LesMu - Lessico della letteratura musicale italiana 1490-1950 (review)

Abstract

LesMu - Lessico della letteratura musicale italiana 1490-1950. Edited by Fiamma Nicolodi and Paolo Trovato. Information retrieval programme DBT (Textual Database) produced by Eugenio Picchi. User Manual and Bibliography (English translation by Aloma Bardi and Carolyn Demcy), pp. 167 + CD-ROM. Firenze: Franco Cesati Editore, 2007. [Requires Windows 98, ME Millennium Edition, XP (Home Edition and Professional), 500 MB hard disk free space minimum, 128 MB RAM. ISBN 978-88-7667-342-9. Pricing: euro900.00.] If we allow musicology any axiom, it would be that it is a metalanguage, as it uses verbal language to investigate and illustrate a nonverbal language. How has the discipline been conceptualized over time? The Italian linguist Fabio Rossi demonstrated in his article Tra musica e nonmusica: le metafore nel lessico musicale italiano (Between music and non-music: metaphors in the Italian vocabulary) (Musica e storia 10, no. 1 [2002]) that most of the essential vocabulary of musicology and music criticism has metaphorical origins. Metaphors loquaciously blossom in the attempt to describe without words the techniques and effects of a completely different system of signs-that of notes, tones, and tempos. How did this language become specialized? The answer involves centuries and many words, or musical talks. In his article, Rossi made extensive use of working material from the electronic music lexicon Lessico della Letteratura Musicale Italiana 1490-1950 (The Lexicon of Italian Musical Literature, 1490-1950), henceforth referred to as LesMu, for which the linguist Rossi acted as an editorial assistant. LesMu represents a remarkable corpus of sources in literature, stretching from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, from the invention of printing to the development of electronic music, before the mass spread of popular music, and before the enormous proliferation of musicological publications (User Manual, p. 69). LesMu's title is due in large part to the fact that beginning in the sixteenth century, Italian-in addition to its text having been frequently set to music-was a leading language of western art music. This does not mean, however, that LesMu is a resource solely intended for lexicographers, linguists, or musicologists engaged in Italian studies. Content LesMu is comprised of the lexicon on CD-ROM and a bilingual, printed user guide in Italian and English; the latter contains a lengthy bibliography which is also available in electronic format on the CDROM. Published in 2008, LesMu is the final outcome of a synergy of multiple disciplines. Over sixty accredited musicologists, philologists, linguists, computer scientists, and typists have worked on this project since 1989. The database contains approximately 22,500 lexicographical records, a total of over 8,000 entries (mostly locutions), 3,600,000 words, and 2,000 illustrations. The bibliography-which consists of 800 works chosen with knowledge and sensibility-includes treatises, periodicals, librettos, reviews by notable Italian authors such as Bruno Barilli, Fedele D'Amico, the Nobel author Eugenio Montale, and Alberto Savinio, correspondence, memoirs, and narrative (even novels by Carlo Collodi, author of Pinocchio). Entries are not exclusively about music but all are of some interest from a lexical point of view. LesMu was made possible by funds from the Italian Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Universita e della Ricerca (Ministry of Education, University and Research), and the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council), the largest public research institute in Italy. Compared to updatable and augmentable online encyclopedias with cheap subscription costs, or compared to Google books or digital libraries that offer free access to some of the sources referenced in LesMu, the price of this CD-ROM is unreasonably high. I would also like to mention another resource, Saggi Musicali Italiani (SMI ), which shares the same field of interest with LesMu. …