MGG Online is a leading digital encyclopedia for music scholarship, widely used by researchers worldwide. The platform provides advanced search functionality and research tools while delivering newly authored and substantially revised content, supported by continuous updates, revisions, and additions. Its scope encompasses a broad range of topics across all areas of music, as well as related disciplines including literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Among its key features are a traceable browsing history that enables users to revisit previously consulted materials; sortable lists of works, bibliographies, discographies, and other reference data; and the ability to switch seamlessly between current and earlier versions of individual articles. MGG Online also offers a bilingual English/German interface, with integrated Google Translate enabling immediate translation from German into more than 100 languages. In addition, the platform supports individual user accounts that allow annotations to be created, saved, and shared, and it provides links to related resources, including RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and other scholarly databases.
Building on the second edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, a reference work that has supported music scholarship since 1949, MGG Online was developed by Bärenreiter and J.B. Metzler in partnership with RILM. Conceived in response to the conditions of the digital revolution and the emergence of a digital scholarly environment, MGG Online was envisioned as a new and revised edition of the second MGG. Unlike a traditional print edition produced at a single moment in time, the project has been developed incrementally, evolving continuously as new material is added and existing content is revised. As a digital lexicon, MGG Online constitutes a living scholarly resource that undergoes ongoing expansion, revision, and renewal.
The original encyclopedia sought to provide a synoptic presentation of knowledge that would, in turn, stimulate the generation of further knowledge. MGG Online remains committed to these principles, producing scholarship that adheres to the highest editorial standards and presents information in a transparent and accessible manner. In this respect, the project is best understood as a work in progress. RILM’s role in the partnership establishes a direct connection to rigorously structured research tools and bibliographic resources. Articles undergo review by multiple subject specialists and are subject to extensive editorial revision and repeated amendment, ensuring their scholarly reliability and quality.
In this context, MGG Online exists in a dynamic tension between continual modification and stable archival structures. Although the digital encyclopedia can respond quickly to developments in scholarship and the broader global cultural landscape, revisions are undertaken with careful deliberation rather than haste, thereby avoiding the ephemerality that characterized many early forms of Internet-based knowledge dissemination.
