Friedrich Blume's monumental enterprise Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG), published by Bärenreiter between 1949 and 1986, was in many respects a landmark in the history of musicology. With Ludwig Finscher's second edition of 1994–2008, MGG affirmed the ongoing vitality and importance of the encyclopedic approach, complementing other lexicological ventures like the Riemann Musiklexikon or both editions of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. It was the latter that first offered an online version, and with the World Wide Web now overflowing with a multitude of tools for musicological inquiry, if of differing quality, MGG has now also entered the digital dimension. Developed by the publishing house Bärenreiter together with RILM, MGG Online was launched during the meeting of the American Musicological Society in Vancouver in November 2016. It features the second edition of MGG with regularly updated and newly written articles, and editor-in-chief Laurenz Lütteken (Universität Zürich) pointed out that it should be understood as a veritable ‘new and revised edition of the second MGG, not all at once, but bit by bit’, which will grow and change as knowledge progresses. An original and, in the long run, highly significant feature in this context is the retention of older versions of articles. While allowing us to document changes in knowledge, at the same time it combats the teleological perspective that, over time, certain encyclopedia articles can become ‘outdated’ and therefore useless and deletable at a certain point.
When Blume's MGG was launched, the leading role of German in musicological discourse was still undisputed, but four decades later the use of the German language had led to a quite reduced reception of MGG 2. It might have seemed logical that MGG Online would move towards a version in the lingua franca of our days, but this is not the case: German continues to be the main language, though the implementation of Google Translator allows articles to be converted into more than one hundred languages. It will of course be easy to find amusing or misleading translations here and there, but the comprehensibility of the core of the articles should be guaranteed, and we can rely on the potential of this technology to be developed further.
Needless to say, MGG Online offers many helpful tools like full-text search, browsing according to article titles, authors and musical occupations, and different sorting options in the bibliographies. In libraries that offer access to RILM Abstracts on EBSCOhost, direct links are given to search this database. Many users will also appreciate the option to select, copy and paste full citations of articles.
Naturally, MGG Online will interest not just readers of Eighteenth-Century Music, but also those of say Early Music History or Popular Music, yet it was Ellen T. Harris, then-current president of the American Musicological Society, who in her introduction to the launch in Vancouver chose Handel as an example to underline the importance of the coexistence of MGG and New Grove:
That the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is available on a digital platform has been wonderful, but that fact does not in any way diminish, but rather enhances, the importance of the MGG launch tonight. Perhaps I understand this in a more visceral sense than most as a Handel scholar. What Paul Henry Lang once referred to as the battle of the umlaut is now inscribed in our two great music encyclopedias, with MGG identifying Händel as ‘Komponist und Organist’ and Grove identifying Handel, famously, as ‘English composer of German birth’. I entered graduate school in 1967 and grew up with MGG, fighting not only with the German before I gained reading fluency, but straining my eyes over the multiple and minuscule fonts and reading the run-on bibliographies with an index card to keep my place. And, although I cannot attribute this to MGG, it is the case that I have always argued that Handel, despite very strong Italian and English influences on his music, was and remained a German composer.
With MGG Online a decisive step has been taken to guarantee this fruitful coexistence for future generations of musicological research.
