Since November 2016, the groundbreaking music encyclopedia “Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart” has been available online, accessible for institutions and personal subscribers at www.mgg-online.com. The online edition, based on the second print edition of MGG with some 19,000 entries written and published by over 3500 authors between 1994 and 2008, includes
– over 18,000 biographical articles on composers, singers, instrumentalists, theorists, musicians, instrument makers, publishers, musicologists, writers, librettists, visual artists, and non-Western composers;
– more than 1300 articles on music aesthetics and theory, periods, genres, church music, popular music, instruments, manuscripts, cities, countries, institutions, and music in relation to history, art, literature, philosophy, law, and the natural sciences.
MGG Online is a continuously updated and growing database of revised and new articles. Since its launch in 2016, approximately 100 articles per year have been updated or replaced by new articles, and new entries have been added.
MGG Online’s scope is expanding with new entries in the following areas: contemporary composers, performers and musicians, popular music, jazz, gender research, new media.
Among the new entries are “Opernhaus”, “Konzertsaal-Konzerthaus”, “Youtube”, “Spotify”, “Madonna”, “Johnny Hallyday”, “Gianna Nannini”, “Teodor Currentzis”, “Kirill Petrenko”, “Ulf Schirmer”, and “Artemis-Quartett”. Existing entries that have been newly written include Philippe de Monte, Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, and Pierre Boulez as well as substantial parts of ”Deutschland¨, “Italien”, “Argentinien”, “Kolumbien”, and “Ägypten”. In addition, so-called minor revisions—i.e., smaller corrections such as death dates—are added continuously.
MGG Online’s editor-in-chief, Laurenz Lütteken (Zurich), and the editors work with an international advisory board of over 60 scholars and thousands of authors worldwide. This ensures MGG Online’s international breadth and compliance with the highest research standards.
MGG Online uses a powerful platform developed by RILM, which makes the content accessible through modern search and browse functionality. The detailed works lists can be sorted according to various criteria. Other features include easy toggling between article versions, customizable user accounts (where bookmarks and annotations can be created, stored, and shared), integrated translation from German into more than 100 languages, and links to the comprehensive RILM Abstracts of Music Literature for mutual subscribers. The platform is constantly being expanded with new functions and search options.
Subscription or free trial access available from the editorial director Ilka Sührig, suehrig@baerenreiter.com