Center for the History of Music Theory

Keeping music history alive

The Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature (CHMTL) strives to ensure scholars around the world have unfettered access to essential musical texts and other materials from the Medieval and later periods.

While primarily focused on music theory, our work also aims to document the deep links between music and the other arts and sciences that have influenced intellectual life from the Medieval era to the present.

Our earliest projects, such as the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, made pioneering use of technology and the Internet by making freely available hundreds of music treatises in Latin dating from the Late Antiquity.

Today, we work to remain at the forefront of research in computer-assisted studies of the music of the past.

Our research

In addition to publishing faculty work in printed publications and hosting conferences, we have long had a focus on creating web-based homes for important texts and databases.

We manage a number of websites with digitized editions of texts on music theory and aesthetics, as well as bibliographic databases.

Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum

The Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML), our oldest resource, is an evolving full-text searchable database of Latin music theory from the late Antiquity to the Renaissance.

TML presently gives access to more than 900 texts from print editions and manuscript sources.

Explore TML

Saggi musicali italiani

Initiated and directed by Andreas Giger (Louisiana State University), the Saggi musicali italiani (SMI) focuses on major treatises written in Italian, with the goal of eventually comprising all printed material on music theory and aesthetics from the Renaissance to the present.

Explore SMI

Texts on Music in English

Texts on Music in English (TME), initiated and directed by Peter M. Lefferts from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, focuses on major treatises written in English.

TME’s goal is to eventually comprise all relevant manuscript and printed materials from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century.

Visit TME

Traités français sur la musique

Traités français sur la musique (TFM), initiated and directed by Peter Slemon (recently retired from the Jacobs School of Music), focuses on major treatises written in French from the Middle Age through the nineteenth century.

Like its sister projects, TFM aims to make available both print and manuscript sources in searchable electronic form.

Visit TFM

Musical Borrowing: an Annotated Bibliography

Initiated and directed by J. Peter Burkholder, Musical Borrowing: an Annotated Bibliography is an ongoing project that aims to create a comprehensive, indexed, and annotated bibliography of material relating to the compositional use of existing music within the tradition of Western music. This is a wide field, embracing borrowing, transcription, variations, quotation, cantus firmus technique, paraphrase, imitation/parody, modeling, allusion, and other ways to rework existing music—from troping and organum to collage and electronic manipulation. The bibliography includes detailed studies of borrowing in individual works and items that consider some aspect of borrowing as a whole, that refute claims of borrowing, or that assemble lists of borrowings.

Explore the bibliography