Beethoven in the House: Digital Studies of Domestic Music Arrangements
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Abstract
Beethoven in the House encompasses two novel and complementary studies into domestic music arrangements of the 19th Century, a digital research environment which will be co-developed alongside the studies, and the innovative application of digital musicology methods within this environment.
Performance of music in the home was the means by which most works were received before the advent of audio recordings and broadcasts, yet the notation sources that form our primary record of this culture have not been the subject of comprehensive or methodical study. Choices made by arrangers adapting music for domestic consumption-of instrumentation, abbreviation, or simplification-reflect the musical life of the 19th-century, and can inform our understanding alongside contemporary accounts such as newspapers, adverts, and diaries.
A study of Steiner editions of Beethoven's 7th and 8th Symphonies and Wellingtons Sieg will make a detailed comparison between arrangements, systematically identifying a core common to multiple versions, and asking if this reflects the stated values of the publisher. A second survey seeks patterns across a larger sample of lesser-known and poorly catalogued scores, collating emergent indicators of arrangers' motivations within a narrative of the domestic market - the music industry of its day. Both studies innovate digital methods which characterise arrangements as music encodings, including new 'sparse' approaches to notation and annotation. Optical Music Recognition and Linked Data will find and structure new knowledge. Results will be digitally represented using an ontology of musicological argument, providing reusable methods and research data for digital musicology, as well as informing the wider digital humanities.
Leading experts and institutions from Germany and the UK will work together with combined collections from both countries for the first time. Doing so, they will jointly transform methods and tools in their field of digital musicology.
Performance of music in the home was the means by which most works were received before the advent of audio recordings and broadcasts, yet the notation sources that form our primary record of this culture have not been the subject of comprehensive or methodical study. Choices made by arrangers adapting music for domestic consumption-of instrumentation, abbreviation, or simplification-reflect the musical life of the 19th-century, and can inform our understanding alongside contemporary accounts such as newspapers, adverts, and diaries.
A study of Steiner editions of Beethoven's 7th and 8th Symphonies and Wellingtons Sieg will make a detailed comparison between arrangements, systematically identifying a core common to multiple versions, and asking if this reflects the stated values of the publisher. A second survey seeks patterns across a larger sample of lesser-known and poorly catalogued scores, collating emergent indicators of arrangers' motivations within a narrative of the domestic market - the music industry of its day. Both studies innovate digital methods which characterise arrangements as music encodings, including new 'sparse' approaches to notation and annotation. Optical Music Recognition and Linked Data will find and structure new knowledge. Results will be digitally represented using an ontology of musicological argument, providing reusable methods and research data for digital musicology, as well as informing the wider digital humanities.
Leading experts and institutions from Germany and the UK will work together with combined collections from both countries for the first time. Doing so, they will jointly transform methods and tools in their field of digital musicology.
Publications
Page K. R.
(2022)
Beethoven in the House: Digital Studies of Domestic Music Arrangements
| Description | Collaboration with mdw - University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna |
| Organisation | University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna |
| Country | Austria |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The Music Encoding and Linked Data (MELD) framework was originated and created at the University of Oxford, and refined through a series of subsequent projects in which it was applied; similarly the musicological model developed during Beethoven in the House (BitH), which can be used to structure musicological annotations within MELD apps. |
| Collaborator Contribution | MELD and the BitH model have since been adopted and extended by researchers at mdw - University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna - including in the 'Signature Sound Vienna' (SSV) project. |
| Impact | * Data interoperability between MELD-related projects at Oxford and Vienna; * Coordination of tool development to maximise complementarity, sustainability, and re-use; * A workshop held in February 2023 to align and synchronise ongoing complementary development of MELD and the BitH model; * A joint tutorial at Digital Humanities 2023 using both the BitH and SSV annotator tools. |
| Start Year | 2022 |
| Description | LinkedMusic project collaboration |
| Organisation | McGill University |
| Country | Canada |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The principal investigator and a research team member are invited collaborators with the Canadian SSHRC-funded 'LinkedMusic' project, based at McGill University, where they contribute their accumulated expertise in digital music information systems and their application to digital musicology. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The goal of the LinkedMusic Partnership is to link music databases through metadata schemas: structures for organizing information stored in a database. This will go a long way towards bringing online music search to the same level of sophistication currently possible for text-based resources, allowing us to answer fundamental questions about music and how it interacts with human creativity, society, culture, and history. |
| Impact | - |
| Start Year | 2022 |
| Description | Software Sustainability Instittute: Best practice for testing in DH software development |
| Organisation | Software Sustainability Institute |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | As a project for the Software Sustainability Institute, team member Graham Klyne is assessing the most effective ways to implement software testing methodologies in the context of Digital Humanities projects. As a case study, Graham is implementing a test framework for the MELD software (Music Encoding and Linked Data, developed during the FAST project) as it has been deployed by the Unlocking Musicology project. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The Software Sustainability Institute facilitates the advancement of software in research by cultivating better, more sustainable, research software to enable world-class research ("Better software, better research"). |
| Impact | Published code for software development testing (see repository link). Project report and recommendations. |
| Start Year | 2020 |
| Description | A New Conceptual Model for Musical Sources and Musicological Studies |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | The Beethoven in the House project presented its new multi-layered, conceptual model for associating musical source materials to musicological arguments at the Music Encoding Conference 2022 in Halifax, Canada. The conference is attended by a wide mix of music librarians, cultural heritage organisations, and commercial organisations who use music encoding technologies, as well as academic researchers. The model shows how portions of digitized data in various files and formats can be identified, selected, labelled, and compared, thus having applications beyond our research project. We described our plan for operationalizing the conceptual through a framework for musical annotation implemented using RDF. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | An Overview of Digital Musicology and an Introduction to Music Encoding |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Kevin Page presented an an overview of digital musicology to the 'Introduction to Digital Humanities' strand at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/digital-humanities-oxford-summer-school |
| Description | Beethoven in the House: annotating digital sources to contextualise musicology studies |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The Beethoven in the House project was presented at the conference of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres in Prague in July 2022. We related how the project builds upon technologies and standards such as IIIF and Linked Data, and through these can enhance access and use of collections resources. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.iaml2022.cz/ |
| Description | Beethoven-Haus Studienkolleg |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | The Beethoven in the House project team were invited to deliver a 3-day workshop to postgraduate musicology students at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, for the 2022 edition of their studienkolleg series. Students were given a theoretical and practical (hands-on) introduction to digital scholarship using cutting-edge technologies, as exemplified through research from the project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Bringing the concert hall into the living room: digital scholarship of small-scale arrangements of large-scale musical works |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Project research, focussing on the digital innovations employed in support of musicology, were presented at 'DMRN+17', the annual Digital Music Research Network workshop held at Queen Mary University of London in December 2022. The audience comprises a mix of academia and industry, primarily from a music technology background. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.qmul.ac.uk/dmrn/dmrn17/ |
| Description | Digital Musicology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective - talk at Digital Humanities at Oxford online 2021 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Kevin Page delivered the presentation 'Digital Musicology - An Interdisciplinary Perspective' to a plenary session of the 2021 Digital Humanities at Oxford online event (held as an alternative to the usual in-person Digital Humanities Summer School). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Expert workshop for US-based 'Measuring Polyphony' project |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Part of a panel of experts invited to participate in a workshop as part of the Measuring Polyphony project, which developed tools to support transcribing and editing medieval and renaissance musical sources. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| URL | https://measuringpolyphony.org/ |
| Description | Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft conference, "Beethoven Arrangements: Can Digital Approaches Widen Our Investigative Reach?" |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Conference presentation as part of a session on "New directions for Beethoven research" at annual conference of the German national musicological society (Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft). The paper was entitled "Beethoven Arrangements: Can Digital Approaches Widen Our Investigative Reach?" |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.gfm2020.uni-bonn.de/ |
| Description | Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft conference, "Beethoven in the House" |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The project team presented a panel on 'Beethoven in the House' at the annual conference of the German national musicological society (Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.musikundmedien.hu-berlin.de/de/musikwissenschaft/gfm2022 |
| Description | Guest lecture to Oxford Brookes University Faculty of Humanities doctoral training programme |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Kevin Page gave the talk 'An interdisciplinary perspective on Digital Humanities' to the humanities doctoral training programme at Oxford Brookes University. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | MEI Linked Data Interest Group |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The Interest Group considers applications of Linked Data to interconnect the rich music and music-related information resources available on the Web with MEI encodings. It focuses on establishing and documenting best practices through community discussion, work on the MEI guidelines for this topic, and proposing useful changes to the MEI schema to enhance or facilitate such connections to and from MEI encodings. The group seeks to provide reference points, both for newcomers, and those with more advanced experience in the topic. Finally, the group intends to work to raise awareness of Linked Data practices within the MEI community, and of music-specific approaches within the Semantic Web and Web science communities. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020,2021,2022,2023 |
| URL | https://music-encoding.org/community/interest-groups |
| Description | Member and co-chair of Special Interest Group on tablature notation for the Music Encoding Initiative |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Membership of a SIG for the standards body the Music Encoding Initiative aiming to develop and extend support for tablature notations (including guitar tabs and historical lute tablature). This includes adding this notation to music typesetting tools. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020,2021,2022,2023 |
| URL | https://music-encoding.org/community/interest-groups.html |
| Description | Member of Special Interest Group on Linked Data for the Music Encoding Initiative |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Membership of a SIG for the standards body the Music Encoding Initiative, convened to look at ways to use Linked Open Data in conjunction with the MEI standard and to create guidance for good practice. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020,2021,2022 |
| URL | https://music-encoding.org/community/interest-groups.html |
| Description | Member of Special Interest Group on MerMEId for the Music Encoding Initiative |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Membership of a SIG for the standards body the Music Encoding Initiative. This SIG is for developers (and, to a lesser extent, users) of a musical works cataloguing tool, MerMEId, built with the standard, and focusses on planning, documentation and bug fixes. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020,2021,2022,2023 |
| URL | https://github.com/Edirom/MerMEId/ |
| Description | Member of Special Interest Group on mensural notation for the Music Encoding Initiative |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Membership of (and at times co-chairing) a SIG for the standards body the Music Encoding Initiative on pre-1600 music notation. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019,2020,2021,2022,2023 |
| URL | https://music-encoding.org/ |
| Description | Modeling Music for Musicologists: A Linked Open Data Approach |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | A presentation at the (hybrid) conference on Digital Humanities 2022. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://dh2022.adho.org/ |
| Description | Panel - Beethoven's Large Scale Works outside the Concert Hall: Towards a Digital Representation of Domestic Arrangements |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | The Beethoven in the House project convened a panel at the 21st Quinquennial Congress of the International Musicological Society, where discussion focussed on the nature and realisation of an interdisciplinary research collaboration working with digital sources. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Panel at Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School - Data standards in the Digital Humanities |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Kevin Page and Tanya Gray were panellists on the topic of 'Data standards in the Digital Humanities' within the Linked Data strand at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/digital-humanities-oxford-summer-school |
| Description | Participation in research network - Digital directions for collected editions (AH/V015095/1 ) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Regular 'seminars' for a UKRI-funded network (AH/V015095/1), gathering scholars and music editors to consider the future of collected music editions. Participation in final conference in March 2023. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022,2023 |
| Description | RISM UK workshop: Crowdsourcing musical data |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Kevin Page attended and contributed to a workshop on the replacement for the RISM databasewith a tailored UK discovery layer for the worldwide RISM database. The workshop examined how users might engage with the RISM database and its data, and whether crowd-sourcing could be used as a technique, for instance to get users to add coded incipits to the current entries in the RISM database. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| Description | Towards MerMEId 2.0 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Beethoven in the House project members have, within a wider international team, contributed to the development of MerMEId 2.0 through the MerMEId special interest group. The "Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI Data" (MerMEId) is a web based tool to capture and enrich data in the MEI header, which was originally developed by Axel Teich Geertinger and Sigfrid Lundberg at the "Danish Centre for Music Editing" for their work on the thematic-bibliographic catalogues of works of Carl Nielsen, Johann Peter Emilius Hartmann, Johann Adolph Scheibe, and Niels W. Gade. It has since been further used by libraries around the world, leading to a need for refinement and extension of the software. The special interest group presented a preview of MerMEId 2.0 to the Music Encoding Conference in Halifax, Canada (also with hybrid remote attendees). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Working Group member EarlyMuse European COST action (CA21161) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | EarlyMuse is a consortium which brings together academic partners from many countries, with a network of music culture professionals and industry partner. EarlyMuse intends to find paths to strengthen the unique place of early music in Europe, in our intellectual and cultural practices, and in global appeal. EarlyMuse addresses six challenges: (1) scientific, (2) educational, (3) professional, (4) structural, (5) economic and (6) societal. The project will transform the scientific field, redraw the place of early music in higher education, attract original talent, deploy tools useful to emerging creative industries, and define public policy in the field of culture |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA21161/ |