Conference Agenda

Music scholarship and teaching increasingly engage diverse, global perspectives. Grove Music Online’s editors and authors participate actively in that process, and in this Roundtable session they will dialogue with audience members about how research is changing; future roles of large, curated reference works; and recent experiences of updating and building new content.

Grove Music Online has initiated several projects that give voice to different cultures around the globe and a more complex array of scholarly understandings of music within human experience and expression. Roundtable participants Kimberly A. Francis and Tes Slominski (Editors in Chief of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality project), Philip V. Bohlman (Board Member and co-Editor in Chief of the Grove Musics in Global Perspective project), Imani Mosley and Marcus Pyle (Area Editors for the Women, Gender, and Sexuality project), and Grove Editor in Chief Deane L. Root will discuss these initiatives; Acquisitions Editor Scott Gleason will moderate.

The communities of scholars, authors, and editors who contribute to and create Grove come from all corners of the world, and the roundtable discussion will broach how legacy structure and concepts such as national borders can be problematized and expanded; how gender can be represented more equitably; how we can balance such needs as updating canonical figures (evidenced by the most viewed and visited entries) while at the same time addressing music-makers in the Global South, from marginalized and minoritized gender and racial identities; and thus, what kinds of decentering must we bring to these projects. How can Grove and large databases generally respond to concerns regarding inclusivity, currency, usability, accessibility, and discoverability?

We will use Grove’s experience with its nine-thousand authors to ground what expands to be a scholarly discussion about music, publishing, and research. Together with the audience, we will ask: What can be the roles of such databases to serve the community and the discipline? How do students, scholars, and the public access information about music and its histories, and what opportunities does Grove provide? What kinds of musical, informational, and cultural exchange can Grove engage, and what kinds of globality and diversity can Grove contribute to?