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.
The series continues with another short piece by retired RILM editor Jim Cowdery. It relays a little-known (and perhaps surprising) meeting between two very different individuals who shared an interest in music’s ability to evoke powerful emotional responses.
Thakur and Mussolini
Near the end of his visit to Rome in 1933, the Hindustānī vocalist Omkarnath Thakur (1887–1968) received an invitation to dine with Mussolini; Il Duce had caught wind of Thakur’s theories and experiments regarding the inducement of emotional states by rāga performances, and he wanted a demonstration.
After a specially prepared vegetarian dinner, Thakur began with hindolam, which depicts valor. “When I was soaring in the high notes of the rāga,” he later recalled, “Mussolini suddenly said ‘Stop!’ I opened my eyes and found that he was sweating heavily. His face was pink and his eyes looked like burning coals. A few minutes later his visage gained normalcy and he said ‘A good experiment.’”
After Thakur brought him to tears with rāga chayanat, which is meant to depict pathos, Mussolini said, after taking some time to recover, “Very valuable and enlightening demonstration about the power of Indian music.”
Il Duce then returned the favor: Producing his violin, he treated Thakur to works by Paganini and Mozart. Again, both agreed on the music’s power to evoke emotion.
“I could not sleep at all the entire night,” the vocalist recalled, “wondering whether the meeting had really taken place; I thought it was a part of a dream.” The next day, two letters from Mussolini arrived—one thanking him and one appointing him as director of a newly formed university department to study the effect of music on the mind (an appointment that he was unable to accept).
This according to “Omkarnath Thakur & Benito Mussolini” by B.K.V. Sastry (Sruti 163 [April 1998] pp. 19–21; RILM Abstracts 1999-26342).
Although the exact date of this meeting is not recorded, we know that it took place in May 1933—80 years ago this month! Below, Thakur performs rāga bhairavi.
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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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.
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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.
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 Music Encyclopedias is a full-text collection of reference works, offering comprehensive and continually expanding coverage of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory. Designed to support teaching, learning, and research, it serves the needs of the international music community. The collection currently includes over 60 influential titles, spanning publications from 1775 to the present, and enables powerful, federated searches across its content. Covering multiple languages and countries–including Italian, German, Slovak, Spanish, and Albanian–RILM Music Encyclopedias features essential national and subject-specific works such as the Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Music, International Encyclopedia of Women Composers, and Das Gothic- und Dark Wave-Lexikon.
As a comprehensive, cross-searchable resource, RILM Music Encyclopedias provides the international music community with a virtual library of essential reference works. It covers a wide range of disciplines, fields, and subject areas, including historical musicology, ethnomusicology, pop and rock, opera, instruments, blues, gospel, recorded sound, and women composers. Key general music publications featured in the collection include Algemene muziekencyclopedie, Biographical dictionary of musicians, Dictionnaire de la musique, The Garland encyclopedia of world music, and Handwörterbuch musikalischer Terminologie. Seminal historical works, such as Fétis’ Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique, Eitner’s Biographisch-bibliographisches Quellen-Lexikon, and Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon (11th edition), are also included, providing unparalleled depth and historical context.
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International Peace Gardens in Jordan Park, Salt Lake City, Utah
Situated about three miles away from the Hilton Salt Lake City Center, site of the 2026 annual meeting of the Music Library Association attended by RILM staff, Jordan Park contains a heritage setting that is uniquely global in character: the International Peace Gardens. The grounds feature 26 country-themed sections, each reflecting a nation’s culture and landscape, that are designed to foster peace and friendship.
The locale’s spirit of international cooperation recalls the global initiatives of UNESCO that inspired the organizational structure of RILM 60 years ago. It is rooted in the conviction that authoritative and incisive knowledge on human creativity can only be attained collectively, by embracing a multitude of perspectives. Today, as RILM continues to collect and amplify every voice in music research as a UNESCO-accredited NGO, the Peace Gardens remind us of the importance of embracing a global sensibility towards interdisciplinary research.
With the approach of Voicing Innocence (7-8 April 2026)—a conference that accompanies the performance of Kaija Saariaho’s opera Innocence at the Metropolitan Opera in New York from several different fields of inquiry—the picturesque area of the park designated to represent Finland (Saariaho’s homeland and that of many of the speakers and illustrious guests) seems particularly prescient and appropriate. It immediately calls to mind the surfeit of writings on Finland’s lands, history, music and instruments, musicians and artists, and so much more that RILM has documented across all of its resources over the last six decades.
Below is a sample of this collecting effort of just some of the holdings dedicated to, and to some extent produced by, Finland. We hope that it serves as an entry point into research on the country’s artistic production and appreciation for its incredibly rich cultural heritage.
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Those interested in research surrounding Finland will encounter a plethora of writings in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature. The country itself is indexed in 8126 records (1493 available in full text). Over 2200 of these writings are in the Finnish language, and writings on Finland exist in 47 languages, attesting to the global musicological interest in the country. These publications reveal a broad and well-developed field that spans historical research, contemporary analysis, and documentation of musical life. Much of the focus lies in music history and musical life, alongside strong contributions from musicology and ethnomusicology, reflecting an interest in both institutional and lived musical practices. Scholarship covers a wide range of genres, including traditional music, popular music, jazz, and religious music, while also addressing pedagogy, performance practice, and musical instruments. These studies are often supported by extensive documentation such as discographies, catalogues, and bibliographies, underscoring a commitment not only to analysis but also to preservation and reference. Geographically and culturally, the material highlights both regional diversity and cultural specificity within Finland. Major urban centers such as Helsinki, Turku, and Tampere emerge as key hubs of musical activity and scholarship, while smaller localities like Kaustinen are especially prominent in the context of folk traditions and festivals. At the same time, research engages with Finland’s multilingual and multicultural fabric, particularly Finnish-Swedish, Sámi, and other minority communities, as well as immigrant groups. Overall, writings on music in Finland situate musical practices within broader cultural, social, and political frameworks, reflecting how music intersects with identity, regional heritage, and cultural policy.
Additional writings are concerned with “Finnish music outside Finland”, highlighting a diaspora-oriented perspective, where references are relatively sparse and spread across a small number of countries. Mentions appear in contexts such as Canada, Estonia, France, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the U.S., along with broader regional references such as North America. Finnish music outside its country of origin is studied primarily in terms of diaspora presence and reception rather than in large volume, with modest attention distributed across neighboring Nordic and Baltic countries as well as select global contexts.
Content related to Finland in the RILM Index to Scores and Collected Editions reflects the country’s outsized contributions to the production and development of Western art music. Finland appears in 203 indexed records, encompassing detailed bibliographic information for 94 full scores, 58 parts, and 27 works for solo instrument or voice, alongside 45 records in Finnish and 20 associated with the historic Finnish publisher Fazer. The scope of available material is further demonstrated by major editorial projects such as Documenta musicae Fennicae, a 20-volume series presenting works by Finnish composers from the 18th and 19th centuries, and the 27-volume edition of Jean Sibelius’s complete works, underscoring both the depth of archival resources and the international significance of Finnish musical output.
Oxford anthology of Western music. III, ed. Robert Rau Holzer and David J. Rothenberg (New York: Oxford University Press) 591–597 [RILM Index to Scores and Collected Editions, 2013-44897]
The RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazinesmentions Finland 383 times across 18different zines, attesting to international interest. Discourse on Finnish pop often centers on heavy metal and its stylistic offshoots. Finnish groups like Amorphis (blending death metal with local folk influences), Sentenced, and Stratovarius established a style characterized by melodic, atmospheric, and sometimes melancholic metal. By the 1990s, Finland’s reputation as an incubator for metal became solidified with the global success of groups like Nightwish, Children of Bodom, HIM, and Apocalyptica, partially defining subgenres like symphonic metal and melodic death metal.
“Finnish Line: Pagan Prog Rockers AMORPHIS defy death” by Michael Moynihan in Seconds no. 29, 1994
Finland has also produced a rich punk scene documented by several non-Finnish zines. Embracing the subversive potential of the music (and the zines themselves), writings from the 1980s sometimes situated music criticism and review within the context of the Soviet presence. Given its geographic proximity, history of conflict (e.g., the Winter and Continuation wars), perceived enforced capitulations surrounding so-called Finlandization policies, and Cold War threats, the Soviet Union as a reference point is rather unsurprising. Articles in zines offer a unique window into the agency and activities of subcultures eager to deploy text, image, and music, some as a response to perceived misunderstandings from outsiders about the Finnish situation, particularly in the country’s major cities.
Content related to Finland in the RILM Music Encyclopedias underscores the country’s rich and multifaceted musical heritage as represented across a wide range of reference works. The collection includes information on 464 Finnish musicians, 74 Finland-related topics, and 21 instruments associated with the country, alongside full encyclopedia entries dedicated to Finland in several major sources. Notable among these are Timo Leisiö’s entry in The concise Garland encyclopedia of world music, which situates Finnish music within its geopolitical, linguistic, and cultural contexts while also addressing traditional music, instruments, and developments such as jazz, and the collaborative article by Liv Greni, Miep Zijlstra, Dilkka Kolehmainen, and Rina Barbier in the Algemene muziek encyclopedie, which traces Finland’s musical history from liturgical and secular traditions through to postwar developments, including education, ballet, and key genres.
Earlier and complementary perspectives are provided by the Finland entry in Hugo Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon, which documents sacred, secular, and traditional music in a historical framework from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Together, these sources are further enriched by specialized scholarship such as The historical dictionary of the music and musicians of Finland by Ruth-Esther Hillilä and Barbara Blanchard Hong, the only comprehensive English-language reference devoted entirely to Finnish music and culture. Spanning a broad historical range from antiquity to the late 20th century, these encyclopedic resources collectively highlight the depth of Finnish musical life, its historiography, and its continued relevance within both national and international contexts.
Kalevala-style song (soloist and choir): Timo Leisiö, Kalevalaisen kansanlaulun ulottuvuuksia, 1976. Liv Greni, Miep Zijlstra, Dilkka Kolehmainen, and Rina Barbier, “Finland”, Vocale muziek, Algemene muziek encyclopedie, eds. Jozef Robijns and Miep Zijlstra (Haarlem: De Haan/Unieboek, 1979–84). Article published 1980.
Finally, the articles dedicated to Finland in the standalone encyclopedias—DEUMM Online and MGG Online—provide a thorough inspection of the county’s vocal and instrumental traditional musics, art music from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era, and modern musical life, including the music industry, concerts, opera, and festivals. Valuable bibliographies accompany both as well.
Beyond this, both resources contain many entries that center on Finnish musicians across several genres. In MGG Online, the researcher will encounter 62 Finnish composers, 14 conductors, and eight pianists, for example. Additionally, both encyclopedias cover not only the nation’s artistic production, but its scholarly output as well, with entries on prominent Finnish musicologists and music critics.
The jouhikko player Juho Vaittinen (d.1916) from East Karelia, in playing position. Ilkaa Oramo, “Finnland”, Volksmusik, Die Instrumente und die Instrumentalmusik, MGG Online, ed. Laurenz Lütteken. (New York: RILM; Kassel: Bärenreiter; Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016–) Article published November 2016.
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The idea for RILM, as its founder Barry S. Brook later reflected, originated in 1964 from the belief that “the alternative to automation was inundation”. The idea was first publicly presented at the American Musicological Society’s meeting on 10 April 1965. During this presentation, a broad yet clear proposal was introduced, suggesting the creation of an abstract journal that would catalog “significant musicological literature published worldwide”, envisioned as a collaborative effort across multiple countries and universities, supporting graduate-level musicology research. The abstracts would be stored in a computer, indexed, published, and made accessible for retrieval in various ways as needed.
A few months later, Brook unveiled a more comprehensive proposal at the Dijon congress of the International Association of Music Libraries. Years afterward, he expressed surprise at the proposal’s remarkably optimistic forecasts. Among its key points, the proposal envisioned RILM producing two main publication series–one focused on current literature and the other dedicated to retrospective material. It outlined a plan to release abstracts and indexes quarterly, with the long-term goal of compiling volumes of retroactive bibliographic records. It also anticipated the use of computer-based automatic indexing, enabling extensive cross-referencing and efficient information retrieval. It described a system in which cumulative indexes would be automatically generated, printed, and published on a regular basis. Additionally, it proposed that researchers could request computer-assisted bibliographic searches and receive printed results tailored to their inquiries. Finally, the proposal suggested that RILM would become financially self-sustaining through publication revenues and fees charged to institutions and individuals seeking specialized information services.
Brook playing an organ.
Brook later acknowledged that the 1965 proposal had been a product of wishful thinking–an idealistic vision of what might be possible. He admitted it was strikingly naïve in terms of the practical means by which RILM and its associated initiatives could be realized. Yet, in hindsight, he also recognized its uncanny prescience: nearly every element outlined in the proposal had, over time, become a reality within the history of RILM.
New York, NY / London, UK – RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale), a global organization dedicated to documenting and making accessible the world’s musical knowledge across all traditions, is proud to announce that it has acquired the Hofmeister XIX database from Royal Holloway, University of London, and King’s College London. This valuable resource is now hosted at hofmeister.rilm.org, continuing its mission under RILM’s stewardship to support musicological inquiry.
The Hofmeister XIX database provides comprehensive, searchable access to over 330,000 bibliographic records from the Hofmeister Monatsberichte, published between 1829 and 1900. These records represent a vital primary source for the study of music publishing, repertoire, and taste in the 19th century, and include bibliographic records for music scores, music-related books, periodicals, portraits, and other ephemera.
The database was created and developed at Royal Holloway and King’s College London (Department of Digital Humanities) by a team headed by Nicholas Cook (Director) and Liz Robinson (Project Manager), with support from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Since 2007 the project has served music librarians, scholars, and others worldwide through an open-access model. RILM now assumes ownership with a firm commitment to preserving open access to the database, its quality, and its scholarly integrity. RILM will continue to credit the founding institutions prominently on the site and maintain the platform according to the high standards long associated with Hofmeister XIX.
“RILM is honored to take over this invaluable resource,” said Dr. Tina Frühauf, Executive Director of RILM. “As a UNESCO-accredited NGO under the 2003 and 2005 Conventions, we are committed to safeguarding intangible cultural heritage and promoting cultural diversity. Acquiring Hofmeister XIX aligns with this mission by preserving and disseminating a vital record of 19th-century musical life and publishing. We look forward to ensuring its continued accessibility for scholars and the public worldwide.”
Dr. Nicholas Cook, a former professor at Royal Holloway, commented: “At a time when digital resources in academia often struggle to keep up with the pace of technical innovation, RILM’s acquisition of Hofmeister XIX is the best possible guarantee of its long-term survival.”
Royal Holloway’s Director of Research and Innovation, Sue Starbuck, noted: “We are thrilled that Hofmeister XIX will thrive under RILM’s custodianship. Their infrastructure, global reach, and deep commitment to musicology ensure a strong future for this resource.”
Dr. Arianna Ciula, Director of the King’s Digital Lab, commented: “With the support of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities leadership at King’s College London, King’s Digital Lab has made every effort to sustain digital resources of value to the research community. The migration of this important resource to its new home is a great example of what trustworthy collaboration and a holistic archiving and sustainability programme can achieve.”
As of today, the original site can be accessed through the new URL https://hofmeister.rilm.org, marking a seamless transition for the academic community and general public.
For more information, please contact:
RILM Dr. Tina Frühauf Executive Director info@rilm.org
Royal Holloway, University of London Sue Starbuck Director of Research and Innovation Sue.Starbuck@rhul.ac.uk
King’s College London Dr. Arianna Ciula Director, King’s Digital Lab kdl-info@kcl.ac.uk
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The global expansion of musicology beyond Europe and North America in the latter half of the 20th century was shaped by several key factors. Alongside the structure of each country’s higher education system, its connection to the so-called West and engagement in Western-oriented modernization played a significant role. The presence of European music within a nation’s cultural landscape, as well as the distinct character and status of its own musical heritage, has further influenced developments. In this context, countries with direct historical ties to European musical and academic traditions–either through colonization or European immigration–generally aligned their approach with the European model of musicology. Conversely, former colonies without large European-descended populations primarily focused on studying their indigenous musical traditions, incorporating European influences only sparingly. This pattern was particularly evident in India and various Muslim-majority countries. In these regions, musicology evolved in response to national independence, secularization, and modernization efforts.
Countries that underwent partial Western colonization but embraced cultural Westernization centered their studies on Western music while also applying musicological methods to analyze their own music traditions. The selection of musical subjects in each region reflects the enduring influence of colonial history. In Western Europe and North America, ethnomusicology continues to engage with musical traditions from across the globe. However, in other regions, research tends to prioritize indigenous musical traditions, with Western music playing a role only when it is explicitly recognized as culturally significant.
In Latin America, the institutional development of musicology has followed diverse paths, with varying degrees of formalization. In its early stages, research primarily focused on indigenous musical traditions, aligning closely with ethnomusicology. It was not until the 1950s that academic musicology began to take root in universities, emerging sporadically as music history and ethnomusicology–first at the Universidad de Chile in 1952 and later at the Universidad Católica Argentina in 1959. This growth accelerated from the 1990s onward. Despite this progress, most universities typically offer only one level of an academic musicology program–either a licentiate (at conservatories) or a master’s degree (at universities). In many cases, musicological studies are embedded within interdisciplinary programs rather than established as standalone departments. Full doctoral programs in musicology remain rare, available at only a handful of institutions, such as Argentina’s Universidad Católica and Mexico’s Universidad Nacional Autónoma and Universidad de Guanajuato.
Studying Indian classical music at Banaras Hindu University.
In India, university arts faculties with dedicated music departments provide opportunities to study both North (Hindustani) and South (Karnatak) Indian music. While theoretical, aesthetic, and academic perspectives complement practical training, they are seldom structured as standalone degree programs, despite India’s rich tradition of music and arts scholarship spanning over two millennia. One notable institution is Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, which established its musicology institute in 1966. This institute offers a doctoral program in musicology and has produced some of India’s most distinguished musicologists. Beyond universities, several other institutions contribute to music research, including the Sangeet Natak Akademi in New Delhi, founded in 1953, and the independent ITC Sangeet Research Academy in Kolkata. The Sangeet Natak Akademi plays a crucial role not only in promoting musical practice but also in documenting, studying, and funding research on Indian music.
The institutionalization of musicology in the Arab world, Turkey, and Iran remains relatively limited, with formal degree programs appearing only sporadically–primarily within Christian universities. One notable initiative is the Académie Arabe pour la Musique, founded in Amman in 1971 under the auspices of the Arab League. This institution organizes conferences, awards prizes, and actively promotes musical practice. Other music research institutes in the region tend to focus on national and regional musical traditions, serving primarily as centers for collection, documentation, and study.
This according to this month’s free article titled Musicology by Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann in MGG Online.
The image at the beginning of the piece is of students visiting the Gallery of Musical Instruments at Sangeet Natak Akademi in New Delhi, India.
The study of 18th century music pedagogy in the Neapolitan region of Italy has seen a significant surge in interest within musicological research in recent years. This research has explored sources related to the practice of partimento since the late 20th century, and over time, has expanded to include materials on counterpoint and solfeggio. Solfeggio evolved throughout the 20th century into an exercise focused almost exclusively on musical reading–first spoken, then sung. A landmark modern and systematic study of the instructional duo between the 16th and 17th centuries is Andrea Bornstein‘s comprehensive monograph, followed by Robert O. Gjerdingen‘s works. Gjerdingen identifies a compositional framework within 18th century exercises, which he refers to as “schemata” and finds within the partimenti. His research demonstrates that both partimento and solfeggio, centered on the close relationship between bass and melody, can be considered foundational exercises for musician training since the 18th century.
Subsequent studies by scholars such as Paolo Sullo explored the role of solfeggio within the composition schools of various Neapolitan masters, carefully reconstructing and analyzing the production context and repertoire spanning from the era of Leonardo Leo to that of Nicola Zingarelli. The work of Nicholas Baragwanath, particularly his influential monograph The solfeggio tradition (2020), has sparked a revival of interest in 18th century solfeggio, reaching an expanding audience of musicologists and musicians. Baragwanath’s study highlights the deep connection between solfeggio and the practice of solmization on the hexachord, a practice that, in Italy, persisted until the 19th century. He identifies the enduring presence of this practice as being largely due to the central role of the Catholic Church, which continued to base the teaching of musical rudiments on hexachordal plainchant and the associated solmization system.
Leonardo Leo
For Baragwanath, the gradual abandonment of hexachordal solmization in favor of the French method of reading real sounds–where each note corresponds to a single syllable–marks a key factor in the gradual decline of the Italian bel canto tradition. In this context, hexachordal solmization emerges not only as a performance technique, which Baragwanath carefully reconstructs and applies to 18th century solfeggi, but also as an interpretative lens through which to understand the solfeggi themselves.
This according to a new article on solfeggio by Paolo Sullo in DEUMM Online.
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