Review: Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML)

Abstract

Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML) . Giuliano Di Bacco, Project Director; The Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. URL: http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/ The Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML), subtitled an “Online Archive of Music Theory in Latin,” is among the handful of online resources that early music scholars consult with frequency—the other two being the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM, an image archive and catalog of manuscripts transmitting medieval polyphony) and the Cantus database (a searchable catalog of plainchant).1 All three were first developed in the earliest days of web-based scholarly resources, and all three have shed their HTML 2.0 look-and-feel courtesy of recent updates to their interface design. This review considers the newest version of the TML, released in 2017, focusing both on the improvements in usability and functionality of the 2017 version, and on the aims and scope of the TML project in general. The TML's purpose, as stated on its home page, is “to give free access to and make searchable every known Latin text on music from the late antiquity to the seventeenth century, in multiple editions and in transcriptions from original sources” (my emphasis). While the TML's primary audience is identified as musicologists, the home page indicates that the resource will be of use to anyone “interested in documenting the broader intersections of music with the humanities and the sciences within the Western tradition.” The TML corpus comprises writings on music in Latin from the late Greco-Roman through the early modern periods, traversing the philosophical, the speculative, and …