Speaking of Music: Music Conferences, 1835-1966 (review)

Articles published in congress reports form an important set of sources for music scholarship. For writings presented since 1967 researchers can routinely refer to RILM Abstracts of Music Literature to find relevant items, but for papers on music from conferences before 1967 the process is not so straightforward, as several different tools are currently available for consultation. The result of a project nurtured by successive RILM editors-in-chief starting with Barry S. Brook, with contents amassed by 125 contributing abstractors working over a period of three decades, Speaking of Music now emerges as the dominant voice in retrospective indexing of congress reports and papers on musical topics. It may not be the final word on the subject, but due particularly to its expanded scope of coverage and classified arrangement it does effectively quiet the voices of its predecessors.

The reference volume consists of a chronological presentation of conference publications and their relevant papers on music (108 pages, comprising approximately 450 conferences, as well as notices and reviews of conferences, for a total of 511 entries), followed by a much larger grouping of the individual papers and abstracts of musical studies from these conferences sorted by subject matter, the annotated bibliography being arranged according to the RILM classification scheme (475 pages, comprising 5,948 citations and summaries), and finally indexes (156 pages) of conference locations, sponsoring organizations, authors, and subjects. Several noteworthy published sources helped form the starting point and basis of the RILM bibliography. The first was assembled by Marie Briquet, La musique dans les congrès internationaux, 1835–1939, [Paris: Société française de musicologie, 1961], as a classified list of 164 congress reports itemizing papers on music. According to the preface in Speaking of Music (p. xiv), RILM intends to enrich, add lists and abstracts, and extend Briquet chronologically, though another source appeared first. John Tyrell and Rosemary Wise, A Guide to International Congress Reports in Musicology, 1900–1975, [New York: Garland, 1979], extended coverage forward in time, but its listing of approximately 450 post-1900 conferences and their papers essentially complemented Briquet, since the book was organized chronologically rather than by subject classification. Moreover, a comparison of the years in which coverage in Briquet and Tyrell/Wise overlap (1900– 1939) revealed a number of congress reports not shared, some found only in Briquet and others only in Tyrell/Wise. For example, for the year 1939 Briquet listed three conferences, one not found later in Tyrell/Wise, which does however list five conferences.

Speaking of Music embraces the years addressed in both Briquet and Tyrell/Wise respectively. Coverage is thus comprehensive, though it may not always be complete, as the editors gracefully acknowledge in the preface (p. xiv). For the year 1939, for example, all three sources found in Briquet are also listed by RILM, which includes five congresses, though two are different from the five in Tyrell/Wise. Indeed, even in the small group of conferences before 1900—the date of the first conferences devoted to discussion of diverse studies in musicology —a number of publications appear unique to either Briquet or RILM, the only two major sources covering this period. For example, there are two conferences with papers on music listed for the year 1892 in each source, but there are four different conferences being referred to. Similarly, Briquet does not list conferences for the years 1895–1896 while RILM has three conferences (with at least 20 papers on music) during that period; on the other hand, RILM lists nothing for the years 1886–1888, while Briquet has three conferences with reports on music. As a whole, the years before 1900 do not involve a significant number of papers on music, but the discrepancy of conference coverage between RILM and its predecessor Briquet, in these selected periods and perhaps in other...