The Complete Theoretical Works of Johannes Tinctoris: A New Digital Edition

The corpus of twelve Latin theoretical treatises by the fifteenth-century Brabantine musician and lawyer Johannes Tinctoris (c.1435-1511) is acknowledged as one of the most significant and comprehensive sources for late medieval musical notation and compositional process, as well as a central focus for important recent research on musical aesthetics and reception at this crucial point in western European culture. Their content demonstrates not only an exceptional technical command of musical notation and theory, but also an intimate acquaintance with contemporary polyphonic practice, derived from a wide knowledge of the composers of his day and their music, both in northern Europe, where he began his career, and in Italy. This project will complete a new online edition of the whole corpus (also to be made available as a more permanent resource in DVD format), supplanting the existing edition (ed. Albert Seay, American Institute of Musicology, 1975-8) which has long been regarded by musicologists as highly unsatisfactory. The completed resource will greatly enlarge both the scope and accessibility of Tinctoris's work. Full English translations will be provided in addition to the Latin texts; in many cases these translations will be the first ever made, which will further enable the detailed significance of the treatises to be appreciated and explored by both scholarly and performance-based readers outside academia who are unable to handle the original Latin. Multiple layers of hyperlinked commentary material will also be provided, covering a wide range of technical and historical issues arising from both the texts themselves and the wider context of Tinctoris's life and musical environment in Renaissance Europe. Combining the highest levels of historical, textual and critical scholarship with innovative technological presentation, this open-access edition explores new methods of relating text-based materials to the numerous, often complex, music examples (both monophonic and polyphonic, mensural and non-mensural) that punctuate the treatises. An additional outcome will be the production of a new notation software package which will make available a wide spectrum of medieval and Renaissance musical notations for the first time to scholars, students, editors, publishers and performing musicians in a flexible and user-friendly application to a high professional level of historical and typographical accuracy. As the project progresses, the edition will have additional layers added which will use Tinctoris's primary texts as a pedagogical resource to enable users (e.g. undergraduate and postgraduate students, and early-stage scholars of pre-modern music repertories) to learn and practise the detail of late medieval notation through interactive engagement, independent virtual learning and self-testing.

Although the project essentially sits squarely within the disciplines of historical and theoretical musicology, its particular slant towards (a) early music performance implications, and (b) the technology of early music notation and editing, brings to the fore a number of strong and valuable linkages with creative and publishing industries beyond academia. It is planned that these will be explored and exploited in order to maximize the cultural and economic impact, within realistic limitations, that the project will have, both in the UK and in other countries for which these areas of knowledge are significant.

Early music performance, in the UK as well as continental Europe, the USA and increasingly the Far East, is in a remarkable healthy state in the present economic climate, and this is true not only of the later, baroque and classical, eras, but also of the medieval and Renaissance vocal and instrumental repertories with which the project is concerned. Small, specialist ensembles are burgeoning in France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, to some extent following the lead given in the 1980s and 90s by high-ranking vocal groups in the UK. There already exists, therefore, a powerful infrastructure for the creative interaction of academic work and high-level performance, both in a live context and through the commercial recording world, in late medieval and early Renaissance music. The significance of Tinctoris as composer of high standing as well as theoretical writer of the greatest importance is already well recognized, as witnessed by several CDs produced over the past decade or so. There is still, however, much scope for the project to spearhead a concerted effort to raise Tinctoris's profile as composer, not only in the project's home territory of the UK, but especially in his own homeland of Belgium, with the collaboration of the Alamire Foundation, which is the recognized International Centre for the Study of Music in the Low Countries, and with which Professor Woodley already has close links.

The year 2011 is the 500th anniversary of Tinctoris's death, providing a wonderful opportunity to capitalize on the personal links between the project team and the professional performing world, in order to explore some of the practical, performative implications of his writings. Such an interaction between scholarship and performance will be able to be exploited through outlets such as BBC Radio 3 broadcasts and talks, performance workshops, public lectures and ensemble tours. The outcomes of these experimental interactions could well feed directly into subsequent commercial recordings, becoming part of a wider cultural knowledge base in musical practice beyond the duration of the project itself. In so doing, the project hopes to use the engaged and outward-facing elements of the research to maximize public awareness of Tinctoris's contribution to early modern musical practice, and of his writings and compositions as a significant part of Western Europe's cultural and intellectual capital.

The technological component of the project, which involves the development of an innovative software application to enable high-quality notation of various medieval and early Renaissance musical repertories, will also have clear benefits and impacts beyond the project itself, and beyond the strictly academic sphere. Such impacts and benefits will include editors, typesetters and publishers of early music repertories, giving a high degree of flexibility for the reproduction of early historical notations, and the ability to incorporate diplomatic facsimile material into their music publications with much more ease and professional quality than has been generally possible hitherto. Individual performing musicians will be able to make use of it, and the project texts, when preparing material for performance from original notation. A mo