So, what is “music bibliography”?
“A bibliography can be regarded as the relatively inert by-product of scholarly activity, or it can be treated as an active ingredient in the learning process. The latter perspective has been adopted in this guide to Music Reference and Research Materials. While no one but a professional bibliographer may be expected to come for his leisure reading to a list of books, most of us can respond with interest to an organized survey of the literature of a particular field. A bibliography, in fact, offers one of the best means of gaining an over-all impression of a subject area. It throws the essential patterns of a discipline into relief, casting light on what has been accomplished and drawing attention to the shadows where work still needs to be done. This guide has been designed to illuminate the bibliographical resources for musical scholarship. It is, above all, intended to serve a teaching purpose. Implicit in its organization is the concept that bibliography is an approach to knowledge, a way in which the student can progress toward mastery in his chosen field of specialization within the larger dimensions of the field of music.”
—Vincent Duckles, Introduction to the first edition of Music Reference and Research Materials (1964)“The Music Division of the Library of Congress has developed an extensive card index of the international periodical literature of music published since 1902. It is sincerely to be hoped that some means be found of printing this index of at least 40,000 entires. . . . Such an index should include all articles on music appearing in the periodical publications issued here and abroad, and it ought to list all currently published books on music and the publications of all musical organizations. The publication of such an index would do more to advance the scientific study and appreciation of music, than any other existing literary agency. It would be a shining beacon in the tanglewood of musical research and would provide a source of work of the utmost value to the music bibliography of the future.”
—Ernst C. Krohn, “The Bibliography of Music,” The Musical Quarterly 5, no. 2 (April 1919): 253–254 (emphasis added)“Music bibliography [requires] . . . an appreciation of the necessary inter-relationships between its major components. A healthy state of scholarship cannot result . . . only from the practice of citing musical objects [reference bibliography]; nor exclusively from the examination of the physical objects [physical bibliography]; . . . nor solely from the construction of exciting questions or hypotheses. . . . [In other words] bibliographers, whatever their goals, deal with citations, physical objects, and ideas, and . . . ignoring one of these necessarily works to the detriment of the others. [One must balance use of computers, respect reference lists and indexes, and pay attention to significant ideas.] . . . Music bibliography becomes intellectually respectable only when citations, copies, and questions are in some kind of ecological balance. . . . This balance is also ultimately what provides bibliographers with the satisfaction of being intellectually honest as they provide both the tools and objects for the worlds of scholarship, libraries, and music.”
—Donald W. Krummel, “The Varieties and Uses of Music Bibliography,” in Foundations in Music Bibliography, ed. Richard Greene (Haworth, 1993), 21.