CHMTL has maintained a home on the web for several digital projects offering access to digitized editions of texts on music theory and aesthetics, and to bibliographic databases. CHMTL also created, and until recently hosted, the online version of the American Musicological Society’s database of Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology.
Our current resources include the following:
Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML), our oldest resource, is an evolving full-text searchable database of Latin music theory from the late Antiquity to the Renaissance. TML presently gives access to more than 900 texts both from print editions and manuscript sources. TML is currently under redevelopment; a new site and enhanced resource are planned for publication in 2014.
Saggi musicali italiani (SMI), initiated and directed by Andreas Giger (Louisiana State University), focuses on major treatises written in Italian, with the goal of eventually comprising all printed material on music theory and aesthetics from the Renaissance to the present.
Texts on Music in English (TME), initiated and directed by Peter M. Lefferts (University of Nebraska at Lincoln), focuses on major treatises written in English. TME’s goal is to eventually comprise all relevant manuscript and printed materials from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century.
Traités français sur la musique (TFM), initiated and directed by Peter Slemon (recently retired from the Jacobs School of Music), focuses on major treatises written in French from the Middle Age through the nineteenth century. Like its sister projects, TFM aims to make available both print and manuscript sources in searchable electronic form.
Musical Borrowing: an Annotated Bibliography, initiated and directed by J. Peter Burkholder, is an ongoing project whose ultimate aim is to create a comprehensive, indexed, and annotated bibliography of material relating to the compositional use of existing music within the tradition of Western music. This is a wide field, embracing borrowing, transcription, variations, quotation, cantus firmus technique, paraphrase, imitation/parody, modeling, allusion, and other ways to rework existing music, from troping and organum to collage and electronic manipulation. The bibliography includes detailed studies of borrowing in individual works, items that consider some aspect of borrowing as a whole, that refute claims of borrowing, or that assemble lists of borrowings.
Illustration: close-up of Crespi's Due sportelli di libreria (by courtesy of the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica, Bologna)