Tag Archives: Music Research

by | September 4, 2026 · 6:00 am

From the EBSCOpost backlist. VIII: Why music reference still matters in the age of Wikipedia (2017)

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.

In this installment, Executive Director Tina Frühauf ruminates on the place of music reference at a time when Wikipedia was changing how information was being generated, shared, and networked. Now 25 years after the platform’s release, the piece remains relevant, as the possibilities and potential dangers surrounding digital access points to knowledge, musical and otherwise, continue to surface in the context of generative AI and large language models (LLMs).

Why music reference still matters in the age of Wikipedia

The field of music reference has evolved continuously since the 1768 publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique. But the advent of Wikipedia in 2001 has had a dramatic impact on this hitherto gradual evolutionary process in terms of format, authorship, and editorial structures. Assessments of Wikipedia’s impact differ widely, from the view of Wikipedia as a means and medium of internationality to complaints about Wikipedia’s elimination of the individual and avoidance of editorial control mechanisms. Whether Wikipedia strikes you as a net benefit or loss, it has triggered important questions as to how future reference works and bibliographies can and should be made accessible, to whom, and with what features. Technology has changed how much can be accomplished and how far one can reach. But where does all this leave musicologists and music librarians? Printed reference works are organisms in themselves, reflective of their time and culture, region and subject matter. Technology has the ability to transform each organism into a universe of musical reference works and bibliographies, easily accessible in multiple languages and across cultural and other divides. More concretely, technology can create such a universe by facilitating cross-database searching, hyperlinking, and complex keyword searches, while maintaining the identity and specificity of reference works as individual organisms. Indeed, why, in the age of advanced information technology, should one reference work exist without the other? Such a communal approach was first put forth by Wikipedia, but neither thought through nor further developed beyond the issues of open access and open authorship. Ideally, digital archives should not aim toward completeness and a global perspective, but toward carefully curated content by means of 21st-century technology.

With technological advances, currency becomes an important matter as well. But as music researchers continue to rely on established and existing reference sources and bibliographies for research on individuals and subjects not included in modern encyclopedias, and for historiographical work which compares the representation of individuals and subjects over time, “old” encyclopedias have now received the ability to become new encyclopedias for the digital age.

In the longue durée, music reference works have always been reflective of their time and location, and also of their editors and users. The aforementioned Rousseau Dictionnaire is a case in point, as it has been deemed both radical and traditional at the same time—radical, as Rousseau advanced philosophy on opera and revealed his rejection of French musical tradition; traditional, as he held on to existing categories—music as art and music as science—and views on music theory accepted in the 18th century. This presence of two (or more) distinct strands or “voices” can be best understood as a reflection of the dialogue process in the formation of musical ideas.

RILM supports such dialogue by comprehensively and accurately representing music scholarship in all countries and languages, and across all disciplinary and cultural boundaries. If you think your faculty and students could benefit from the kind of resources RILM provides, I invite you visit our website to learn more.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1775), one of the many historic reference works available in RILM Music Encyclopedias.

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by | August 28, 2026 · 6:00 am

RILMiniscences: Remembering RILM as a family

The second installment of the RILMiniscences series features Terence Ford, a former editor-in-chief, who remembers that the organization’s greatest strength was its people. Ford joined RILM in 1981 after beginning graduate studies in musicology at the City University of New York. Like many graduate students at the time, he was assigned to work on one of three major music documentation projects: RILM, the iconography project that would later become one of the four R projects, Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM), or the music collections project. Ford’s first assignment was in iconography, a role that took him to Germany before he returned to New York to join the RILM staff.

Although Ford was simultaneously writing a dissertation, he eventually made the difficult decision to stop working on it. Instead, he forged a career at RILM, beginning as an assistant editor before becoming an editor and, eventually, editor-in-chief from 1989 to 1991. After leaving RILM, he worked for the Modern Language Association and later retrained as a psychoanalyst, a profession he practices today in Los Angeles. Looking back, however, what stands out most to Ford is not the career trajectory but the overall atmosphere of the RILM office itself.

During the 1980s, RILM occupied the third floor of a building on Manhattan’s 42nd Street, where its relatively small staff worked closely together each day. The close quarters fostered friendships that extended beyond professional titles and responsibilities. “RILM back then was like a family,” Ford recalls. As the organization expanded and moved to the tenth floor alongside other music department offices—including that of RILM founder Barry S. Brook–the sense of community endured. Even after Ford’s responsibilities shifted from editing to supervising editors and reviewing their work, the office retained its convivial atmosphere.

Dorothy Curzon, RILM’s managing editor from 1975 to 1991.

Central to creating this environment was Dorothy Curzon, a managing editor whom Ford affectionately describes as the “mother of the office”. Impeccably dressed, elegantly perfumed, and never without beautifully styled hair, Curzon embodied professionalism. She was also a gifted editor and teacher who trained many of RILM’s early influential editors, often emphasizing precision, consistency, and clarity. One of her rituals left a lasting impression on Ford: every payday, Curzon walked around the office personally handing each employee their paycheck and thanking them individually for their work. As Ford puts it, “Dorothy was so good at making everyone feel appreciated.”

Besides Curzon, the RILM office was filled with other memorable personalities. Rosalie McQuade, a full-time editor, was also a nun who commuted daily from a convent in New Jersey. McQuade carpooled with fellow sisters–some of whom worked at the United Nations–and became known in the office for her singing abilities, especially a song she wrote and often sang titled Buckle up, New Jersey! inspired by her observations that few motorists on the New Jersey highways wore seatbelts. Carl Skoggard was another significant figure in the RILM office. Skoggard handled many of the German-language abstracts and possessed remarkable linguistic abilities. Hidden behind rows of filing cabinets in a corner of the office, he would periodically emerge with an unexpected, humorous story that left everyone laughing.

Carl Skoggard, the RILM editor who established many of the organization’s editorial practices.

There was also Adam O’Connor, whose dry wit enlivened the RILM office. O’Connor, who would later become RILM’s editor-in-chief, had an uncanny ability to switch effortlessly between editing abstracts and reading The New Yorker, Harper’s, or The New York Review of Books, seemingly never missing anything despite dividing his attention. Of course, not every relationship was always harmonious. Ford remembers frequent disagreements in the RILM office based on differing views reflecting wider debates and philosophies within bibliography about how knowledge should be organized and what indexing systems should be used.

Adam J.P. O’Connor, RILM’s editor-in-chief from 1991 to 1996.

During his time at RILM, Ford noted that several publishers and information companies, such as EBSCO and H. W. Wilson Company, recognized RILM’s value and expressed interest in acquiring it, though no sale was ever finalized. What set RILM apart was not just its growing reputation but the dedicated individuals behind its success. More than three decades later, while technologies and editorial workflows have evolved into digital formats, Ford’s most cherished memories center on the people who made up the organization and the relationships that turned the editorial office into a vibrant community rather than just a workplace.

This post is based on an interview conducted with Terence Ford on 16 January 2026.

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by | July 22, 2026 · 6:00 am

From the EBSCOpost backlist. VI: The pointy end: Spoof articles (2013)

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.

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by | June 8, 2026 · 6:00 am

From the EBSCOpost backlist. IV: Mastering the mix: Choosing authentic popular music material for libraries (2018)

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.

Next up is a piece written by editor Jason Lee Oakes that shows how RILM curates a music research experience that is itself quite musical. Focusing on popular music as an example, Oakes notes the importance of relationships (musical and otherwise), the process of finding valuable information (while filtering out what is not needed), and the delicate balance between novelty and familiarity that researchers receive in RILM’s search results.

Mastering the mix: Choosing authentic popular music material for libraries

Long before huge databases of music recordings could be shared and filtered with such efficiency, academic databases like RILM Abstracts of Music Literature developed a similar approach to information about music. Drawing on a “peer-to-peer” network of shared music research, today there are nearly a million records about music in RILM Abstracts of Literature, searchable through the EBSCO interface. But how can searches of this massive database be made as “musical” as possible, quite apart from the content itself? Taking a page from Napster and from other digital music algorithms, how can we best enhance the quality and the impact of information retrieval in academic databases through increased musicality?

A good starting point can be established through a simple observation: Music is defined by relationships. A single note doesn’t mean much in isolation. Even Tuvan and Mongolian throat singers subtly alter timbres/overtones over time to make a “single note” musical. In the broadest possible sense, then, music acquires meaning through how notes are arranged relative to other notes: arranged pitch-wise in relative intervals to form melodies and harmonies; arranged relative to time through structured rhythms, metrical systems, and other temporal modes; and through the relative arrangement of voices and instruments to create compelling timbres and textures. Musical meaning is also found in how humanly organized sounds are used to organize people—acting as a powerful symbol for cultural identity, social belonging, individual uniqueness, and other methods of negotiating human relationships.

Moving from music itself to music scholarship, database search results are usually at their most effective and appealing when a query is posed in relational terms. Taking an inverse example at first, if you search RILM Abstracts for records on “popular music” with Major Topics chosen from EBSCO’s pull-down search menu, more than 82,000 records are returned. The search result isn’t likely to be “effective or appealing” to anyone due to its single-note quality and the lack of focus that results.

But now let’s try turning this into a multi-parameter search. One quick, easy and useful parameter that can be added to the mix is “Full Text”. By clicking the Linked Full Text box on the left side of the screen, only records with attached PDFs are returned, saving the user a trip to the library in the process. At the time of writing, this search returns more than 7,000 entries. It’s still a large number, but a lot less than 82,000 and the content is just a click away.

From here it’s easy to take more steps to get a more “musical” search result by throwing more parameters, and thus a broader array of relationships, into the mix. Adding an EBSCO Subject parameter to the parameters already chosen, the search is narrowed to records where the chosen word or phrase appears in RILM Abstract’s indexing for a given record. For instance, choosing “heavy metal” as the subject returns around 100 full-text citations, a much more manageable number than 7,000.

Most important of all, the results are musical. They strike a useful balance between uniformity and diversity, a balance likewise found in music that strikes an aesthetically appealing balance between repetition and variation. While all the records in the dataset are uniform in addressing heavy metal directly and thoroughly, there’s a good bit of variation otherwise: spanning writings that examine “metal studies” as an academic field, sonic traits of drone metal in light of genre theory, the sociology of Caribbean heavy metal scenes, and perceptions of sexuality and gender around female metal fans, among many other topics.

From EBSCO to Excite, the ultimate goal of most search engines is to return a good mix of results. This helps explain the shift from the directory model of first-wave search engines like Yahoo Directory to the second wave of webcrawler search engines (Google most famously) that utilized algorithms to locate sites, collect metadata and build an index. I would submit that the latter won public favor due to two main factors: it was more likely to deliver exactly the results the user was looking for (indexes are more granular than top-down categories); and it was more likely to return unexpected results.

Needless to say, random and irrelevant results are not widely desired. They are equivalent to “wrong notes” in a melody and just about as popular. Instead, results that provide a novel yet purposeful perspective on a query are often the most impactful—like the surprising yet logical-after-the-fact twist in a melody that serves as the “hook”. Returning to the example of Napster, it hooked users not just because it found the music they already knew they wanted, but also because they ended up discovering new and unfamiliar music they went on to fall in love with—often by searching laterally through a given user’s music collection. This mix of the familiar and the novel is a sure-fire formula for a successful search interface.

With this in mind, the digital-age database manager must work to be a master of the mix—all the more so when it comes to popular music studies and other interdisciplinary fields. The popular music researcher is sure to need materials published in non-music journals and publications. What’s more, she is likely to seek out other important data strewn across magazines and fanzines, posted on blogs and other websites, and located across a range of other non-traditional sources. To accommodate their needs, RILM has been seeking out and compiling more of these “outside the box” materials, curated for potential use value as primary or secondary data.

Given the risk of information overload that comes with the widening and the blurring of traditional boundaries, effective curation becomes all the more important. Approaching a database from a musical point of view offers a step in the right direction. Editors at RILM and at other databases are increasingly placed in the role of “record collectors” who don’t just “collect” but who also filter, organize, and interpret the data we collect. Like the crate-digging DJ, we dedicate ourselves to digging for data and creatively integrating new materials. This DJ mindset also highlights the necessity of working across various old and new media and of delving into unexplored spaces to find hidden gems.

The Alash Ensemble sings “Ediski deg boostaamny” (My throat, the cuckoo), an old Tuvan tune re-worked by the group that compares the singer’s voice to birds. It exemplifies the manifold sonic and interpersonal relationships on which musicality depends.

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Filed under Asia, Ethnomusicology, Musicology, Popular music, Resources, RILM, Sound, Voice, West Indies, World music

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by | May 4, 2026 · 6:00 am

From the EBSCOpost backlist. II: What is musicology? (2018)

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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