Peter Slemon, Interim Director
Eigenmann Hall 701-6; IUB
(812) 855-6889
(812) 856-5024 FAX
Email center
The mission of the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature (CHMTL) is the development of scholarly resources pertaining to the history of music theory and music literature.
The CHMTL currently provides a home for four full-text databases:
1) The Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, a 5.1-million-word database of Latin music theory ranging from the third through the seventeenth centuries and three developing databases: saggi musicali italiani for Italian texts, Texts on Music in English from the Medieval and Early Modern Eras, and Traités français sur la musique for French
texts, developed at IU by a consortium of universities over the past 14 years;
2)
Musical Borrowing and Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology (DDM-Online), two bibliographic databases containing in excess of 13,000 records;
3) Greek and Latin Music Theory, a text- and-translation series (10 vols.) and Publications of the CHMTL (3 vols.);
4) Studies in the History of Music Theory and Literature (4 vols. to date); and similar types of projects, publications, and services to be developed.
In the past seven years, the collective databases have responded to more than 11 million searches. The full-text databases make it possible to locate and display almost instantaneously every occurrence of a particular term, a phrase or passage, or a group of terms in close proximity in hundreds of previously published editions and unpublished manuscript sources, thereby greatly facilitating the study of this body of literature. Likewise, the bibliographic databases enable users to find important scholarly literature in the field of music that has not been fully catalogued by any other existing source.
