Musicology and Ethnomusicology Collections

The Ethnomusicology Archive holds the musicology division’s collection of world music recordings. The holdings amount to hundreds of hours of music collected from all over the world. These originate from the fieldwork of both faculty and graduate students but also include material from older archives, some dating to the late nineteenth century. This rich trove of musical material is primarily contained on magnetic tapes which are stored in specially designed cabinets. The collection has been fully cataloged and classified along with detailed research notes. Material is available to the faculty and, under special permission, to graduate students and individual researchers.

Established in 1966, this archive offers a collection of over 2,000 microfilms of music manuscripts from the period ca. 1400–1550 collected from archives, libraries, and churches all across Europe. In total, it is the largest and most comprehensive collection of Renaissance polyphonic music microfilms anywhere in the world. The archive holds microfilms of many of the items included in a complementary indexing project, the Census-Catalogue of Manuscript Sources of Polyphonic Music, 1400–1550, originally compiled by the University of Illinois Musicological Archives for Renaissance Manuscript Studies and published in five volumes between 1978 and 1988.

The Hymn Tune Index is a searchable, online, comprehensive census of English-language hymn tunes in printed sources from 1535 to 1820. This index enables users to identify an array of useful information related to hymn tunes, including a tune’s earliest publication, any texts used with a tune, names given to tunes, keys and voicings in which a tune was published, and a tune’s complete publication history up to 1820. The index also provides full bibliographic details for the various hymnals and other sources which make up the Hymn Tune Index.

The History of Ethnomusicology Bibliography Project is a sortable online bibliographic table of sources that discuss some aspect of the history of ethnomusicology. It was compiled by Jessica Hajek in her capacity as research assistant for a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship held in 2010 and 2011 by Professor Bruno Nettl. The bibliography is an excellent resource for scholars interested in the history of ethnomusicology.