All the Music Research on Earth

Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie and RILM

Its mission is to index and abstract of every scholarly piece of writing on music in the world," says Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie about RILM, the premier international database for music scholarship, which is housed at The Graduate Center. Mackenzie, a faculty member of the Ph.D. Program in Music and director of the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation, serves as editor-in-chief of RILM. "It's what I think about most of the time," she says.

RILM, which stand for Repertoire International de Litterature Musicale, was founded in 1966 by renowned musicologist and Graduate Center professor Barry S. Brook. For more than three decades, music scholars, students, librarians, performers, teachers, and music aficionados have relied on it as an indispensable research tool. An ongoing, continuously updated guide, RILM is published in hardcover, on CD-ROM, and online--where most researchers use it these days. It currently contains some 350,000 records of publications in over 140 languages.

"It could be larger than it is," says Mackenzie, admitting that finding all of the scholarly writings about music on the planet is not an easy task. But the ambition to be all-inclusive (or at least as much as humanly possible) is a hallmark of RILM, and a vision inherited from its founder, Barry Brook.

"He was a very well-known musicologist, and a person with many big ideas," says Mackenzie. "Some of his ideas were so big, that people thought, 'That's ridiculous. Sure, it sounds great, but how would you ever accomplish it?'" For instance, she says, how would you ever have a bibliography of writings about music from all over the world?

"It's very hard to find everything, and we don't claim to have fulfilled our mission; but we do claim to get ever closer to it," she says. "We gather our materials with the help of RILM committees in sixty countries around the world, and those committees are responsible for finding what should be in our bibliography, abstracting it, and sending it to us. Our job is to gather, edit, and publish all of this material."

Mackenzie oversees a staff of twenty-seven, including music doctoral students and full-time editors, who collate, edit, and translate the entries. RILM's committees--made up of musicologists and music librarians--are usually located at major universities or research centers in the given country: in France, it is at the Bibliotheque Nationale; in the UK, at the British Library. There is a committee for the U.S., located at Cornell, and one was recently organized to cover the entire continent of Africa.

"It functions somewhat like the UN," she says. In fact, the huge organizational structure is based on the UNESCO model. "It's a true international collaboration that's worked astonishingly well for decades," she says.

The result of this collaboration is a first-stop clearinghouse of information for the music researcher--impressive not only in its international scope, but in its variety of subject matter. Subject headings include ethnomusicology; popular music and jazz; music theory; performance practice and notation; sound sources (instruments, reprints of historical teaching methods, makers, technical drawings of historical instruments); and music as it relates to other disciplines, to name a few.

"If you were going to write a paper on a rap artist, or Mozart, or how music is taught in schools," says Mackenzie, "you would come to RILM first and do a search on that topic. You'd find out who's writing about it and what they're saying."

Typical entries give the title of the work in the original language, an English translation of the title, complete bibliographical data, and a content description of up to 200 words (also in English). Entries are heavily indexed according to topic, names, institutions, and key concepts. Browsing under "P" in the index, for example, one can find entries for articles on music related to philosophy, Peru, Jackson Pollack, and pedagogy.

Mackenzie became editor-in-chief of RILM in 1996. The story of her professional life, like the story of RILM itself, has much to do with Barry Brook. Mackenzie met Brook when she was in Italy doing research for her doctoral dissertation. She gave a paper on the composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736), one of Brook's interests. Brook liked her paper and invited her to a dinner for the Pergolesi Research Center. After receiving her Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Michigan (she also studied voice there, and is an active singer in New York City), she visited Brook to fill him in on her research. She happened to mention that her grants were running out, and that she was looking for a part-time job before finding an academic position.

"I started that day as a part-time editor at RILM," she says. "And by the time I got an offer for the 'real' job, I realized I didn't want to leave RILM. I've stayed here ever since."

Besides editing RILM and speaking about it at international conferences, she also serves as director of the Brook Center, which was founded in 1989 by Brook and renamed in his memory after his death in 1997. The center exists to promote and provide a setting for wide-ranging research and documentation activities in music and, besides RILM--its biggest constituent project--includes the Research Center for Music Iconography, the Foundation for Iberian Music, Music in Gotham: The New York Scene (1863-1875), the Center for the Study of Free-Reed Instruments, the Pergolesi Research Center, French Opera in the 17th and 18th Centuries, the and 18th-Century Symphony Archive.

To her knowledge, it is the only broad music research center of its kind, says Mackenzie. Other universities have research centers on a particular topic because of the interest of a particular faculty member. But, she says, "the Brook Center is a large umbrella that has seven different research projects, and potentially can have others. When projects are completed they can go, and others may come in."

Asked why such a center is located here at The Graduate Center, Mackenzie says: "It all has to do with Barry Brook himself....He had great charisma and a lot of contacts all over the world, so he could make these things happen. That's how the center was created, and probably why it's the only one of its kind."

Following Brook's legacy, Mackenzie continues to lead the center, and RILM, in ambitious directions. Just this year, RILM released a book, titled Speaking of Music: Music Conferences, 1835-1966, which abstracts all known papers on music given at scholarly conferences, beginning with the earliest, up through the year RILM was founded. The book serves as a historiography of music research in that period, showing how the field has changed and evolved--from the earliest conferences in France (sponsored by the Catholic Church) on the topic of Gregorian Chant, to an 1893 conference in Chicago on folklore, to a 1966 conference on "Stereophony and Music Reproduction." In connection with the book, RILM will hold a conference on music historiography at The Graduate Center in March. The conference has already accepted more than ninety papers from scholars around the world.

"The response to the conference has been greater than we anticipated, and consequently, the event has grown to include more papers and more days than originally planned," she says.

So it goes with RILM. From its beginning as one of Barry Brook's big ideas, to becoming the vast and widely-used online database of today, RILM keeps expanding beyond expectations in order to reach its goal of covering all the music research on Earth.