Review: RIdIM: Répertoire International d'Iconographie Musicale

Abstract

RIdIM: Repertoire International d'Iconographie Musicale . Antonio Baldassarre, President; Dorothea Baumann, Chair of the Database Working Group; Alan Green, Editorial Centre Project Director. URL: https://ridim.org and http://db.ridim.org The Repertoire International d'Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM) was founded in 1971 as a musicological network dedicated to researching and cataloging visual sources with musical subject matter. Incorporated as a not-for-profit association in 2011, RIdIM now formally identifies as “Association RIdIM.”1 The mission of Association RIdIM includes the management of a database of images accessible without subscription. In addition to the flagship RIdIM database of images, various RIdIM working groups around the world have databases of local image collections, including RIdIM Arbeitsstelle Deutschland in Germany and Iconografia of the Asociacion Espanola de Documentacion Musical (AEDOM) in Spain.2 Alongside a growing interest in the relationship between music and visual culture within both musicology and art history, RIdIM has recently expanded its mandate from music iconography to the area of music and visual culture more broadly, also including theater and dance.3 The content of the RIdIM database reflects this changing mission, including items relating to performance art and performing spaces, as well as video, painting, printmaking, ceramics, and sculpture. The various images in the database span the period from ancient Greece to the present day (the majority dating from between 1600 and 2000) and are drawn from collections worldwide. They depict composers, performers, patrons, instruments, and notation, and include biblical and mythological scenes, colonial encounters, urban streetscapes, and domestic interiors. Although a wide-ranging collection, the RIdIM database holds surprisingly few records—approximately 2,800 at a recent count with …