RILM Index to Scores and Collected Editions (RISE) is a comprehensive digital finding aid that helps users locate musical works published within collections, sets, and series. It indexes individual pieces found in complete editions of composers’ works, music anthologies, born‑digital editions, and scholarly collections. Each record provides detailed descriptions–performing forces and instrumentation, language, genre, score type, sources, and publication information. With more than 590,000 entries, RISE expands as new materials enter the market.
RISE–originally known as the Index to Printed Music–began in 1985 with an NEH grant secured by George R. Hill to create a finding aid for musical scores in scholarly editions. Over the years, it expanded into a comprehensive database, incorporating the full contents of Collected Editions, Historical Series & Sets & Monuments of Music: A Bibliography by Hill and Norris L. Stephens (1997), itself grounded in Anna H. Heyer’s Historical Sets, Collected Editions, and Monuments of Music (1957–1980). Further development continued under the James Adrian Music Company, founded by Hill in 2000. Hill oversaw the project’s growth until 2018, when RILM assumed ownership and editorial stewardship, ensuring the database’s continued expansion, accessibility, and long‑term sustainability.
Today, RISE includes digital editions as well as scores beyond the Western classical canon. It contains more than 10,000 records with direct links to open‑access editions, many of them born‑digital. Reflecting RILM’s global mission, RISE indexes publications from 58 countries and vocal music in over 100 languages. Beyond its core search functions, it offers multiple discovery tools: preferred title links gather all editions of a work, a full‑text limiter highlights records with open‑access editions, and instrumentation searching allows users to locate pieces written for a wide range of ensemble combinations. Links between related record types support seamless navigation from the most detailed information about individual works to broader data on entire series or collections.
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.
The instrumental ensemble of the Iraqi Maqam, al-chālghī, as depicted on a 2002 national stamp.
This post inaugurates a series that will feature annotated bibliographies on performing arts inscribed in UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. To promote open knowledge and preserve these traditions through scholarly writings, a monthly post will be curated for Bibliolore over the course of the year.
The Iraqi maqām (المقام العراقي) is the art music of Iraq, historically performed in the country’s urban centers, namely Baghdad, Kirkuk, and Mosul. For centuries, it has been transmitted orally from master musicians to apprentices. The core of the genre is a vocal performance in which a singer delivers classical or colloquial poetry, accompanied by a small ensemble known as the chālġī. This ensemble typically consists of the sanṭūr (a hammered dulcimer), the ǧūzaẗ (a spiked fiddle), and the ṭablaẗ (a goblet drum). In a masterful display of improvisation, the instrumentalists engage in call and response with the singer, supporting the embellished melodic mode and poetry. The canonical repertoire comprises approximately 54 modes, each with a distinct emotional and melodic character. It is said that mastering the entire system requires a lifetime of study, and today, only a few living masters have the entire repertoire memorized.
In 2008, UNESCO recognized the Iraqi maqām by inscribing it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. With documented history stretching back centuries to the Abbasid era in Baghdad, the genre stands today at a critical crossroads, challenged by shrinking performance spaces and a declining number of master practitioners. Despite this vulnerable status, musicians and scholars are actively engaged in preserving the Iraqi maqām’s legacy through dedicated research and documentation. Their writings aim to preserve the genre’s status in collective memory. A selection of key scholarly contributions to this effort is presented below.
al-Aʿẓamī, Ḥusayn Ismāʿīl. المقام العراقي بين طريقتين: دراسة موسيقية لفترة الصراع خلال القرن العشرين [The two styles of the Iraqi maqām in the 20th century: An analytical study] (Bayrūt: al-Mu’assasaẗ al-ʿArabiyyaẗ li-l-Dirāsāt wa-al-Našr, 2011). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2011-51858]
Presents a comparative analysis of the two main styles of the Iraqi maqām: the traditional performance style named after the reciter (qāri’) Rašīd al-Qundarchī (1886–1945), and the modernized style named after the reciter Muḥammad al-Qubbanchī (1904–89). Aesthetic principles and recitation style characterize each school. A comparison of various reciters’ styles highlighted these differences, and anecdotes about the reception and appreciation of the musical tradition by amateurs and the broader public attest to its popularity in the 20th century.
al-ʿĀmirī, Ṯāmir ʿAbd al-Ḥasan. محمد القبانجي: مطرب العراق الأول [Muḥammad al-Qubbanchī: Iraq’s master singer] (Baġdād: Dār al-Šu’ūn al-Ṯaqāfiiyyaẗ al-ʿĀmmaẗ Āfāq ʿArabiyyaẗ, 1987). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 1987-32379-32379]
The life of Iraqi maqām master singer Muḥammad al-Qubbanchī (1904–89) testifies to his immense contribution to the musical genre and to the country’s musical life in the 20th century. Analysis of key recordings illustrates his many innovations to the Iraqi maqām.
al-Bayātī, Muwaffaq. القطع والأصال في المقام العراقي: دراسة تحليلية [Melodic pieces and melodic connectors used in the Iraqi maqām: An analytical study] (Baġdād: Matbaʿat Bāsim, 2009). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2009-55313]
The performance of the Iraqi maqām relies on singers’ knowledge and mastery of classical and colloquial poetry, as well as the order of the melodies that constitute the repertoire. Modally, each Iraqi maqām is composed of a series of interconnected melodic pieces, known as quṭaʿ, and melodic connectors, known as awṣāl. Thirty-seven of these melodies are analyzed.
al-Ḥanafī, Ğalāl. المغنون البغداديون والمقام العراقي [Baghdadi singers and the Iraqi maqām] (Baġdād: Wizāraẗ al-Iršād al-ʿIrāqiyyaẗ, 1964). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 1964-10286]
The melodies of the Iraqi maqām permeate every aspect of life in Baghdad. Such melodies are regularly recited in the mawlid ceremonies (celebrations of the Prophet Muḥammad’s birthday), ḏikr circles (God’s remembrance), and tamǧīd (religious praise). They are also performed in secular cycles accompanied by the chālġī ensemble. Names and biographies of Iraqi maqām reciters and musicians are included.
Hassan, Scheherazade Qasim. “Le maqām irakien: Structures et réalisations” [The Iraqi maqām: Structures and realizations], L’improvisation dans les musiques de tradition orale, ed.by Bernard Lortat-Jacob. Ethnomusicologie (Paris: Société d’Études Linguistiques et Anthropologiques de France (SELAF); 1989) 143–149. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 1989-1012].
Analyses of the Iraqi maqām reveal a melodic conception unique to Iraqi vocal art music. A maqām is identified by fixed elements and the obligatory placement of certain parts within their respective time frames. Three musical elements, taḥrīr (vocal introduction), quṭaʿ (melodic pieces), and taslīm (final vocal cadence), are indispensable in establishing the identity of an individual maqām.
Hassan, Scheherazade Qasim. “A space of inclusiveness: The case of the art music of Iraq”, International journal of contemporary Iraqi studies 2:1 (2008) 115–128. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2008-53697].
The traditional art music of Iraq, the Iraqi maqām, which is part of other core Islamic maqām traditions, has historically been designed to fulfill two purposes: a supranational frame and a diversity of local content. Both of these underscore the idea of bringing together multi-ethnic and multi-social differences, articulating them on a common ground of musical content, social contexts, and performers. By bringing together the study of the social and the musical, the issue of Iraqi identity as expressed in this musical tradition is addressed. The Iraqi maqām is a strong cultural marker, as it represents the forms of relations between ethnic and social groups in the country. The interaction appears in sacred and religious ceremonies, secular meetings, and all social gatherings, as well as in transmitted moral and aesthetic values. (abstract by the author)
Hassan, Scheherazade Qasim. “Between formal structure and performance practice: On the Baghdadi secular cycles”, Theory and practice in the music of the Islamic world: Essays in honour of Owen Wright, ed.by Rachel A. Harris and Martin Stokes. SOAS musicology (Aldershot: Ashgate; 2017) 273–292. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2017-48378].
The comparative study of the suite forms of the Islamic Middle East reveals entanglements, connections, common features, and interactions that cut across borders. Those of present-day Iraq, and particularly the Iraqi maqām, deserve special attention, not only as the distant ancestors of those developed in the Baghdad caliphate, but also because they have taken shape in a border zone where the Arab, Persian, and Turkish musical worlds overlap. The ordering of maqām within the cycles—significantly different from the Turkish fasıl and the Arabic waṣlaẗ—constitutes a significant puzzle, even more so since later 20th-century performers started to assert their prerogative to pick and choose. Yet the underlying principle, one of singing improvised music, moving from mode to mode, and incorporating composed items along the way, has been remarkably resilient. (abstract by Martin Stokes)
al-Saʿdī, Ḥāmid. المقام وبحور الأنغام: دراسة تحليلية لغناء المقامات العراقية مع نصوصها الشعرية [The maqām and the oceans of melodies: An analytical study of the singing of the Iraqi maqām and its poetry] (Baġdād: author, 2006). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2006-55181]
The Iraqi maqām is the traditional genre performed in Iraq’s urban centers. An analysis of the structure, performance style, and poetic content of each individual maqām shows the melodic complexity and poetic richness of the musical genre. Anecdotes about master musicians and from the author’s life attest to the vibrant musical life of the Iraqi maqām in Baghdad in the 20th century.
Maqam ensemble at Alwiyah Club in Baghdad in 2010. Photo courtesy of the Iraqi maqam blog.
Simms, Rob. The repertoire of Iraqi maqam (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2004). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2004-4076]
The art music of Iraq, known as Iraqi maqām, features poetry in classical Arabic and in the vernacular Iraqi dialect, sung by a virtuoso soloist and accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. It is a remarkably cosmopolitan art, sharing many features with neighboring art music traditions, particularly with Iranian music. Its repertoire consists of orally transmitted, multi-sectioned compositions, performed with some flexibility regarding ornamentation, arrangement, and development. Focusing on the period between 1930 and 1980, this reference offers a comprehensive overview of the repertoire’s musical content through tables and musical transcriptions of scalar structures, melodies, and overall forms. Information from prominent Iraqi sources is consolidated, and a selection of recordings by master musicians, including Rašīd al-Qundarchī and Yūsuf ʿUmar, is presented. An introductory section provides a brief overview of pan-Middle Eastern modal theory along with an outline of the terminology, theory, and practices specific to the Iraqi maqām. The main section of the work is a catalog of 40 maqāms that constitute the central core of the contemporary repertoire.
al-Mašhadānī, ʿAbd Allāh Ibrāhīm. موسوعة المقام العراقي [The encyclopedia of the Iraqi maqām] (Baġdād: Matbaʿat Bāsim, 2009). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2012-52890]
Although the Iraqi maqām represents a continuation of performance traditions originating in Abbasid Baghdad, the 20th century was the period in which the genre evolved into the form recognized today. Traditional venues like cafés and domestic spaces gave way to new listening experiences facilitated by audio technology such as radio and commercial recordings. Simultaneously, new educational institutions, often supported by the government, began to formalize its instruction in the 1960s. Today, the standard Iraqi maqām repertoire comprises approximately 54 distinct pieces, each analyzed and categorized by its unique melodic and rhythmic structures.
The RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines (RAPMM) is a digital collection of independently published popular music magazines and fanzines, bringing together over 125 titles from multiple countries—including Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and spanning a variety of languages. Each issue is scanned in full to preserve the original content digitally, including interviews with both renowned and emerging artists, band profiles, album and live show reviews, histories of record labels, and extracted images such as advertisements, cartoons, drawings, and photographs.
The collection highlights a wide range of popular music genres, particularly the expansive world of punk and its many subgenres, alongside rock, indie, hip hop, and country, while documenting the intersections of musical movements with politics, society, culture, underground scenes, stylistic shifts, and feminism. Users should note that some content is explicit; this material remains unredacted to preserve historical accuracy, reflecting the social context, attitudes, and opinions of the time.
RAPMM offers robust tools for exploration, including an image viewer for page-flipping and zooming, a supplemental HTML view for plain-text reading and extracted images, issue-level navigation via a collapsible table of contents, a browseable publication timeline with cover images, featured content, and detailed publication metadata. Its powerful search functionality allows users to query individual issues, entire publications, or the full archive, facilitating in-depth research and discovery of historical trends in popular music.
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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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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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DEUMM Online is a digitally enhanced music encyclopedia published by RILM, building on Alberto Basso’s Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti from the 1980s and 1990s. Developed as a collaborative effort among Italian and international scholars, it aims to create an Italian-language knowledge base with a distinctly global perspective on music and its circulation worldwide.
Expanding and updating the original print edition, DEUMM Online adds approximately 150 new entries each year. These contributions emphasize areas previously marginalized or overlooked–such as pop, film, jazz, folk, world, and ancient music–alongside emerging concepts and theoretical approaches in music studies, including feminism, gender and race studies, sound studies, and postcolonial perspectives. All entries are authored and reviewed by subject specialists, ensuring the reliability and scholarly quality of the content. Under the leadership of general editors Daniela Castaldo and Antonio Baldassarre, an international network of experts continually revises existing entries and produces new ones, keeping the encyclopedia aligned with ongoing developments in both Italian and global music scholarship.
New articles in DEUMM Online are designed to be comprehensive, offering a complete overview of each topic. They are divided into titled sections that help users navigate complex subjects with significant historical, cultural, or social dimensions. Different sections may be authored by different specialists, ensuring that each aspect is treated by an expert in that area. The content is enhanced with multimedia elements and can be explored through multiple access points, including section titles, article types (including biographies, instruments, genres, and works), occupations and nationalities of the individuals discussed, and sortable timelines. Users can also arrange works and biographies either chronologically or alphabetically, allowing them to tailor how they view and study the material.
Although DEUMM Online is published in Italian, it remains a valuable resource for the international music research community, offering insights into both Italian and global musical traditions. Modern technologies now make it possible to translate Italian into other languages almost instantly, greatly enhancing its accessibility. This allows scholars and enthusiasts to engage more deeply with its content while navigating the complexities of today’s interconnected music landscape. As a result, DEUMM Online stands out for its dynamic and flexible nature, continually adapting to the evolving needs and expectations of its users.
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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.
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This post inaugurates “RILMiniscences,” a series in which long-time RILM staff members share their recollections. The first installment features retired RILM editor Jim Cowdery, who joined RILM in the summer of 1998 after earning his PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University in 1985. Before arriving at RILM, he held a succession of part-time college teaching positions. Hoping to move beyond academia, he realized that the skills he had developed while serving as editor of the journal Ethnomusicologymight prepare him for an editorial role elsewhere. When he spotted a New York times advertisement for an editor with an ethnomusicological background at RILM, he applied—and was hired, despite never having heard of the organization before.
That Fall, Cowdery became part of what RILM Executive Editor Zdravko Blazekovic called “the class of ‛98”, the only time that RILM had hired five editors simultaneously. According to Cowdery, “At first, we actually were trained all together as a class—Zdravko taught us how to navigate the computer database that had been designed for RILM, Carl Skoggard and André Balog taught title and abstract editing, and Risa Freeman and Andrea Saposnik taught indexing. At that time RILM was based in the Graybar Building, adjacent to Grand Central Terminal. There were more editors than computer stations, so several of us needed to stagger our hours and use whatever computer happened to be available when we arrived. Only one of these computers was connected to the Internet, and there was a sign-up schedule for any research that couldn’t be done through our in-house reference collection or via interlibrary loan. Google did not exist then, nor did Wikipedia.”
Jim Cowdery (second row, farthest right) with RILM colleagues in 2002.
Editors at the time worked with “batches”, RILM’s term for file folders containing paperwork for 100 records. These batches were stored in a multi-drawer filing cabinet, and editors checked them out and returned them by recording the date and their initials on a clipboard log. Inside each folder, documents were ordered by accession number rather than subject, so editors had to sift through multiple folders to find a reasonable number of records in their areas of expertise. Once an editor signed out a batch, they assumed responsibility for all 100 records it contained, no matter how far those records lay outside their academic comfort zone.
Cowdery recalls that, although his RILM colleagues were friendly and helpful, seeking their advice on unfamiliar topics was considered a last resort, as editors were expected to possess enough research expertise to edit and index any record on a music-related subject. He notes, “I will never forget that my first batch included a large collection of articles about the Trent Codex, thereby initiating me into the arcane world of RILM’s medieval manuscript indexing.”
During his tenure at RILM, Cowdery also published the first edition of How to write about music in 2005, a widely praised manual that tackles many of the specialized challenges faced by writers on music—challenges that general writing guides rarely address. The book brings an international perspective to issues often treated piecemeal and from an ethnocentric standpoint, including work titles, manuscript sources, transliteration, non-Western theoretical systems, opus and catalogue numbers, and pitch and chord names. A second edition followed in 2006, a third in 2023, and a fourth edition—no longer attributed to Cowdery—that substantially updates the work with new discussions of AI tools, digital content, and inclusive language related to culture, gender, and disabilities is slated for publication in 2026.
Cowdery looks back on his years at RILM with genuine affection, noting that, despite rumors of warring factions, tribunal-like meetings, and acrimonious departures, his own 25-year tenure “bore no trace of such feelings.” Instead, he cherishes “many fond memories of mutual respect among colleagues and lively exchanges on esoteric topics.”
**Special thanks to Jim Cowdery for coining the term “RILMiniscences”.
The library of the Institut du Monde Arabe (Arab World Institute) in Paris is home to an extensive collection of writings on music from the Arab world, a region stretching from the Atlas Mountains to the Indian Ocean. This series … Continue reading →
The Filipino ethnomusicologist and composer Jose Maceda created unique works that blended his fieldwork on Filipino and other music with his expertise in European avant-garde traditions. His compositions combined innovative techniques such as spatialization, a focus on timbre, and musique … Continue reading →
The Senegalese singer, songwriter, musician, and politician Youssou N’Dour was born just six months before Senegal achieved independence. His mother hailed from a long line of griots, or gawlo, who served as hereditary musicians and custodians of oral history in … Continue reading →
Ellis Marsalis first learned to play the clarinet and saxophone but the piano later became his main instrument. From 1951 to 1955, he completed a bachelor’s degree in music education at Dillard University in New Orleans while receiving informal jazz … Continue reading →
