Electronic Information and Applications in Musicology and Music Theory

IN THE FIELD OF MUSIC, the impact of electronic information goes beyond research on music and writings about music to the processes of creating, notating, printing, performing, and recording music. The overview of electronic publications and information resources selectively covers: (1)bibliographic citations of books, articles, scores, and sound recordings; (2) electronic network resources; (3)databases, some with music incipits or complete scores in image or sound or both; (4) music laboratory environments; and ( 5 ) commercial multimedia products. INTRODUCTION Both the scholarly study of already existing music and the creation and performance of new music are being transformed by the proliferation of electronic music information hardware and software. The nature of the music curriculum and the music library that supports that curriculum undergo continuing revision as the boundaries of both what is studied and how such study is accomplished are redefined. The latest manifestations of that revision are accompanied by electronic resources that suggest a fundamental reexamination of the relationship of the student, scholar, music department, and library. A diminished relative importance of local resources comes with easy, efficient, and inexpensive access to equally important outside resources. To the roles of librarians as collectors, catalogers, and servers of information comes a new role of provider Mary Kay Duggan, School of Information Studies, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 40, No. 4, Spring 1992, pp. 756-80 @ 1992 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois DUGGAN/MUSICOLOGY AND MUSIC THEORY 757 of hardware and software interfaces that link users to outside information and allow them to process it, and a new key role of educating users themselves to access invisible resources. The relationship of the library to what is outside of it-in laboratories of the music department; laboratories of other departments; centralized campus installations; or regional, state, national, and international networks-has begun to transform former concepts of what the library is for, what librarians do and what they should and can do (Dougherty & Hughes, 1990, pp. 10-18; Woodsworth, 1991). Scholars and students of music who have grown up with the computer go to the libraries and networks with great expectations of access to the world of scholarship and with the knowledge of the ability of that world to accommodate research results and pedagogical tools that use the full range of resources available. Fulfillment of such expectations has been the goal of music libraries in the past and this full utilization of resources in and outside the library will continue in the future. Today’s scholars in musicology and music theory require a variety of information formats. There are those who find materials for research on their own shelves and manage to exchange information orally with those in the world whose ideas are important to them. At the opposite end are those who find or create their research materials on the computer and constantly use electronic communication to seek those in the world who can stimulate their thinking. In between are the mass who wish to exploit all kinds of information-oral, printed, and digital. None is content with what is in the local library; scholars never have been. Electronic information processing promises to serve these users by abbreviating those years of productive life spent in the search for, and study of, music and writings about music. Even greater change is taking place as the computer affects the processes of creating, notating, printing, performing, and recording music. In a recent article on computers and music, David Crawford (1991) pointed out that the artistic, educational, and social issues surrounding computerized performance and composition are especially controversial, though they are nevertheless the issues which grip the campus, the training of children, and the music around us (p.35).As computer workstations acquire the capability of displaying notation, analyzing it, printing it, playing it, and interfacing with electronic musical instruments, they provide composers, performers, and researchers with an attractive and relatively inexpensive tool for such activities as composing and storing music. Educators use workstations to follow the individual performance of a room of electronic instrument novices; train students in melodic memory, pitch, and rhythm; teach paleography by inputting transcriptions, listening 758 LIBRARY TRENDWSPRING 1992 to the resulting polyphony, and printing in a variety of notations. Listening and composition laboratories become interactive multimedia experiences as scores and structure are displayed on the monitor, high quality speakers produce sound, and computer keyboards are used by students to control activities and learning levels. Instructors, students, departments, libraries, and campuses have purchased hardware and software individually or through committees. No matter where computers for music are located, careful decisions on operating platforms, software, and output to systems and printers will take into consideration issues of electronic music information that go beyond the local laboratory. It is likely that the hardware and software used for music research, teaching, composition, and performance is the same that will be needed in the future to serve electronic music information to users on networks and in libraries. The overview of electronic information and applications in music that follows surveys selected publications and information resources in several categories and summarizes major issues in providing that information. It begins with bibliographic citations of books, articles, scores, and sound recordings, an area of astounding growth in recent years that has transformed all levels of research from that of the beginning high school student to that of the most advanced researcher in need of up-to-date citations. Next, consideration is given to the resources of Bitnet and the Internet for professional communication via electronic mail, LISTSERVs, and networked databases. Even more selective is the introduction to music databases, some with text, some with incipits or complete music scores in digital searchable form or in images, some with sound incipits or complete works. A brief section reviews computer music laboratory environments and the variety of alternatives being utilized on campuses today. A final section looks at electronic multimedia commercial products, probable precursors of normal scholarly publications of the future. Major issues that arise in providing that information involve the role of the music and general libraries and librarians and their relationship to: (1) the computer laboratory and computer networks in providing music information; (2) accessibility;(3) the nature of service to electronic end-users; (4) the future of music printing and publishing; and (5)the position of music in relation to the developing importance of multimedia art forms and interdisciplinary research strategies, a position that already makes an isolated chapter on music an impossible challenge. BIBLIOGRAPHICITATIONS A pervasive and transformational electronic tool in music, as in other research areas, is the online library catalog of records in a standard MARC format, grown over the years to include large DUGGAN/MUSICOLOGY AND MUSIC THEORY 759 numbers of music scores and sound recordings deliverable to the personal workstation. It epitomizes the positive aspects of electronic information since i t is prepared by professionals in standard format, constantly updated, accessible in sophisticated interfaces for the novice, and provided through networks at no cost to users. A good online catalog provides access to high quality and detailed information through fields never searchable in drawers of cards (for example, by date or language) and allows Boolean combinations of fields that narrow results to a precise goal. Despite the amalgamation into centralized catalogs of music scores and sound recordings formerly housed in separate drawers in the music library, music materials can again be isolated by the use of appropriate command language (search by “form music scores” or “form sound recordings” as well as the newer electronic formats, “form databases” or “form CD-ROM”). By providing special search capabilities unique to music-key, music publisher, thematic catalog numbers such as Kochel numbers for Mozart, personal name for performers, corporate name for performing groups, highly refined subject access-online catalogs have become the best available bibliographies of many composers, performers, genres, and so on. For example, begun in 1977, MELVYL is the catalog of the books, periodicals, scores, sound recordings, and other materials of the nine University of California campuses plus periodical holdings at California State University, California State Library, Stanford, University of Southern California, The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, and the Center for Research Libraries (as of October 1990, 6 million book titles and 800,000 periodical titles). A sample search of music materials uses form commands to isolate the field and the special index of key (mk); others available include music publisher (mp) and thematic catalog number (thematic K. 318). With the assistance of federal funding, retrospective conversion of card catalogs has made it possible for some music collections to put their entire holdings into catalogs. Cables that network campus buildings allow individual users in offices or dormitories to have instant access to catalogs through their personal computer. Modem and a password provides access to general users; in addition, international access is provided free to the academic community through Internet. MELVYL was found to be the most used library catalog on Internet, a compliment to the designers of the friendly user interface. Several national projects have issued electronic music information on CD-ROM. For access to musical scores, the British Library published its printed music catalog up to 1980 in paper, but the supplement to 1990 has appeared on CD-ROM (CPM Plus, 760 LIBRARY TRENDS/SPRING 1992 Bowker/Saur, 1991) where i t can be searched by composer, title, keyword, publisher, place and date of publication, publisher or plate number, and series title. It can be updated by CPM Plus (see later discussion). Other CD-ROM products for coverage of British holdings include printed books in the British Library Catalogue of Printed Books to 1975, and BNB on CD-ROM (British National Bibliography from 1950 to present on two disks, over 1,200,000 records). A search of music truncated (“music#”) in the BNB on CD-ROM to October 1991 retrieved 10,163 titles. The British Library CD-ROM can be updated by online access by subscription to Blaise (a search of “1977-”, retrieves 22,000 records on “music”). The same software is used for the CD-ROM catalogs of the Bibliotheque Nationale of France and the Deutsche Bibliothek of Germany. The Music Catalogue of the Netherlands (MCN MUSICROM) contains cataloging for 200,000 printed scores in libraries of that country. f pa mozart and form music scores 3,537 f pa mozart and form sound recordings 2,430 and date current [current = the last three years] 149 and mk g 8 display 1-4 [The default display is a short entry; complete is available] 1. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756-1791. [Concertos, violin, orchestra, K. 216, G major.] Philips Classics, [1987]. SOUND RECORDING 2. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756-1791. [Quartets, strings, K. 387, G major.] Titanic, [1987]. SOUND RECORDING 3. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756-1791. [Quartets, strings, K. 387, G major.] Hyperion, p1987. SOUND RECORDING 4. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756-1791. [Symphonies, K. 318, G major.] Philips, p1989. SOUND RECORDING Figure 1. MELVYL (University of California Catalog) While i t may seem trivial to have begun an article on electronic information for music with online bibliographic catalogs, it is the genre which offers the most in the immediate future as the goals of international bibliographic coverage are realized. Though it is of ten easier for librarians to use the larger bibliographic utilities to which they, as professionals, have access as a privilege of their position, they can as well become skilled users of Internet resources in order to instruct users in resources that are free to workstation users, make current directories of the library catalogs available, and DUGGAN/MUSICOLOGY AND MUSIC THEORY 761 describe the relevance of holdings for music researchers. Over 250 library catalogs, including some forty academic and research library catalogs of the United Kingdom, available through a gateway to JANET (Joint Academic Network), the centrally funded academic network in the United Kingdom, are available to users of Internet (Farley, 1991). The MARC records of the catalog of the Library of Congress are now accessible to specified libraries in the United States. With initial funding in place for NREN (National Research and Education Network), a broadband national network that will allow rapid transmission of full text, image, and sound files, national network services promise to grow. Similar developments are taking place across the globe (Dierickx, 1990, pp. 97-103) that will affect access to electronic information in all categories. Very large files of music records are held by the bibliographic utilities OCLC and RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network). Developed as tools for catalogers, the databases are usually accessed by librarians at special workstations by contract with the utilities, although it is now possible for any user to acquire a password and, for a fee, search OCLC or RLIN through Internet (see Figure 2). OCLC 24 million records, 606,156 scores, 719,020 sound recordings (1992) EPIC, with public access interface; First Search CAT-CD450,entire database on CD-ROM (annual subscription), including two CDs of music scores and sound recordings (1,000,000 items) Music Library, CD-ROM (now published by Silver Platter, annual subscription) containing more than 408,000records for musical sound recordings RLIN 12,000,000 books, 1,200,000 serials, 430,000 scores, 200,000 sound recordings (1990) Figure 2. Databases available on OCLC and RLIN Both utilities have been the beneficiaries of large bodies of music records from retrospective conversion projects (jazz recordings, librettos, sheet music, etc.). Music was a participant in the development of the RLG (Research Libraries Group) conspectus to describe, through the LC classification system, the level of comprehensiveness at which an institution collects materials in a given subject area. The widespread application of the conspectus to record conversion within the research library community brought much music into RLIN and OCLC, though not always with the comprehensiveness intended (Hewitt & Shipman, 1987; Farrell & Reed-Scott, 1989). As regional and national databases and networks increase access to freely shared information resources, the role of the utilities as national suppliers of bibliographic information is undergoing revision. 762 LIBRARY TRENDSISPRING 1992 While indexes of periodical and newspaper articles have not traditionally formed a significant part of American library catalogs, online catalog vendors have begun to offer users integrated access to their own indexes (CARL [Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries]) or to other commercial databases (Current