Bibliography

Terms of reference

The Bibliography Section is concerned with the description and interpretation of musical sources of all periods, including printed music, music manuscripts and performance ephemera. Its main purpose is to promote the dissemination of bibliographical research in music and to debate methodological issues relating to the description of musical sources. It also provides a forum in which scholars and librarians can formulate proposals for bibliographical projects and initiatives both within IAML and more widely. Bibliographical research in music helps to support the work of libraries in cataloguing and documenting their holdings, but it is also a much broader field of enquiry that ranges beyond the organisation of data into the realms of social, economic, and political histories. The Bibliography Section is therefore concerned with analytical bibliography in its widest sense – encompassing descriptive, textual, and historical bibliography – in which the study of musical sources may be regarded as a distinctive subset.

Among other activities, the Section oversees the following study group:

• Study Group on Access to Performance Ephemera (formerly Indexing of Music Performances)

Papers given under the auspices of the Bibliography Section can be found here:

• Papers of the Bibliography Section 2018-2019

Former activities include:

• Project Group on Hofmeister (formerly Hofmeister XIX)