Beethoven in the House: Digital Studies of Domestic Music Arrangements

Lead Research Organisation: University of Oxford
Department Name: Engineering Science

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.
 
Description The Beethoven in the House project undertook parallel explorations of music itself, and the application of new technologies to undertake that research. The project made musicological contributions firstly in terms of understanding Beethoven's relationship with to the arrangements of his works; and secondly in a terms of studying the contents of The Harmonicon journal, bringing insights into the distribution of music in the 19th century and its performance in the home. In doing so, the project developed exploration tools using technologies such as Linked Data and IIIF, enabling researcher to both find materials for study, then annotate and structure analysis of those materials.
Exploitation Route The Beethoven in the House Annotator App could be applied to new data sources made available using Linked Data and IIIF; and applied to new areas of musicological study. The project developed a new model for Music Annotation which was designed to be widely applicable to music studies, beyond the specific research areas of the initial project. The project created and documented new practice for 'Selective Encoding' which is applicable to all users of the Music Encoding Initiative. The underlying principle of annotation developed during the project could be translated and implemented within other software applications, while remaining compatible with the project Annotator App.
Sectors Creative Economy

Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)

Culture

Heritage

Museums and Collections

URL https://domestic-beethoven.eu/
 
Description CORSICA (EarlyMuse STSM)
Amount € 17,500 (EUR)
Organisation European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) 
Sector Public
Country Belgium
Start 02/2024 
End 07/2024
 
Title Beethoven in the House: Selective Encodings of Arrangements of Beethoven's opp. 91, 92, and 93. 
Description This dataset contains selective MEI encodings of a number of arrangements of Beethoven's Opp. 91, 92, and 93. These encodings were prepared in the context of the Beethoven in the House project, jointly funded by AHRC and DFG from 2020 to 2023. It is a slight update on v1.0.0 in better organizing the release assets. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2023 
Provided To Others? Yes  
URL https://zenodo.org/record/7874638
 
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 E-LAUTE Advisory panel membership 
Organisation Austrian National Library
Country Austria 
Sector Public 
PI Contribution As a member of the advisory panel, I advise the project more generally, but I am also closely engaged in developing the Music Encoding Initiative standard to support the work of this team
Collaborator Contribution The partners are part of a research project aiming to make digital editions of German lute music
Impact Development of the MEI schema and documentation. The collaboration includes music performance, music editing, German studies and information science.
Start Year 2023
 
Description E-LAUTE Advisory panel membership 
Organisation University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
Country Austria 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution As a member of the advisory panel, I advise the project more generally, but I am also closely engaged in developing the Music Encoding Initiative standard to support the work of this team
Collaborator Contribution The partners are part of a research project aiming to make digital editions of German lute music
Impact Development of the MEI schema and documentation. The collaboration includes music performance, music editing, German studies and information science.
Start Year 2023
 
Description E-LAUTE Advisory panel membership 
Organisation University of Vienna
Department Institute of Musicology
Country Austria 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution As a member of the advisory panel, I advise the project more generally, but I am also closely engaged in developing the Music Encoding Initiative standard to support the work of this team
Collaborator Contribution The partners are part of a research project aiming to make digital editions of German lute music
Impact Development of the MEI schema and documentation. The collaboration includes music performance, music editing, German studies and information science.
Start Year 2023
 
Description E-LAUTE Advisory panel membership 
Organisation Vienna University of Technology
Country Austria 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution As a member of the advisory panel, I advise the project more generally, but I am also closely engaged in developing the Music Encoding Initiative standard to support the work of this team
Collaborator Contribution The partners are part of a research project aiming to make digital editions of German lute music
Impact Development of the MEI schema and documentation. The collaboration includes music performance, music editing, German studies and information science.
Start Year 2023
 
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
 
Title DomesticBeethoven/bith-annotator: Release 2023-04 
Description This release covers the state of this prototype app at the end of the funding phase for the Paderborn University part of the Beethoven in the House project. It uses https://api.domestic-beethoven.eu/ld/BithCollection.jsonld as starting point for traversing the LOD graph, and reads data from the project pod available from https://bith.solidcommunity.net/public/bith.ttl (which has no content at the time of the release). 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2023 
URL https://zenodo.org/record/7877697
 
Description 'Beethoven and Beyond' Panel, International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres conference 2023 
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 Panel of speakers from our project, speaking on "Beethoven and beyond: reflections on digital studies of musical arrangements" (at IAML 2023 in Cambridge) with discussion during and afterwards. Audience primarily of music librarians, with library scientists and musicologists also present. Connecting library and archive digitisation and publication with musicological practice and the possibilities of digital tooling to support these.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
URL https://www.iaml.info/congresses/2023-cambridge
 
Description 'Digital companions - approaches and opportunities', The Future of Digital Editions of Music conference, March 2023 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact Conference bringing together musicologists, digital musicologists, editors, music publishers and librarians, looking at practical ways to use the possibilities of digital technology in music editions without sacrificing quality or disregarding economic concerns. Discussions included planning future projects and collaborations, and proposals to survey stakeholder groups, especially professional and amateur musicians who might use the editions.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
 
Description 'Pragmatic digital musicology', Algomus seminar (invited talk), Lille 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Invited talk for a seminar (title 'Pragmatic digital musicology') as part of a 2-day visit to a digital musicology research group. After the presentation, the group presented their work, and possible avenues for collaboration were explored.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2024
 
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 workshop at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2023 
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 Members of the project team organised and led teaching for the Digital Musicology workshop at DHOxSS 2023. The workshop is one of few opportunities offered worldwide to learn about practically applying computational and informatics approaches to music and musicology during a single week-long course. The workshop was attended by 8 people from a variety of backgrounds (academic, libraries, archives, industry).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
 
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 Invited Lecture, 'Practicalities of sharing humanities data', Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Invited talk entitled 'Practicalities of sharing humanities data: Studying arrangements of nineteenth-century music', Musikwissenschaft JGU Mainz: Gastvortrag. JGU Mainz, Germany 28 April 2023. The talk focussed on practical approaches to open, linked data with the aim of informing policy at an active DH institution. It was well attended by faculty, students, as well as several external visitors, since it was a hybrid event, publicly advertised. Plenty of time was allowed for discussions and demonstrations afterwards.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
 
Description MEI Developers' Workshop (Vienna) 
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 Annual workshop for the development of the Music Encoding Initiative standard or tools relating to it. Over the course of the workshop, we extended the standard for the encoding of tablature notations, particularly German lute tablature, made improvements to the online documentation, and began the development of a test suite for an MEI editor.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2024
URL https://iwk.mdw.ac.at/mei-development-workshop/
 
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 2020,2021,2022,2023,2024
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 2020,2021,2022,2024
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 2020,2021,2022,2023,2024
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 2019,2020,2021,2022,2023,2024
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 2023,2024
URL https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA21161/