Saariaho (7–8 April 2026) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Inspired by the Metropolitan Opera’s presentation of Simon Stone’s original production—first staged at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2021—the conference situates Innocence within broader critical conversations on contemporary opera, trauma, memory, and the limits of forgiveness.
This annotated bibliography is shaped by the shared mission of the Brook Center and RILM, a project housed within the Center: to document, organize, and make accessible the global circulation of music scholarship across languages, disciplines, and cultural contexts. That mission resonates directly with Innocence itself, an opera conceived as a transnational and multilingual work, unfolding across multiple temporalities and perspectives. Saariaho and librettists Sofi Oksanen and Aleksi Barrière construct a dramaturgy in which characters sing in their native languages—Finnish, French, German, Czech, Spanish, Swedish, Greek, and English—without translation within the world of the opera, foregrounding linguistic difference as both a narrative and ethical condition.
In this sense, Innocence offers not only a subject for scholarly inquiry but also a methodological analogue for bibliographic work. Just as the opera resists a single linguistic or cultural vantage point, this bibliography assembles scholarship produced across national traditions, disciplinary frameworks, and languages, tracing how Innocence and the topics at the heart of the opera can be interpreted, historicized, and mobilized within diverse intellectual communities. By mapping these intersecting strands of research, the bibliography reflects the broader commitment of the Brook Center and RILM to foster dialogue across borders—linguistic, cultural, and scholarly—mirroring the opera’s own insistence on global entanglement and shared responsibility.
RILM Abstracts offers over 596 bibliographic records that touch on Saariaho and her work, but surprisingly little has been written about Innocence to date. This is also evident from the website saariaho.org—the official hub for the composer. The select bibliography below draws from publications represented by RILM across all of its resources and draws together various topics relevant to a deeper understanding of the opera:
Liisamaija Hautsalo. “Whispers from the past: Musical topics in Saariaho’s operas”, in Kaija Saariaho: Visions, narratives, dialogues, ed. Tim Howell, Jon Hargreaves, Michael D. Rofe, Tim Howell (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011) 107–129. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2011-6218]
Examines the role of musical topics in Kaija Saariaho’s operatic works, focusing on the incorporation of historical and cultural musical references within a contemporary compositional language. Drawing on Raymond Monelle’s theory of musical topics, the study analyzes how recognizable stylistic gestures function semantically and hermeneutically in Saariaho’s operas. It traces the composer’s development as an opera composer and centers on detailed analyses of her two full-length operas, L’amour de loin and Adriana Mater. Musical semantics, semiotics, and hermeneutics are employed to demonstrate how topics mediate between past musical traditions and modern techniques, contributing to themes of memory, intimacy, and cultural resonance. Saariaho’s operatic practice is situated within broader interdisciplinary and narrative contexts, establishing a foundational framework for subsequent topic-based studies of her operatic repertoire. (Frühauf, Tina)
Tomi Mäkelä “Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023): Kunst zwischen Mensch und Maschine—Erste Gedanken post mortem”, Musik & Ästhetik XXVII/108 (2023): 5–11. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2023-25374]
Pays tribute to the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died in her home in Paris on 2 June 2023. More than a necrology, it serves as a topography of agendas that are or could be relevant to the reception of her works, from Bruden (1977) to Hush (2023), as well as her essays. Special emphasis is given to her Finnish environment—heritage, language, and professional surroundings. (journal)
Anni Katariina Oskala. “The voice in Kaija Saariaho’s music, 1977–2000” (Ph.D. diss, University of Oxford, 2008) (p. x, 418). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2008-19184]
Examines the use of the voice in Kaija Saariaho’s works composed between 1977 and 2000, including her first opera L’amour de loin (2000). The term voice refers to all live, recorded, and/or processed vocal sounds as well as synthesized sounds modeled on vocal timbres. (author)
Éva Pintér. “Was die Träume erzählen: Textdeutungen in den Vokalwerken von Kaija Saariaho”, in Woher? Wohin? Die Komponistin Kaija Saariaho, ed. Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich. Edition Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (Main: Schott Musik International, 2007) 75–84. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2007-25840]
Kaija Saariaho bekennt sich zu den psychoanalytischen Traumdeutungen in ihren Kompositionen. So erwähnt sie beispielsweise in ihrer Einführung zu Grammaire des rêves (1988) auch Aspekte der Traumforschung, hebt jedoch insgesamt die musikalische Ausformulierung hervor. Die psychoanalytische Traumdeutung kann folglich die inhaltlich-musikalische Grundlage solcher Werke wie Im Traume, L’amour de loin, From the grammar of dreams oder Grammaire des rêves beleuchten. Auf der anderen Seite werden diese Traumdeutungen in einen souveränen musikalischen Stil eingebettet, der ein ganz entscheidend charakteristisches “Geflecht” in vielen Werken Kaija Saariahos bildet und damit ein eigenes, autonomes kompositorisches Verfahren aufweist.
Kaija Saariaho acknowledges the psychoanalytical interpretations of dreams in her compositions. For example, in her introduction to Grammaire des rêves (1988) she mentions aspects of dream research, though placing primary overall emphasis on the musical formulation. The psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams can therefore shed light on the contentual-musical basis of works such as Im Traume, L’amour de loin, From the grammar of dreams, and Grammaire des rêves. Conversely, these interpretations are integrated into a masterly musical style that creates an absolutely characteristic weave in many of Saariaho’s works and thus reveals a personal, autonomous compositional method. (Schöntube, Cornelia)
Elena Vasil’evna Kiseeva and Emma Sergeevna Korotkieva. “Traktovka žanra v opere Nevinnost’ Kaji Saariaho” [An interpretation of genre in Kaija Saariaho’s opera Innocence], Problemy muzykal’noj nauki: Rossijskij naučnyj žurnal/Music scholarship: Russian journal of academic studies 4 (January 2023) 128–141. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2023-23108]
Идея обновления оперного жанра нашла яркое претворение в многочисленных произведениях, авторами которых являются выдающиеся композиторы современности Джон Адамс, Луи Андриссен, Тан Дун, Стив Райх, Филип Гласс, Джон Кейдж, Кайя Саариахо и многие другие. В их сочинениях обнаружились трансформации, обусловленные нарушением в драматургии причинно-следственных связей, включением смысловых разрывов, прерывающих линейность повествования, а также отказом от коммуникативной функции слова в пользу музыкальности его звучания. В некоторых произведениях кардинально изменился характер взаимоотношений между автором, исполнителем и зрителем, что привело к разрушению установившихся жанровых норм. Предметом исследовательского интереса в данной статье выступили жанровые эксперименты, представленные в новой опере Кайи Саариахо «Невиновность» (2018). В них как в зеркале получила отражение гораздо более обширная и серьёзная научная проблема — трактовка оперного жанра в начале XXI века. Новизна исследуемого произведения определена соединением в нём оперы и триллера. Специфика построения либретто и музыкальной драматургии, трактовка вокальных и хоровых партий направлены на создание характерного для триллера длительного эмоционального нагнетания и погружения зрителей в состояние тревоги и страха.
The idea of a renewal of the opera genre is present in numerous works written by some of the outstanding 21st-century composers of our time: John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Tan Dun, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Cage, Kaija Saariaho, and many others. Their works demonstrate transformations stipulated by transgressions of cause-and-effect relationships in their dramaturgy, inclusions of semantic abruptions interrupting the linearity of the narrative, as well as a rejection of the communicative function of words in favor of the musicality of sound. In some works, the nature of the relationship between composer, performer, and audience has radically changed, leading to the disintegration of the established norms of the opera genre. The experiments in the sphere of genre demonstrated in Kaija Saariaho’s opera Innocence (2018) reflect a much more extensive and serious scholarly issue – the interpretation of the genre of opera at the beginning of the 21st century. The novelty of Saariaho’s composition lies in the combination of the genres of opera and thriller. The specific construction of the libretto and musical dramaturgy, as well as the interpretation of the vocal and choral parts, are aimed at creating a long-lasting emotional buildup, characteristic of a thriller, and immersing the audience in a state of anxiety and fear. (journal)
The full-text extension of RILM Abstracts offers several short write-ups of Innocence stagings:
Jules Cavalié. “Festival d’Aix-En-Provence 2021”, L’avant-scène: Opéra 324 (septembre-octobre 2021) 102–105. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2021-7310]
Anon. Sinfónica. “La impactante nueva ópera Innocence de Kaija Saariaho y su tan esperado debut en el Reino Unido”, 1 mayo 2023. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2023-4230]
Ingo Hoddick “Empathiemusik: Das Musiktheater im Revier bringt die meisterhafte Oper Innocence von Kaija Saariaho zur deutschen Erstaufführung”, Das Orchester: Magazin für Musiker und Management LXXII/12 (2024) 53. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2024-20273]
Lucile Desblache. “Tales of the unexpected: Opera as a new art of glocalization”, in Music, text and translation, ed. Helen Julia, Minors. Bloomsbury advances in translation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) 9–19. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2013-5356]
Questions how languages in opera have been used as instruments of globalization, both as agents of what was seen initially as an operatic form expressing universal messages and as tools of cultural identity which promote the value of ethnicity or of a local heritage. Multilingualism and cultural diversity are central to the discussion. (Minors, Helen Julia)
Marta Mateo. “Multilingual libretti across linguistic borders and translation modes”, in Opera in translation: Unity and diversity, ed. Adriana Şerban and Kelly Kar Yue Chan.Benjamins translation library 153 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2020) 337–357. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-77898]
Based on research on multilingualism in opera production, reception, and translation, the relationship between translation and linguistically heterogeneous librettos is examined, focusing on the texts themselves. Plurilingual operas encourage reflection on how important it is to understand the semantic content of the various languages in order to grasp the communicative value and enjoy these works. The advisability of neutralizing the verbal diversity—integral to their meaning—in the translation process must be questioned, too. The translation strategies used in subtitling and CD inserts for some multilingual librettos are analyzed. These show varying functions and degrees of heteroglossia, in order to observe whether those textual features determine translation choices as much as the translation mode. (author)
Tomi Kiilakoski and Atte Oksanen. “Soundtrack of the school shootings: Cultural script, music and male rage”, Young: Nordic journal of youth research XIX/3 (2011) 247–269. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2011-53211]
School shootings have had an enormous cultural impact on discussions about youth worldwide. Studies on school shootings have not yet considered the complex nature of youth subcultures, often blaming particular subcultures or cultural products. School shooters use different cultural products, including books, films, and, especially, music. As a consequence, particular cultural products are woven into the fabric of the cultural script of school shootings. The music of 46 videos left by the Finnish Jokela High School shooter is analyzed in the context of the cultural script of the shootings. School shooters are not only fascinated by previous shootings but are also fans of similar cultural products. Music is actively used as a reference, as shooters actively searched for lyrics that enforce the idea of revolutionary violence. Internet videos offered a channel for shooters to interact with other people. (journal)
Jennifer M. Sokira. “Considerations for music therapy in long-term response to mass tragedy and trauma”, Music therapy today XV/1 (2019) 78–90. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-7832]
Aprovechando la experiencia en la prestación de musicoterapia en la comunidad de Connecticut Newtown/Sandy Hook, desde el tiroteo que hubo en la escuela en 2012, este artículo describe la evolución y las fases del trauma psicológico de la comunidad, aportando consideraciones a los musicoterapeutas que trabajan con los super vivientes en todas las fases. Con referencia a la sintonía del terapeuta con los cambios neurológicos en el cerebro y en el cuerpo que sufren los supervivientes, se hacen recomendaciones relativas a la resiliencia como prevención, a educación y entrenamiento, a pautas de trabajo, y a la propia resiliencia del terapeuta.
Drawing from experience in providing music therapy to the Newtown/Sandy Hook, Connecticut community since the 2012 school shooting, the trajectory and psychological phases of community trauma are outlined, providing considerations for music therapists serving survivors through all phases. Advocating for therapist attunement to the neurobiological brain and bodily changes which trauma survivors experience, recommendations are made regarding resilience as prevention, education and training, networking, and therapist vicarious resilience. (journal)
DEUMM Online, the preeminent Italian encyclopedia online, published a fresh appraisal of Saariaho in 2025. In addition to the new entry, Foglia also contributed work-specific articles on L’amour de loin (2000), Adriana mater (2005), La passion de Simone (2006), and Émilie (2009).
RILM Music Encyclopedias,which aggregates a wide range of music encyclopedias and dictionaries, providing authoritative biographical, stylistic, and bibliographic information on composers, performers, and music topics, covers Kaija Saariaho across several sources, including the Historical dictionary of the music and musicians of Finland, Komponisten der Gegenwart, International encyclopedia of women composers, and The 20th century violin concertante: A repertoire catalogue. These entries provide concise biographical data, overviews of her compositional style, key works, and references to further scholarly resources.
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A 1967 New York Times article titled Who’s writing about music and where reviewed the inaugural quarterly volume of RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, released in August of that year. The reviewer commended the publication as “the first permanent attempt to describe regularly what is being written about in the world’s significant literature on music,” observing that it “obviously fills a great need in musicological circles”. Even in its earliest stages, the potential of RILM Abstracts to help shape the field of music research was already being recognized.
1967 New York Times article.
In his 1967 inaugural report, RILM’s founder, Barry S. Brook, emphasized the integral role of authors and librarians in submitting abstracts, identifying the author-generated abstract as the “essential first step in the RILM project”. Drawing on its successful use in the sciences, Brook advocated for its adoption within the humanities to foster scholarly communication and documentation.
Prior to the introduction of online submission forms, all citations and abstracts were submitted manually–either handwritten or typed–on standardized forms like the yellow one shown above. These forms were available in multiple languages and color-coded for efficient sorting. Given the limitations of manual typewriters, corrections and diacritics had to be added by hand. Once received, submissions were retyped into the database at the International Center, and non-English titles and abstracts were translated into English.
Over the decades, RILM has benefited from the dedication of countless volunteers, including many prominent scholars in musicology and ethnomusicology, whose contributions have helped shape the richness and reach of the database.
The kidiu (pictured above) is a unique aerophone in Malaysian folk music, specifically a bullroarer, which is a type of free aerophone that lacks an air column or closed air reservoir. Used by the Kenyah-Badang ethnic group in the Upper Rejang River region of Sarawak, the kidiu is typically played in small ensembles of two or three bullroarers to create melodies. The kidiu consists of a flat, oval disc made from wood or bamboo, with precise dimensions–at least ten centimeters in length, about eight to ten centimeters in width, and two to three centimeters in thickness. The disc is attached to a string, which is connected to a bamboo pole with a handle, with both the string and bamboo pole being approximately the same length.
A Kenyah dancer.
The player holds the bamboo pole by its handle and swings the kidiu disc quickly through the air, generating swirling air currents that produce distinct short notes. These notes vary based on the size of the disc and the speed at which it is swung. Typically, two or more players use differently sized kidiu discs, swinging them at specific intervals to create a range of notes, depending on the strength and direction of their swings–either forward, backward, or in a circular motion. Played in an interlocking pattern, the two or three kidiu discs produce repeating short melodic phrases as long as the players continue swinging them.
Kenyah kidiu. Image courtesy of the British Museum.
Initially, the kidiu was used in rice paddies to scare away pests like birds, mice, and insects that threatened the rice crops. Over time, however, it evolved into a musical instrument used for entertainment among the residents of the longhouse.
The guitarrón, an instrument of central Chile, is known as one of the most complex stringed instruments in the Americas due to its unique string arrangement and quantity. Shaped like a guitar, the guitarrón features a total of 25 strings–21 arranged in five courses, with an additional four strings positioned along the sides. The guitarrón is customarily used to accompany sung poetry in décimas, a Spanish stanza form consisting of ten lines.
The cover of Hugo Arévalo’s album El guitarrón y el canto a lo pueta (1970).
In performance, the guitarrón is held similarly to a guitar, with the left hand muting the strings along the neck and the right hand plucking them over the body. The instrument’s position can vary from horizontal to vertical, depending on the musician’s preference and their proximity to other performers. Guitarrón players, known as guitarroneros, are often also proficient guitarists, capable of executing a wide range of strumming techniques–though these are never applied to the guitarrón. Instead, the instrument is played exclusively with plucking techniques. Occasionally, one or two notes are struck rapidly with the index finger as an ornamental flourish, but traditional guitar strumming is avoided. When guitarrón repertoire is performed on guitar, musicians typically imitate the plucked pizzicato style.
Photo credit: Rodrigo Pardo
The history of the Chilean guitarrón remains largely unclear. Its origins can be traced back to the Spanish guitar, rather than the more refined vihuela favored by the urban elite. The guitarrón shares the general body shape and structural features of the guitar, though with certain variations. Its development mirrors the evolution of the Spanish guitar introduced to the Americas from the 16th century onward. Early guitars of that period typically had four strings, arranged in single or double courses. By the late 16th century, the five-course guitar emerged and remained prevalent in rural regions, even after the seven-course guitar gained popularity in urban centers toward the end of the 18th century. Interestingly, the modern six-string guitar is sometimes still used as a five-course instrument, either by loosening the sixth string or tuning it in unison with the fifth.
This according to DEUMM Online’s featured article of the month by José Pérez de Arce, entitled Chilean guitarrón.
Hugo Arévalo performs on the guitarrón below. The video after it, featuring Santos Rubio on guitarrón, was made by Daniel Sheehy, the ethnomusicologist and future director and curator of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, in 1973 during his fieldwork in Chile.
Digital opera has roots in electroacoustic works that integrate spatial soundscapes into performance, such as Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin (2000, pictured above). Musicologist Anna Schürmer offers a broader view, tracing its history even further, suggesting its origins may precede electroacoustic sound. Schürmer links the evolution of digitally mediated works to the construction of larger 18th century theaters, where sound connected audiences across physical divides. Earlier multimedia-infused productions, like Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die soldaten (1965), Harrison Birtwistle’s The mask of Orpheus(1986), Libby Larsen’s Frankenstein(1990), and Bill Viola’s The Tristan project (2004, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic), are significant for their use of electronics. However, they fall short of utilizing digital sound sample processing. Additional antecedents include mid-20th century radio plays and performances where multimedia significantly shaped the auditory experience.
A production of Viola’s The Tristan project.
From Rihm’s Die Hamletmaschine.
The most prominent use of contemporary digital technology in opera lies in sound design, where digital processing techniques shape how audiences perceive sound within the performance space. This innovation builds on earlier milestones, including IRCAM (the French institute of research on music and sound) performances employing electronic or MIDI keyboards and voice, such as Wolfgang Rihm’s Die Hamletmaschine (1987) and various works by Karlheinz Stockhausen. In the 21st century, the digital manipulation of sound samples has become a staple–though often overlooked–in both contemporary and traditional operatic productions, with subtle amplification techniques further extending its reach.
This according to the new entry on digital opera by Megan Steigerwald Ille, in DEUMM Online.
Below is a performance of Die soldaten with music by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, along with an excerpt from Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin sung by the soprano, Susanna Phillips.
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