Sharing News: Early Music Monographs (Books) Digitized!

This is a piece of news that we received via IAML (International Association of Music Libraries) and the MLA (the Music Library Association, an  American organisation).  Copying and pasting shamelessly, because this is news that's bursting to get out, we offer you this exciting snippet:-

"The Music Division of the Library of Congress has launched a new site with scans of approximately 2,000 books on music published before 1800.  The scans were made from microfilmed versions of the books.
https://www.loc.gov/collections/books-about-music-before-1800/about-this-collection/"

Karen C. Lund is the Digital Project Coordinator for the Music Division.

Sold Out! Digital Delius (London, 1 October)

Why share details of a seminar that's sold out?  Well, you never know if there might be a last-minute cancellation!  So we're sharing details of this seminar at the British Library, just in case anyone might be particularly interested.  Anything touching on the digital humanities has a very current resonance, after all.

"How can technology help people access and understand music manuscripts?

"This event has been rescheduled from 16 July.

"Join us for the launch of a new digital exhibition showcasing the music of British-born composer Frederick Delius (1862–1934), including a live performance by the Villiers String Quartet."

 "Daniel Grimley, Joanna Bullivant and representatives from the University of Oxford’s e-Research Centre present an overview of the AHRC-funded project and outline how technologies they have developed can enrich engagement with musical sources and give an insight into the creative process. "

 Monday 1 October, 13:00 - 18:00
Foyle Visitor and Learning Centre
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London
NW1 2DB

And if you're lucky enough to get a ticket ... it's free!

Find out more here:- https://www.bl.uk/events/digital-delius-unlocking-digitised-music-manuscripts 

A new database for British musical festival repertoire, 1695-1940

MUSICAL FESTIVALS DATABASE

This announcement has just been shared with music librarians world-wide.  If you're interested in the history of musical performance and repertoires, then a database of historical music festivals might be right up your street!  Extending from 1695 to 1940, it offers a wealth of information from over 250 years.

Let's quote from the announcement we've just received,

Announcing the Public Launch of the Musical Festivals Database (with apologies for cross-posting)

The Musical Festivals Database (MFD; www.musicalfestivals.org) is now launched! The MFD is a fully-searchable index of programs, personnel, ensembles and venues of musical festivals held in Great Britain between 1695 and 1940. As of May 15, 2017, the MFD contains searchable records for over 500 festivals. These records include complete programs for major festivals such as Birmingham, the Handel Festivals at the Crystal Palace, Leeds, Norwich, and the Three Choirs Festivals. Through searching the MFD, one can trace the dissemination of repertoire throughout Great Britain, track how a singer’s or performer’s repertoire changed over time, see the changes in ensemble size and makeup, or even gauge the popularity of a specific performer, composer, or composition. 

We invite you to explore the site and browse for your favorite performers and compositions. In the next few weeks, we will discuss ways we have used the MFD in classes on our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/MusicalFestivalsDatabase/). In the meantime, feel free to share any comments you have about the site and the information contained within it with us!

Technical: The MFD is an open-access research tool, freely available to all users. It is hosted by the Oberlin College Library, and was created and is supported in collaboration of the Oberlin College & Conservatory Office of Sponsored Programs, Duke University’s Digital Scholarship Services, the Five Colleges of Ohio, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The MFD was created by Charles Edward McGuire of Oberlin College & Conservatory and Chris Borgmeyer of Crooked River Designs. Undergraduate research assistants at Oberlin and graduate students at Duke completed much of the data entry for the MFD. 

The Aria Database 

While we're talking about databases, here's a really useful searchable database listing opera arias along with English translations - the Aria Database, boasting 1288 Arias - 177 Operas - 65 Composers - 389 Translations - 1027 Aria Texts - and 223 MIDIs  ...

http://www.aria-database.com/index.html

.

Scottish musicians might also be interested in a brief history of the very first Edinburgh Musical Festival - NOT the festival that you know and love today, but one that was a brave new attempt way back in 1815 ... 'The First Edinburgh Musical Festival: 'Serious and magnificent entertainment', or 'A combination of harmonious and discordant notes'?' / Karen McAulay, Brio, vol.53 no.1, 35-46
 

Pore (or Drool) over Mediaeval Music Manuscripts Digitised Online - DIAMM

https://www.diamm.ac.uk/

Eton Choirbook (Wikipedia image)

Mediaeval music manuscripts might not be our main focus here at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, but it's always good to enrich our experience of more recent music, with an understanding of much earlier repertoire.  DIAMM is a fantastic starting point.  If "digital humanities" don't yet excite you, maybe this might provide the vital spark!


An introduction from the website, run by the Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford:-

"DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music) is a leading resource for the study of medieval manuscripts. We present images and metadata for thousands of manuscripts on this website. We also provide a home for scholarly resources and editions, undertake digital restoration of damaged manuscripts and documents, publish high-quality facsimiles, and offer our expertise as consultants."

(Karen would very much like that slightly damaged facsimile of the Eton Choirbook, but she'll try to sit on her hands and let someone else snap it up!)

Are You a Romantic (where music is concerned)? Bruckner Online website

Bruckner Online

We thought we'd share this - a "large-scale Anton Bruckner Internet portal that includes complete digital copies of all manuscripts and first editions along with information on relevant persons and places." For anyone needing to know more about Bruckner, it sounds like a great place to start!

• Read the Bibliolore blogpost about Bruckner Online, here.
• Visit Bruckner Online itself, here 

Bibliolore  is the acclaimed blog of RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale), which  can genuinely call itself, "the World’s Most Comprehensive Music Bibliography".  The Whittaker Library at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is a subscriber to RILM (our students and staff can find RILM on our digital collections page), but anyone can visit Bibliolore's great blog.

Lost Voices - New Renaissance Choral Music Project Goes Live

Here's a new link for scholars of Renaissance choral music.  Not just scholars - singers as well!  So this might be interesting to people who sing in a choir, too.  We have permission from Professor Richard Freedman to share a summary of his announcement here. 

http://digitalduchemin.org

Image from the Lost Voices project

 

"I am pleased to announce the public launch of the "all MEI" Lost Voices Project!  It's freely available to anyone interested in Renaissance music—scholars, teachers, performers, and anyone curious about the humanities in the digital domain.

"The Lost Voices Project centers on 16 sets of music books published by Nicolas Du Chemin in Paris in the years around 1550, offering facsimiles and modern editions of almost 400 chansons by composers like Clément Janequin, Claude Goudimel, Etienne Du Tertre, and many others. You can read the complete poem of each piece (with rhyme diagram), scroll through the piece, or listen to the music in high-quality sampled versions (lute in mean-tone tuning).  Help menus explain how to use the many features of our site.  

"The project also opens these chansons to some novel modes of collaborative inquiry. We have built a large database of analytic observations about the music (with some 11,000 entries). You can search, sort, and save your queries. With a free individual account you can collect ‘favorite’ pieces, take private notes on them, and participate in live public discussions about them. (The ‘help’ menus explain how to request an account, or how to reset your password if you already have one).  

"Meanwhile we have created new kinds of dynamic digital editions using the open-source Music Encoding Initiative standard. Here you can view variants and emendations (with critical reports for each piece), as well as display any phrase or analytic segment instantly in any modern internet browser (no special software is needed).  

"You can also take part in our collaborative exploration of the “lost voices”:  reconstructions of the contratenor and bassus parts of dozens of pieces from the last five volumes of our corpus. You can compare different solutions (just as you can compare variant readings for the complete works). If you like, you can also contact us to submit a reconstruction of your own.   

"The project will be explained in an essay in Early Music that will appear in a few weeks. 

"Professor Freedman thanks the many colleagues and students who have made all of this possible; his partners at the CESR in Tours (led by the incomparable Philippe Vendrix) for their patience, enthusiasm and vision; and the  funding agencies whose generous support make all of this possible: the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the), the CNRS, the CESR, and Haverford College.

Further funding allows a related project to run for the next three years.

Does the library have a role to play?  I ask you! Of course we do! 

Read the JISC report here:

http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2012/02/23/does-the-library-have-a-role-to-play-in-the-digital-humanities/

Here's how it begins:-

Does the library have a role to play in the Digital Humanities?

What role does the library have to play in the increasingly data driven, technologically evolving humanities?

Humanities and the social sciences have traditionally been disciplines aligned closely with the institutional library and its resources and services. Increasingly, in my conversations with librarians, there is a concern that while the library as a space remains popular, this masks a growing distance between the services the library provides and the needs and expectations of researchers (to say nothing of undergrads).

As subjects like digital humanities find themselves transformed by their engagement with technology, is the library facing the threat of redundancy?

There has been a flurry of research recently including the RLUK report: Re-skilling for Research and JISC Collections’ UK Scholarly Reading and the Value of Library Resources, exploring the evolving role of the library in supporting researchers....