Post by Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann

Making Musical Thought Accessible: Our Three-Volume Lexicon on Writings about Music How do you make centuries of musical thought accessible to students, researchers, and music lovers? We've been working on this challenge with our three-volume "Lexikon Schriften über Musik" (Lexicon of Writings on Music, published by Bärenreiter-Verlag and Metzler). A thought experiment: If you're interested in musical discourse, you probably know names like Johannes Tinctoris, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Peter Kivy, or Zofia Lissa. You might know that fascinating insights about music appear in literary works from Homer to Thomas Mann. But can you name a comparable author or text from ancient Egypt, Persia, the Arabic world, India, China, or other "non-Western" regions? This knowledge gap is exactly what we're addressing with our lexicon: Each entry provides expert introductions to individual works, explaining their content, context, and significance in accessible language. What we've accomplished so far: 📚 Volume 1 (2017): Music Theory from Antiquity to the Present - 260 entries on key theoretical texts from Pietro Aaron to Bernhard Ziehn and from ancient harmonics to contemporary analysis methods 📚 Volume 2 (2022): Music Aesthetics in Europe and North America - 435 entries exploring not only aesthetics monographs, but a large range of other text types: philosophical treatises, astronomical works, religious writings, legends, myths, poetry, novels, and journal articles 📚 Volume 3 (in progress): Music Aesthetics in Global Context - over 200 entries on works from Ancient, Persian-Arabic, Indian, (South-)East Asian, South-American, and African musical traditions The collaborative approach: Hundreds of international scholars contributed entries, each providing reliable guidance to complex historical sources. Volume 3 will finally offer a truly global perspective on musical aesthetics beyond the Western canon. I am grateful to my co-editors (Ulrich Scheideler, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, for vol. 1), the late Hartmut Grimm (Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin, for vol. 2 and the original idea), Carmel Raz (Cornell University, for vol. 3) and, most importantly, my wonderful colleague Felix Wörner (all vols.). Also, we couldn’t do this without our great editorial team at the Max-Planck-Institut für empirische Ästhetik and our fantastic lector Jutta Schmoll-Barthel at Bärenreiter. #MusicalThought #Aesthetics #Musicology #GlobalPerspective