Leseprobe_Festschrift Cohen

Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond
1982 International Musicological Society conference, a panel was convened
on French archives and archival sources for the music historian; this collection
of essays, compiled and introduced by Cohen, was published in 19th Century
Music. 8 Following his appointment to the faculty of the University of British
Columbia in Vancouver, he founded the Center for Nineteenth Century
Music Studies to facilitate research in this growing domain.
* * *
Cohen’s magnum opus is RIPM, Le Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale.
Established in 1980, RIPM’s genesis can be found in his experiences as
a graduate student. As a member of a generation of scholars who sought to reimagine
nineteenth-century musical studies through a richer, contextualized,
granular, and international perspective—contra that which was handed down
by the largely-German founding fathers of the discipline—a great amount
of foundational work was required: to develop bibliographies, establish basic
historical facts, gauge critical reception, record repertory, identify performers
and performances, locate biographical information … in short, to document
and understand the vast milieu of nineteenth-century musical life. For this,
the musical press was vital—where else could one so completely immerse oneself
in contemporary musical life, to view musical history through the eyes
of those who lived it? Yet, here he sat in the reading room of the Bibliothèque
National in Paris, taking a volume off the shelf, turning hundreds of pages,
making notes, and returning it back to the shelf for the next researcher to
come along, take the same volume off the shelf and turn the same hundreds of
pages. He has often remarked about the seeming absurdity of this: In an era
of networked computers and space travel, how could one still rely upon such
ancient and inefficient methods?
The foundation of RIPM came at a fortuitous time. A burgeoning scholarly
interest in the nineteenth-century press, demonstrated through such projects
as the Waterloo Directory of Victorian Periodicals, the Wellesley Index to Victorian
Periodicals, and the Bibliographie des revues et journaux littéraires des XIX e et XX e
siècles provided points-of-departure. At the same time, the value of computer
technology and its application in the humanities had been validated through
an increasing number of projects, most relatedly in Barry S. Brook’s Réper-
H. Robert Cohen, Dix livrets de mise en scène lyrique datant des créations parisiennes, 1824–1843 =
The Original Staging Manuals for Ten Parisian Operatic Premières, 1824–1843. La vie musicale en
France au XIXe siècle 6 (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1998).
8 19th-Century Music 7, no. 2 (1983).
15