Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM)

Each week RILM features one reference work contained in RILM Music Encyclopedias. The encyclopedia of this week honors #BlackHistoryMonth: the Encyclopedia of the blues (New York: Routledge, 2006). For this two-volume blues encyclopedia Edward M. Komara, the Crane Librarian at SUNY at Potsdam, assembled more than 2,000 articles. The exhaustive catalogue of biographical entries features blues artists, historians, songwriters, and label owners from all time periods and includes... items that might seem obscure (e.g., the Chicago-based R&B band Big Twist and the Mellow Fellows). The encyclopedia also provides entries for important record labels, instruments, musical styles, individual songs, geographic regions, historiography, aspects of the business, and additional topics that have been lacking in other encyclopedic efforts: entries such as Blues Folklore and Juke Joints. The blues often gets lumped together with jazz, folk, or gospel; it is rare to see it stand on its own as an encyclopedic subject. This title clearly fills a gap by offering multifaceted coverage in one place. To learn more about the richness and diversity of RILM Music Encyclopedias and its encyclopedias devoted to various types of music and subjects, visit rme.rilm.org. See more

Each month #MGGOnline features on its homepage two articles selected by editor-in-chief Laurenz Lütteken and editorial director Ilka Sührig. These are snapshots of MGG Online’s broad and expanding content. RILM puts the spotlight on the article on Oceania, jointly written by an international team of musicologists: Artur Simon, Barbara B. Smith, Brian Diettrich, Barbara Matthes, and Richard M. Moyle. It received a major overhaul in November 2017. The structure of the article f...ollows the subregional division of Oceania, focusing on Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia respectively. Within these section, structures differ, as each of the regions represents different issues for the transmission of knowledge, The rich spectrum of diverse musical instruments, especially in Melanesia, belongs to a large extent to the music-historical past, which can be visited almost only in museums; while Micronesia sees living practices. Note also the images included in the article, which illustrate the musical practices. To learn more about the content of MGG Online, visit mgg-online.com. See more

This Thursday, 11am EST. Back by popular demand! The RILM office hour. Join, learn, and enjoy yourself with our bibliography buffs!

Each month RILM features one journal contained in the full-text enhancement of the seminal RILM Abstracts of Music Literature. Honoring #BlackHistoryMonth, the journal of the month of February is African music: Journal of the African Music Society/Journal de la Société de Musique Africaine. Founded in 1954 by Hugh Tracey, the International Library of African Music (ILAM), now located at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, is the largest repository of African musi...c in the world. It preserves thousands of historical recordings, going back to 1929, as well as documents, films, and musical instruments, and supports field research and outreach and education projects. It is currently digitizing its collections and making them accessible globally via its ILAM Sound and Photo Archive Online. Its journal, African music, now in its sixth decade, is one of the few academic journals in the world devoted to research on African music. With this journal, ILAM aims to promote knowledge of music making in Africa that takes into account theory of African music and the social, cultural, and artistic values of African music. The journal is completely indexed in RILM Abstracts and all issues, from 1954 through 2019 come with a full-text PDF. The 2019 issue, soon to be live on EBSCOhost, is worth a browse. A large chunk of it is devoted to contemporary issues, such as Titus Olusegun’s article Ecomusicology, indigenous knowledge and environmental degradation in Obadan, Nigeria *2019-23042), an ethnographic investigation of the place of music in the flood disasters of Ibadan as addressed in the songs of Yoruba musicians Kollinton Ayinla, Foyeke Ajangila, Ebenezer Obey, and Agbada Owo. The article describes the connections between the cultural past, when indigenous knowledge was respected and flooding was avoided, and the present, when it was forgotten, and flooding became a constant. Based on the very specific, local context of Ibadan. Or note Manolete Mora’s contribution ‘This country of China is tough’: Nigerian immigrant music making in Guangzhou, China (RILM Abstracts 2019-23040), which concerns Nigerian music making in one of China’s leading manufacturing and trading centers, and where the largest groups of Africans in China, more generally, are concentrated. This article describes how their experiences unfold in specific songs composed by two Igbo Nigerian immigrants whose aspirations and efforts to live and work in the city resulted in different outcomes. To learn more about the richness and diversity of the full-text enhancement of RILM Abstracts, visit rilm.org/fulltext. See more

The newest addition to the "RILM Resources" YouTube Channel: A tutorial of RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text. Watch, learn, and for a personalized tutorial, send an email to [email protected]. https://youtu.be/t9DGSWUpevw