Skip to main content
RILM Board of Directors Announces Next Executive Director

RILM Board of Directors Announces Next Executive Director

August 2022

NISO Member News

New York, NY. |. August 15, 2022

The Board of Directors of Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) is delighted to announce that Tina Frühauf, current Deputy Executive Director of RILM, will become its next Executive Director effective 29 August 2022. She will be the fifth person to lead RILM, succeeding Barry S. Brook (1966–89), Terrence E. Ford (1989–91), Adam P. J. O’Connor (1991–96), and Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie (1996–2022).

Following an international search, the Board of Directors unanimously selected Dr. Frühauf as RILM’s next Executive Director. “Tina brings to the position a unique breadth of experience at RILM and in the academic community,” said Dr. Mackenzie, RILM’s current Executive Director and President of the Board of Directors. “At RILM she has already worn many hats, all successfully, including as an editor, as head of marketing, and as licensor of full-text content for RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text and RILM Music Encyclopedias. Tina is also a widely published and active scholar and teacher. What impressed the Board most about Tina is her passion for RILM’s global mission and her vision for the organization and its role in music research of the 21st century.”

“I am thrilled and honored to serve as RILM’s next Executive Director and, by extension, all researchers, educators, students, and librarians worldwide who seek to access music literature and scholarship in all its facets and contexts,” says Dr. Frühauf. “Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie created a stable and entrepreneurial work environment, and I am excited to head an organization that is well prepared to continue its development. As a scholar, teacher, and editor, I have relied on RILM’s research tools for over two decades and I strongly believe in their scope, which is driven by the global mission they represent. Expanding RILM’s global network and  strengthening the appreciation of bibliography and historiography as crucial pillars of solid academic work is at the forefront of RILM’s future work. With this, I hope that RILM’s resources remain indispensable sources of knowledge that support all those who are engaged in the study of music.”

RILM’s 2021 Board of Directors served as the search committee: Zdravko Blažeković (RILM), L. Charles Fink (RILM), Elizabeth Davis (Columbia University), Richard Freedman (Haverford College), Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie (RILM), Philippe Vendrix (CNRS), and Richard W. Young (Quarles & Brady, ret.). The committee benefited from the assistance of Mary Gail Biebel, succession consultant, and Sara McWilliams, executive search consultant.

Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), New York: RILM publishes a suite of online reference works for music research, including the German music encyclopedia Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (as MGG Online) and the lexicographic collection RILM Music Encyclopedias. Its well-known bibliographic database RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text has some 1.5 million records representing publications concerning all types of music, published in more than 170 languages, coming from some 150 countries, and includes several hundred journals in full text. RILM also published the Index to Printed Music, and the forthcoming online version of Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (as DEUMM Online). RILM functions under the auspices of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres; the International Association for the Study of Popular Music; the International Musicological Society; the International Council for Traditional Music. RILM is housed at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in New York City.

Tina Frühauf has been a core member of the RILM staff since 2003, working in a number of capacities over the years. She is an active scholar and writer; the study of Jewish music in modernity has been Dr. Frühauf’s primary research focus for two decades, culminating in monographs such as Orgel und Orgelmusik in deutsch-jüdischer Kultur and Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945–1989. Her most recent scholarly work focuses on the historiography of music scholarship and migration, examining the mass dislocation of peoples in the 20th century and the conditions of globalization, genocide, exile, and minority experience as well as musicology and coloniality. Dr. Frühauf is an adjunct professor at Columbia University and serves on the doctoral faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.