Connecting secondary literature to composition

[baumar]

Hi all activists,

I'm a very thankful user of imslp and I love this site especially for the possibility to download facsimiles of music that were unreachable and not affordable when I was young...

Yet there is one thing that I miss and that would match perfectly here: The availability of secondary literature. I studied music science for a while and learned that there are immense archives of master and doctor thesis about compositions. But they all are locked in some offline archive where they will be thrown away after a bunch of years.
But it would be so interesting and helpful to read reflections about a composition you play because IMHO when I play a piece of music I am kind of sinking in my interpretation like in a kind of mental hole and in that process, intellectual reflections of other people would be a great input to enhance ones mind.

I think IMSLP would be the greatest place to either contain these documents or link to them in case if this work and idea was started in some other place, because I don't know any other site containing so many individual compositions as IMSLP and that is the key: Find literature about a specific composition.

In case if someone knows already existing collections of secondary literature about compositions, I would be delighted if you leave a link.

And if there were ideas how to link secondary literature to a composition, I would be glad to help.
Since I work in IT I might also help to add a bit at the backend how to add this function into the existing data base as I don't think this is too difficult ( I guess it would be just another table referring to the ID of a composition)

with best regards and looking forward on your feedback

Markus

[kosboot]

But much of that material (in the particular the material that people would want to read, i.e. from the last 50 years) is in copyright.

There are many places that have texts online, even music texts online (I've transferred a number of them from the Internet Archive to IMSLP). But IMSLP is unique in that it has music scores. The infrastructure of this site is based on scores, not texts. While it might be nice to supplement the functionality, I think the main focus of the site should always be scores.

You can always edit the wiki of a composition's page to link to discussions of the work (as is already done with Wikipedia pages).