Digital directions for collected editions: keyboard music by British musicians before c.1700

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.