Blog *8


My journey as musicologist through the Graduate Music Bibliography Course at Ithaca College.



Skills and resources discussed (and developed) over the past semester include, but are not limited to:

1) working across national/international resources (languages and cultures act and react differently to the challenges inherent in Information Retrieval services. These differences aren't to be taken for granted.

2) Learning about the search for and the finding of facsimiles and manuscripts is quite a game-changer - knowing that manuscripts exists (somewhere in the ether) doesn't mean that today one might have access to much more than different editions of specific musical piece, SOME of which MAY contain Urtext. One could joke that there are Ur-Urtexts, which are supremely helpful (with a trained eye, of course) to nuances that one might not every notice normally. This is indispensable when searching for a personal connection to / within the music. Learning about the differences between Swiss, German and American systems is uniquely helpful in discovering major plusses and minuses inherent in any system.

3) interlibrary loan - a truly amazing tool - with or without pandemic restrictions! This quite literally exponentializes the access and amount of material available. 

4) Critical thinking means not only playing a role in FINDING and or categorizing the information - one needs to evaluate whether the information gleaned can or should be trusted at all, and to what degree. The idea of peer-reviewed evaluations - and watching out for academic traps (pay-to-play) were unknown to me before this course.

5) one the biggest surprises was - as discussed in our little tête-å-tête - was that there are often in fact "back doors" to getting information, and that one couldn't simply rely on a Google search, or even a library search (cumulative) to find everything for which one searches.

6) We're coming up to Beethoven's birthday this week - our group did a group presentation on the Beethoven Haus (that was my idea), and I hadn't been aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the program in Bonn UNTIL our group was called to mobilize to explain this archive as a usable source.. Certain assets I had taken for granted. One needs to regularly attack a research question from different vantage points - for instance, that New York Historical papers (NY State) don't necessarily archive everything. You have a system with strengths and weaknesses - it would be wise to evaluate each system a priori, to avoid heartache. But that's not always possible. And sometimes there ARE discrepancies in a website between the different languages - even when the board of directors tell you there isn't. 😔 

7) learning about RILM and RISM was also a big help for me - although I'm not convinced I'll have a direct need for that, I believe that continuing to "kick the tires" in the coming semester - when I still have access, will allow me to examine sufficient amounts of "low-hanging fruit" to satisfy my appetite for source material - for the years to come.


Thank you! 😊 


Alex Jacobowitz

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