Digital directions for collected editions: keyboard music by British musicians before c.1700
Lead Research Organisation:
Northumbria University
Department Name: Fac of Arts, Design and Social Sciences
Abstract
In the 19th and 20th centuries collected editions made music accessible by gathering all works by a single composer or by creating a series defined by time or place. Each volume resulted from rigorous scholarship, providing reliable musical texts based on all known, available sources. The editorial boards of Musica Britannica, the Purcell Society Edition and Early English Church Music have been deliberating over the future of scholarly, critical editing of music in the 21st century.
Collected editions have been designed with the performer in mind as well as the scholar: in the case of Musica Britannica, 'although its chief purpose is an accurate and scholarly presentation of the original texts, it is also intended to provide a basis for practical performance'. Today, scholars, students and players expect to find material for research and study online, so sometimes sacrifice consideration of the quality of an edition and the scholarly work it represents in favour of ease and speed of access. In an era of 'fake news', it is important to return to the main rationale for the collected edition: the provision of reliable, scholarly, critical editions of musical texts. In the digital age, collected editions remain relatively difficult to access for many users, such as amateur performers, since they are restricted to the reference shelves of university libraries, so there is a need to reconsider, revitalise and renew the role of the collected edition for the present day.
This project draws together musicologists specialising in the critical editing of music with experts in music technology and computer science to address the future of the collected edition within an online environment. As well as establishing new methodologies, it explores how the next generation can be equipped with the skillset needed by 21st-century editors of music. Recent research projects have resulted in significant technological advances that can be harnessed for a 21st- century digital platform for the collected edition in which advanced editorial expertise is combined with possibilities opened up by the encoding of musical texts. The project will determine how to design such an environment so that it can be accessed easily by a range of users, thus achieving impact beyond the academy. The project will also address related questions such as copyright, future funding models and marketing.
All three series include keyboard music, the focus of this project. The paucity of autograph manuscripts of repertoire dating from before c.1700 throws the emphasis on the scribes who entered the music into their manuscripts, and the degree of variance between sources raises questions surrounding the instability of texts and their relation to aural transmission and creative engagement with the music. Much of this repertoire dates from a period when the conventions surrounding the notation of the music were in a state of transition. This lack of standardisation, and debates surrounding the relationships between visual appearance of the music and the ways in which it was performed, provide greater challenges to the editor than do other genres. Thus, the solutions to specific challenges surrounding early keyboard music should be adaptable to other genres at other periods.
One of the aims of the project will be to show how the digital humanities can transform the collected edition by retaining each surviving text, enhancing the way in which information about variant readings can be displayed using music notation. The encoding of each variant text allows a three-dimensional approach to editing music, where the scribes and users of manuscripts can be placed at the heart of the project alongside named composers. Even more exciting, the encoded variant texts can be analysed using machine learning to address questions of authorship, to evaluate stemmatic relations between sources (especially where there are missing links), and to study scribal interference with texts.
Collected editions have been designed with the performer in mind as well as the scholar: in the case of Musica Britannica, 'although its chief purpose is an accurate and scholarly presentation of the original texts, it is also intended to provide a basis for practical performance'. Today, scholars, students and players expect to find material for research and study online, so sometimes sacrifice consideration of the quality of an edition and the scholarly work it represents in favour of ease and speed of access. In an era of 'fake news', it is important to return to the main rationale for the collected edition: the provision of reliable, scholarly, critical editions of musical texts. In the digital age, collected editions remain relatively difficult to access for many users, such as amateur performers, since they are restricted to the reference shelves of university libraries, so there is a need to reconsider, revitalise and renew the role of the collected edition for the present day.
This project draws together musicologists specialising in the critical editing of music with experts in music technology and computer science to address the future of the collected edition within an online environment. As well as establishing new methodologies, it explores how the next generation can be equipped with the skillset needed by 21st-century editors of music. Recent research projects have resulted in significant technological advances that can be harnessed for a 21st- century digital platform for the collected edition in which advanced editorial expertise is combined with possibilities opened up by the encoding of musical texts. The project will determine how to design such an environment so that it can be accessed easily by a range of users, thus achieving impact beyond the academy. The project will also address related questions such as copyright, future funding models and marketing.
All three series include keyboard music, the focus of this project. The paucity of autograph manuscripts of repertoire dating from before c.1700 throws the emphasis on the scribes who entered the music into their manuscripts, and the degree of variance between sources raises questions surrounding the instability of texts and their relation to aural transmission and creative engagement with the music. Much of this repertoire dates from a period when the conventions surrounding the notation of the music were in a state of transition. This lack of standardisation, and debates surrounding the relationships between visual appearance of the music and the ways in which it was performed, provide greater challenges to the editor than do other genres. Thus, the solutions to specific challenges surrounding early keyboard music should be adaptable to other genres at other periods.
One of the aims of the project will be to show how the digital humanities can transform the collected edition by retaining each surviving text, enhancing the way in which information about variant readings can be displayed using music notation. The encoding of each variant text allows a three-dimensional approach to editing music, where the scribes and users of manuscripts can be placed at the heart of the project alongside named composers. Even more exciting, the encoded variant texts can be analysed using machine learning to address questions of authorship, to evaluate stemmatic relations between sources (especially where there are missing links), and to study scribal interference with texts.
Publications
Smith D
(2025)
Editing Purcell's keyboard music: some reflections on collected editions, past and future
in Journal of New Music Research
Smith D. J.
(2024)
Editing English Consort Music: Past, Present and Future - John Jenkins and his Time Revisited: Essays in Honour of Andrew Ashbee Part II, 18b (2024): . Open access: available at
in The Viola da Gamba Society Journal
Smith Dj
(2021)
Digital Directions for Collected Editions
Smith DJ
(2024)
Byrd studies in the twenty-first century
Smith DJ
(2023)
Full circle? Observations on keyboard music to c.1630 in Musica Britannica and some thoughts about the future
in Harpsichord & Fortepiano
| Description | The project was granted an extension from the end of February to the end of April because the Covid pandemic delayed its start. Therefore, this time last year (2023), it was too early to report on key findings because the project was still ongoing. The network brought together experienced, expert scholars engaged in the critical editing of music with music technologists, computer scientists and computational musicologists. Through discussion and debate, it quickly became apparent that there were few if any technological barriers to creating exciting, dynamic digital editions of music. The project came to focus on questions closely associated with (potential) impact and sustainability. For whom are collected editions intended? Might there be communities of user that could be identified and involved in future developments? It became apparent that there was a need to involve music publishers (especially Stainer & Bell, which publishes all three UK-based collected editions) and music librarians. Representatives of Stainer & Bell participated in the symposia and the conference, and music librarians from the British Library, Bodleian and Cambridge University Library made valuable contributions to the in-person symposium. There was considerable discussion about preservation of data and software. Many excellent digital projects in music do not achieve longevity because their websites cease to work properly after the funding has run out. There needs to be national, European and global infrastructure to support the preservation of digital artefacts; of vital importance in this is the investment in people who can conserve digital material. The competition for those with the skills needed to ensure that digital projects remain viable is considerable, and most will fare better working outside libraries and the academic sector. In the shorter term, therefore, there is a trade-off between new, exciting and dynamic functionality and the likelihood that a digital edition will survive in a functioning state. Preservation of data is likely to succeed where it is stored in as great a number of formats as possible (including hard copies). At the next level up, it is prudent to use available open source software that has become increasingly standard for digital projects: there is a medium level of risk here, but it is reasonably likely that a digital platform using widely accepted tools will continue to be usable. The highest level of risk is where software has been tweaked, modified, customised or developed for a specific project: without resources available after the funding for a project ends, it is likely that functionality will be affected as technology in general evolves. This leads on to the question of financial sustainability. Collected editions operate on a nineteenth-century subscription model which is rapidly becoming obsolete. Academic libraries are no longer in a position make an open-ended commitment to subscriptions such as these where there may be pressures from other areas of musicology, a field that has rapidly expanded in scope over recent decades. Furthermore, students and other users interact with sheet music in new ways, expecting to be able to find and freely download what they need. This presents a challenge to 'traditional' music publishers and to collected editions. There is a need to engage with audiences in such a way that they place a value on scholarly editions. Engaging new communities of user will be essential in securing a sustainable financial future for the collected edition. Within an academic context, there is an inherent conflict between making publicly funded research freely available in open access and the emphasis placed on commercialisation. A digital edition needs to be monetised if it is to be sustainable as a series because it needs to become at some point self-supporting. One possible solution would be to make the dynamic digital edition freely available to all online, but to charge a small amount per piece to download a version from which to play. This would bring scholarly editions in line with commercial suppliers of downloadable sheet music, such as www.musicnotes.com, where individual items are available for a few pounds. The PI has established the potential for digital editions involving the encoding of texts contained in each source of every piece to address musicological research questions that are currently unanswerable. Although there has been much debate over the interpretation of ornament signs in the keyboard music of Byrd and his contemporaries for well over a century, much of this revolves round in circles. The PI took a defined subset of pieces by Byrd to establish that no two sources agree in the placement of ornaments, suggesting that they reflect scribal performance rather than composer intention. The evidence points to changes in their interpretation through time. However, traditional methods of investigation cannot hope to interrogate all the evidence - there is a need to use computational analysis of the encoded data to arrive at any firm conclusions. Furthermore, the printed book chapter (in this case) is an inadequate vehicle for conveying the results. This project has shown the need to co-design a digital infrastructure for dynamic editions of music with various communities of user. Expanding the user base will in itself help the collected edition to be sustainable in the future, and greater attention needs to be paid to creating attractive user interfaces and marketing/promoting digital collected editions. Although one possible business model was identified that could reconcile the needs of funders and publishers, more work needs to be done in this area. Ultimately, solutions are likely to be found at a transnational, European level. The Digital Directions network effectively became part of a 'network of networks', and as a direct consequence of the networking grant, the PI was invited to contribute to Musica2, a Huma-Num consortium (funded by the French government - see https://www.huma-num.fr/les-consortiums-hn/) in drafting a _Guide de l'édition musicale numérique_. Thus, one of the promised outputs of the grant now has an international dimension. In terms of the other promised outputs, 1. a follow-on bid for a pilot edition to trial the recommendations and ideas that emerge from the network is in preparation 2. A special issue of a journal, the _Journal of New Music Research_ (Taylor & Francis), is being edited by the PI and Co-I. Submitted contributions are currently undergoing peer review. |
| Exploitation Route | The interaction of editors, board members, music technologists, computer scientists, librarians and publishers raised as many questions as were answered. However, there was a distillation of what is needed for the future of collected editions in the digital age which may be summarised as: 1. communities of user 2. financial sustainability 3. data/software sustainability. The boards of all three collected editions support continued work in this area, and will be project partners in a new funding application which will be informed by the research outcomes/outputs. The content of the journal special issue is likely to be directly relevant to such a funding proposal (the exact content being subject to the result of peer review), and will be used to demonstrate how the project is a natural extension of the networking grant. The involvement of user communities in the co-design of pilot digital editions will embed impact from the start, and help to create pathway(s) through which the research generated by both the current project and the follow-on one can reach a number of different audiences, from specialist researcher to professional/amateur player and young learner. The special issue of _Journal of New Music Research_ is scheduled for publication in March 2025. A grant application for the follow-on project has been submitted to AHRC (APP62407): 'Digital Music Editions: Creating a SustainableFuture for the Monumental Edition' |
| Sectors | Creative Economy Education Culture Heritage Museums and Collections |
| Description | The end date of the project has been extended from the end of February to the end of May, so it is still too early to comment on non-academic impacts. The lecture recital given by the PI in Chesterfield demonstrates one way in which the fruits of such research may be demonstrated to a broader public. Whereas the event in Chesterfield ended up attracting members of the general public more than practitioners, the audience for a similar one in Glasgow (November 2024) was made up mainly of organists. There is, therefore, potential to create a pathway to further cultural impact through the co-design of a pilot edition with user communities. The principle of co-design is embedded in the follow-on grant application, 'Digital Music Editions: Creating aSustainable Future for the Monumental Edition' (APP62407), and thus impact on existing and potential users of collected editions would be embedded throughout the project. This grant application is one of the promised outcomes of 'Digital Directions', although there is nowhere to record it. There is also the potential to create economic impact for the publisher of the collected editions, although there are issues surrounding how commercialisation can be reconciled to open access. This is something that would be addressed as part of the 'Digital Music Editions' project. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2023 |
| Impact Types | Cultural |
| Description | Consortium MUSICA2 de Huma-Num |
| Organisation | Centre d'Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance |
| Country | France |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | As a direct consequence of my 'Digital Directions' networking project, I was invited to participate in a three-day workshop on digital editing and specifically attempts to establish consistent working practices and guidelines for those embarking on the scholarly editing of early music. I provided a perspective informed by the involvement of UK collected editions in 'Digital Directions', and specifically the continuing importance of editorial expertise in an environment where citizen science may play an increasing role. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The workshop was fully funded by the French government as part of Huma-Num, the French Very Large Research Infrastructure ('Tres Grande Infrastructure de Recherche') which brought together participants from France and across Europe, including Spain, Poland and the UK. |
| Impact | At the workshop, it was agreed that there would be a follow-up event at Versailes. This was delayed, but a two-day conference followed in 2025 (separately reported under publications section). |
| Start Year | 2023 |
| Description | Early Muse: a New Ecosystem for Early Music Studies |
| Organisation | European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) |
| Department | COST Action |
| Country | Belgium |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | Early Muse: a New Ecosystem for Early Music Studies - part of the programme for European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST Action). 'Digital Directions' led to my involvement in two of its working groups, 'Sources' and 'Publications'. There is considerable overlap between them. I have been involved in discussions: for example, the Sources WG is particularly mindful of the risks posed to invaluable musical sources, especially manuscripts, through neglect and, at the present time, through the ravages of war and political upheaval. |
| Collaborator Contribution | This is a multinational, joint enterprise that brings together scholars from across Europe. In terms of contributions made directly connected with 'Digital Directions', it is worth noting an article jointly authored by members of the Publications WG who also represent boards ofr monumental (=collected) editions across Europe which will feature in a special issue of _Journal of New Music Research_ scheduled for publication at the end of March 2025. |
| Impact | None as yet |
| Start Year | 2023 |
| Description | European Cooperation in Science and Technology, EarlyMuse: Short Term Scientific Mission 'Creation Of eaRly muSIc CorporA' (CORSICA), Utrecht University, 13-17 May 2024. |
| Organisation | Utrecht University |
| Country | Netherlands |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | CORSICA (Creation Of eaRly muSIc CorporA) was a short-term scientific mission funded by the EU to consider ways in which Early Music can be encoded to allow new research to take place involving computational musicology. For such research to be robust, there is a need to create a substantial body of data. The use of a corpus of such material in the digital humanities is very closely connected to 'Digital Directions' and the ways in which collected editions may be developed. My contribution was to offer a perspective based on my expertise as someone experienced in the scholarly, critical editing of music and to present the outcomes of 'Digital Directions' to the other participants. I gave a presentation, 'Creating digital collected editions', on the first day; this was revised in the light of the overall STSF outcomes for the MedRen Conference held in Granada (6 July 2024). I conducted two interviews on behalf of Corsica which directly informed the presentation which I gave on the first day: one was with a senior academic and experienced editor of early music; the other was with a PhD student. All participants contributed to discussion on the technical challenges involved in creating corpora, with a focus very much on people - both users of corpora and related reseach, and the possibilities of citizen science. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Participants included musicologists, computational/digital musicologists and those with specialist knowledge and experience of encoding music using MEI. The sessions included experiements in encoding music contained in a manuscript held at Utrecht University which illutrated well the issues involved, and highlighted the need for accurate metadata. Other participants focused on the complexities of big data in researching early music; tools for musicologists studying encoded music at scale; the challenges of working with smaller bodies of material; specific problems of encoding mensural notation in MEI. We thought through the process of encoding (and, in my case, editing) music, and the fruits of these discussions fed directly into the follow-on grant application. A report of CORSICA is in preparation. Although intended as a one-off workshop, CORSICA has become an ongoing international network. An outwardly facing Blog provides an excellent summary of what was involved and a link to it is provided below in the space provided for a URL. |
| Impact | 'Round Table: Making Corpus Creation in Early Music Rewarding: Finding the Optimum Between Standardization and Scholarly Autonomy', MedRen 2024, Granada, 6-9 July 2024 CORSICA is cited in my follow-on AHRC grant application - APP62407: Digital Music Editions: Creating a SustainableFuture for the Monumental Edition |
| Start Year | 2023 |
| Description | 'Byrd and the Organ'. Lecture/Recital for Glasgow Society of Organists |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Lecture/Recital for Glasgow Society of Organists, St Bride's Episcopal Church, 2 November 2024. This lecture recital was based around a number of my research publications on early English keyboard music, and the consideration of ornaments and their interpretation in Byrd's music directly relates both to this AHRC-funded 'Digital directions for collected editions' and the follow-on grant application which has been submitted. This work is published in a research article (Between Text and Act). It illustrated the necessity for dynamic digital editions of music where each source is separately encoded for each piece so that computational research techniques can be used to address the placement of the ornaments in relation to their interpretation and whether this changed through time. The lecture-recital was an updated version of the one given in Chesterfield, and therefore relates directly to the promised 'plans made for future related activity' promised in its entry on Researchfish. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Lecture-Recital at Crooked Spire Church, Chesterfield |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Saturday 11 November 2023 Lecture Recital at Crooked Spire, Chesterfield, for local organists' associations BYRD 2023 2023 marks the anniversary of William Byrd's death in 1623. This lecture recital was based around a number of my research publications on early English keyboard music, and the consideration of ornaments and their interpretation in Byrd's music directly relates both to this AHRC-funded 'Digital directions for collected editions' and the follow-on grant application which is currently in progress. This work is published in a research article (Between Text and Act). It illustrated the necessity for dynamic digital editions of music where each source is separately encoded for each piece so that computational research techniques can be used to address the placement of the ornaments in relation to their interpretation and whether this changed through time. The publicity material read as follows: 'As we bid farewell to the Franck year, we usher in a celebration of William Byrd's anniversary. This lecture recital will introduce the world of Byrd's keyboard music. In particular, we will explore which pieces are best suited to the organ, what the fingerings in the manuscript sources of this repertoire tell us about how to play early English keyboard music, and how we can go about interpreting the mysterious single- and double-stroke ornament signs. Byrd composed music for players of all levels of ability, so come along to find out more! The lecture will be illustrated both by images and by live performance of extracts from Byrd's magnificent oeuvre.' |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |