Musicological Gender Research
MUGI platform with encyclopaedia and multimedia celebrates 20th anniversary
The freely accessible research and publication platform ‘Music and Gender on the Internet’ (MUGI) is celebrating its 20th anniversary. The website is managed and maintained by the University of Music and Theatre Hamburg in cooperation with the University of Music FRANZ LISZT Weimar (since 2022) under the direction of Beatrix Borchard, Nina Noeske and Silke Wenzel.
The website can be found here: https://mugi.hfmt-hamburg.de
To mark the 20th anniversary of MUGI, a ceremony will be held at the HfMT Hamburg on Saturday, 8 June, with lectures, music and a roundtable discussion. The motto is: ‘MUGI turns 20 – 600 lexical articles / 150 authors / 23 multimedia pages / 14 editors / 3 publishers / 1 birthday girl’. In addition to the editorial and editorial teams from Hamburg and Weimar, guests from Austria, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and other parts of Germany will be present.
The MUGI platform was founded in May 2004 by Beatrix Borchard with the aim of promoting musicological gender research (at that time still: women's and gender studies) in Europe, networking it and making it accessible to a broad public.
‘What was a pioneering act at the time, also in terms of the possibilities offered by the internet, is now a scientific standard and a necessity for the communication of scientifically sound research and reflection,’ says Dr Nina Noeske, professor of musicology at Weimar.
The project is characterised in particular by two different forms of mediation: on the one hand, by a ‘lexicon’ that now includes more than 600 biographical articles with lists of works, sources and literature, collections of material and research references; on the other hand, by multimedia presentations in which musicians and gender-relevant topics are presented. The principle of ‘filling in the gaps’ (Beatrix Borchard) as a methodological basis creates a gender-sensitive historiography of music as a history of cultural action.
‘The internet has made it possible to publish the first, incomplete traces of female musicians, which are gradually being filled in with new findings,’ says Nina Noeske. As part of an internationalisation process, the first external editorial office was established in Luxembourg in 2022 (website: mugi.lu), with a particular focus on collecting sources and digitising archival material from Luxembourg's women's music history, as well as its pedagogical preparation. Further external presences are to follow.
[5 June 2024]