Writings on contemporary music notation: An annotated bibliography by Gerald WarfieldMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I know that in-print bibliographies seem dated, and they are, but there's a certain pleasure in combing through them that just isn't equalled by using a contemporary database. Thanks to the Internet Archive, I was able to review Warfield's annotated bibliography which, at the very least, provides a fairly accurate snapshot of the state of research on notation in the 1970s. This was a heady time, with Kurt Stone and others initiating the Index of New Musical Notation project in 1971, and a significant conference on notation in Ghent in 1974. The typescript is frustrating in all the expected ways--the occasional typo, the taxing-to-read font, etc, but it is a valiant effort to at least include some European sources on notation (in French, German, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, Belgian) with annotations that were rather helpful in paring down what might be useful for my own research. Frustrating of course, were the items that were unavailable to Warfield (and his team) for review--some of which remain elusive (if not obsolete) today. The "mimeograph" items aren't connected to archives, so the bibliography is NOT helpful in terms of hunting down these things (often conference proceedings).
I was trained by an "old-school" (ethno)musicologist to value bibliographies. In grad school we spent HOURS looking at über-bibliographies and hunting down sources in the library, making notecards for each source (this was before Zotero was a thing, but you might be surprised to know the Internet was well into use by this time, haha). But there's something valuable about this enterprise, and combing through Warfield's bibliography reminded me of it. There's a human-to-human transfer that says "this is important" or "this might be of interest." There's a different impetus to sit and read through a bibliography that to type in a series of different search strings in hopes that you find what you are looking for. When you read this type of bibliography, you find things you didn't know you were looking for. And that, as far as I'm concerned, is the joy of research for research's sake.
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