Celebrated Music Encyclopedia Now Online
~ MGG Online. Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart is now available as an online database ~
New York. — November 1, 2016 — The comprehensive and authoritative German-language music encyclopedia, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG), is now available as a dynamic online database under the title MGG Online. Its Editor-in-Chief, the renowned musicologist Laurenz Lütteken (Zurich), is collaborating with an editorial board of internationally respected musicologists, the MGG editorial department, and authors around the world to update and add new content on a continual basis. MGG Online has been created, financed, and implemented by the publishers Bärenreiter (Kassel), J.B. Metzler (Stuttgart), and Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM, New York).
MGG Online contains the complete content of the second edition of MGG, published in 29 printed volumes between 1994 and 2008 under Editor-in-Chief Ludwig Finscher. It consists of more than 16,000 articles written by 3500 authors from 55 countries. Biographical articles cover some 9000 composers, singers and instrumentalists, and theorists. Many articles are about non-Western composers, performers, and writers, figures from jazz and popular music, philosophers and literary figures, as well as instrument makers, publishers, musicologists, writers, librettists, and visual artists. About 7000 subject articles cover music aesthetics and theory, epochs and genres, church music and pop music, instruments and manuscripts as well as cities and countries. Comprehensive articles on institutions (including music libraries), music iconographical subjects, and music as it relates to history, art, literature, philosophy, law, the natural sciences, and more are included.
MGG Online contains all of this content in a continuously updated and expanding database in which the data is revised, new information is added, and articles are rewritten. Beginning in 2017, new entries will be added regularly. All article versions remain permanently accessible and clearly labeled. Upon launch, users will find some 200 articles already updated or rewritten.
"The authoritative standards of scholarship and editorial practice for which the print edition was renowned remain hallmarks of the new online version," writes Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Laurenz Lütteken.
MGG Online resides on a powerful new platform developed by RILM, further enhancing the content through cutting-edge search and browse functions. MGG’s widely reputed and comprehensive work lists, for example, can now be sorted by the user according to several criteria. Other features include easy toggling between article versions; individual user accounts in which bookmarks and annotations can be created, saved, and shared; integrated translation from German to more than 100 languages; and links to the comprehensive RILM Abstracts of Music Literature. The platform will be continually enhanced with new features and search possibilities.
"The platform of MGG Online aims to realize the potential of what a 21st-century music encyclopedia can be," writes RILM President Dr. Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie.
MGG Online is available to subscribers from 1 November 2016, at mgg-online.com.
Tina Frühauf
Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
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