The Index to Printed Music (IPM)
Introduction
During the 19th and 20th centuries, music was published in score notation by musicological scholars. These editions provide the main source material of the western classical repertory for scholars, researchers, performers, educators, and music lovers. The typical format of these publications has been in sets or series of collected works, and in many cases, they contain the only available print version of a musical piece.
Some of the categories of publications include: composer-based titles, e.g., the Complete works of Beethoven; works of national or geographic origins, e.g., the Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich; anthologies of music on topical subjects, e.g., The Anthologies of Black-note Madrigals; pedagogical anthologies, e.g., the Anthology for Musical Analysis; and anthologies with a chronological organization, e.g, Scores: An Anthology of New Music. Not limited to publications devoted exclusively to scores, IPM includes musical works found within dissertations, monographs, articles, or other types of published research.
IPM Project
Bibliographical access to the contents of these works is severely limited. Library cataloging generally describes such works at the series title level, or at best, at the monographic-title level. Individual pieces within each volume are not included.
To address this access challenge, in 1982 a group of scholars led by Dr. George R. Hill designed a project to index these individual pieces of music. Funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the bibliographic titles to be indexed were identified, and indexing was completed for half of them. The bibliography of titles was published in 1997 (Collected Editions, Historical Series & Sets & Monuments of Music: A Bibliography, by George R. Hill and Norris L. Stephens (Berkeley: Fallen Leaf Press, 1997).
In 2004, under thesponsorship of
the Music Library Association, the project received a grant from the Mellon
Foundation to finish the indexing of the original titles and to index
subsequently-published titles. Now in its third year, the project databases
number over 240,000 index records, over 10,000 bibliography records, and over
15,000 authority records.
IPM is available electronically by subscription through NISC, Inc
