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The Digital Humanities and Nineteenth-Century Music: An Introductory Overview

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2020

Heather Platt Open the ORCID record for Heather Platt [Opens in a new window]
Heather Platt*
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Ball State University
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The digital humanities have grown to encompass multiple disciplines; they embrace everything from online resources that have the potential to democratize scholarship to computational approaches that allow a higher order analysis of large datasets. That the digital humanities has significantly influenced musicology is evidenced by the number of leading journals, including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Notes, Journal of the Society of American Music and Nineteenth Century Music Review, that regularly review digital resources and by the increasing use of the tag ‘digital musicology’. This special issue of Nineteenth Century Music Review (NCMR) and this introduction reflect a broad definition of the digital humanities; they embrace digital archives, born-digital projects, and studies employing computational methodologies and tools.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 18 , Special Issue 1: The Digital Humanities and Nineteenth-Century Music , April 2021 , pp. 3 - 18
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2020

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Footnotes

I am most grateful for the advice and citations of publications that I received from Sarah Fuchs, Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, John Rink, Daniel Shanahan and Faedra Weiss.

References

1 Numerous articles have debated the definition of digital humanities, and whether it is a field or a discipline; a spectrum of these are reprinted in Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader, ed. Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan and Edward Vanhoutte (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). Ryan Cordell offers a provocative and skeptical overview of the use of the term ‘digital humanities’ in ‘How Not to Teach Digital Humanities’, Debates in Digital Humanities 2016 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016): https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/31326090-9c70-4c0a-b2b7-74361582977e.

2 In her brief overview of the digital humanities and its relationship to musicology, Michelle Urberg traces the intersection of these disciplines to projects in the 1970s such as the Hymn Tune Index, which was compiled and managed by Nicholas Temperley at the University of Illinois; see Urberg, Michelle, ‘Past and Futures of Digital Humanities in Musicology: Moving Towards a “Bigger Tent”’, Music Reference Services Quarterly 20/3–4 (2017): 134–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.1080/10588167.2017.1404301. Although the title of her article includes the word musicology, in the article itself Urberg differentiates between the disciplines of music history and music theory. This is not usually the case in similar surveys of the digital humanities and music. Like the tag digital musicology, such publications follow the European practice of combining history and theory under the umbrella term musicology rather than the US practice of clearly separating the disciplines. Similarly, many of the scholars who work under the rubric of empirical musicology undertake the types of research that scholars in the US more readily associate with music theory than with musicology.

3 In their article in the Companion to Digital Humanities, Ichiro Fujinaga and Susan Forscher Weiss offer one of the broadest views of the digital humanities in music, including the electronic versions of such resources as RILM and Music Index, composers’ use of notation software, digital archives and computer applications. See Fujinaga, and Weiss, , ‘Music’, A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Schreibman, Susan, Siemens, Ray and Unsworth, John (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004): 97–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Many of the larger repositories have been reviewed in this journal and others. See for instance, my review of VIFA in ‘Virtual Library of Musicology’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 10/2 (2013): 359–64; Duchesneau, Michel, ‘Gallica: The Online Digital Library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 11/2 (2014): 337–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Long, Sarah Ann, ‘International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), Gallica, e-codices: Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 71/2 (2018): 561–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 RISM's Online Catalog of Musical Sources (www.rism.info/en/home.html) not only allows traditional searches by composer and title, it also has a keyboard that enables one to search by melody. Entries describing sources for a given composition often include helpful links, some of which lead to digitized manuscripts. The site also releases short news items, such as a recent posting concerning digitized performance materials for Wagner's operas: www.rism.info/home/newsdetails/select/electronic_resources/article/2/performance-materials-from-tannhaeuser-and-meistersinger-von-nuernberg-now-online.html.

6 https://libguides.princeton.edu/digitalscores.

7 https://drm.ccarh.org.

8 The Bizet Catalog: http://digital.wustl.edu/bizet/; McGuire, Charles Edward, ‘Of Programs and Prima Donnas: Investigating British Music with the Musical Festivals Database’, Notes 73/3 (2017): 432–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and https://musicalfestivals.org.

9 https://guides.library.harvard.edu/onmusic.

10 https://prague-concerts.info.

11 Rossini search at Duke University Libraries Digital Repository: https://repository.duke.edu/dc/quartets?utf8=✓&q=rossini&search_field=all_fields.

12 Transforming Musicology: https://tm.web.ox.ac.uk/research/mini-projects.

13 Unlocking Musicology: https://um.web.ox.ac.uk.

14 Duke University Libraries’ ‘Digital Musicology: Getting Started’: https://guides.library.duke.edu/c.php?g=857511. In general, LibGuides are wonderful sources of information about current technology and software, such as text mining tools, that are being employed by digital humanists.

15 https://documentingcarreno.org/ and www.songsofthevictorians.com/index.html#home.

16 https://mugi.hfmt-hamburg.de. Anna E. Kijas's posting ‘Rebalancing the Music Canon’ briefly introduces her project that seeks to address the lack of representation of women and people of color in digital projects: www.annakijas.com/rebalancing-the-music-canon/#more-994.

17 This project, which encompasses over 3,000 texts related to French music and ballet in the long nineteenth century along with related bibliographic resources, is now known as France: Musiques, Cultures 1789–1918, www.fmc.ac.uk/.

18 Aiyegbusi, Babalola Titilola, ‘Decolonizing Digital Humanities: Africa in Perspective’, Debates in Digital Humanities 2016 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016)Google Scholar: https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-4e08b137-aec5-49a4-83c0-38258425f145/section/c9862793-ef00-4d6b-a30c-2f3d354e4e94. This article also touches on other topics that I reference, including the definition of digital humanities.

19 Tom Beghin, et al, Inside the Hearing Machine, www.insidethehearingmachine.com. Sisman, Elaine reviewed the outcomes of this project in Nineteenth-Century Music Review 16/2 (2019): 317–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Boren, Braxton B., ‘Computational Acoustic Musicology’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34/4 (2019): 707–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 For a recent overview of the study of recordings, see Carlos E. Cancino-Chacón, Maarten Grachten, Werner Goebel and Gerhard Widmer, ‘Computational Models of Expressive Music Performance: A Comprehensive and Critical Review’, Frontiers in Digital Humanities 5 (24 October 2018): https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2018.00025.

21 Clarke, Eric, ‘Empirical Methods in the Study of Performance’, in Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects, ed. Clarke, Eric and Cook, Nicholas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 77–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cook, Nicholas, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar, see especially the discussions in chapters 5 and 6 on recordings of Chopin's mazurkas.

22 Information for this centre is available at https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FD502527%2F2.

23 https://charm.kcl.ac.uk. CHARM contributed to the studies of expressive music performance and historical recordings that proliferated following the publication of Philip, Robert's Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance, 1900–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 A number of the publications that emerged from ‘Analysing Motif in Performance’ concern mazurkas and etudes by Chopin. In their study of recordings of Chopin's Mazurka op. 24, no. 2, John Rink, Neta Spiro and Nicolas Gold demonstrate that music's gestural properties are not fully encoded in scores. Rather than focusing on traditional pitch or rhythmic motives, they consider ‘expressive patterns in timing, dynamics, articulation or varied repetition’; see Rink, John, Spiro, Neta and Gold, Nicolas, ‘Motive, Gesture and the Analysis of Performance’, New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, ed. Gritten, Anthony and King, Elaine (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 267Google Scholar.

25 For information about Sonic Visualiser, see www.sonicvisualiser.org. Massimo Zicari's study of recordings of Adelina Patti employed Sonic Visualiser along with more traditional musicological methodologies and sources: ‘Expressive Tempo Modifications in Adelina Patti's Recordings: An Integrated Approach’, Empirical Musicology Review 12/1–2 (2017): http://emusicology.org/article/view/5010/4791.

26 Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performances (London: CHARM, 2009; updated version 2010): www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html. Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). These books are addressed to the musicology and theory communities, but many of the other studies produced by CHARM concern the psychology of music and are published in journals such as Musicae Scientiae.

27 Cook, Nicholas, ‘Computational and Comparative Musicology’, in Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects, ed. Clarke, Eric and Cook, Nicholas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 103Google Scholar. David Huron, ‘The New Empiricism: Systematic Musicology in a Postmodern Age’, Ernest Bloch Lectures, University of California, Berkeley, 1999, www.musiccognition.osu.edu/publications/.

28 Stephen Cottrell, ‘Big Music Data, Musicology, and the Study of Recorded Music: Three Case Studies’, Musical Quarterly 101/2–3 (2018): 216–43. The website of the Digital Music Lab (http://dml.city.ac.uk), an AHRC-funded project, provides access to Emmanouil Benetos's guide to audio analysis and a demonstration of Digital Music Lab VIS, a tool designed for analysing large collections of music.

29 Liem, Cynthia C.S., Rauber, Andreas, Lidy, Thomas, Lewis, Richard, Raphael, Christopher, Reiss, Joshua D., Crawford, Tim and Hanjalic, Alan, ‘Music Information Technology and Professional Stakeholder Audiences: Mind the Adoption Gap’, Dagstuhl Follow-Ups 3 (2012): 235CrossRefGoogle Scholar, http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2012/3475/.

30 Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel, ‘Portamento and Musical Meaning’, Journal of Musicological Research 25 (2006): 240Google Scholar.

31 Music Perception 31/1 (2013) and 31/2 (2014) and Empirical Musicology Review 11/1 (2016) are each devoted to corpus studies.

32 Computational Music Analysis, ed. David Meredith (Cham: Springer, 2015). Each article concludes with a substantial bibliography of publications such as Marsden, Alan, ‘Schenkerian Analysis by Computer: A Proof of Concept’, Journal of New Music Research 39/3 (2010): 269–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 SALAMI: Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information (www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub151/case-studies/salami/). This dataset encompasses a wide variety of music, including both popular and classical genres from across contrasting eras. One case study analyzed the large-scale form of approximately 1,400 of these recordings: Jordan B.L. Smith, J. Ashley Burgoyne, Ichiro Fujinaga, David De Roure and J. Stephen Downie, ‘Design and Creation of a Large-Scale Database of Structural Annotations’, in Proceedings of the 12th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, ed. Anssi Klapuri and Colby Leider (Miami: University of Miami, 2011): 555–60, http://ismir2011.ismir.net/papers/PS4-14.pdf. Karen Ullrich, Jan Schlüter and Thomas Grill are among the scholars to have used SALAMI data; see their ‘Boundary Detection in Music Structure Analysis Using Convolutional Neural Networks’, in Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2014 Taipei), ed. Hsin-Min Wang, Yi-Hsuan Yang and Jin Ha Lee (n.p.: International Society for Music Information Retrieval, 2015): 417–22, www.terasoft.com.tw/conf/ismir2014/proceedings/ISMIR2014_Proceedings.pdf.

34 White, Christopher Wm. and Quinn, Ian, ‘The Yale-Classical Archives Corpus’, Empirical Musicology Review 11/1 (2016): 50–58Google Scholar. See Trevor de Clercq's critique of this study on pp. 59–67 of the same issue.

35 Although there are numerous freely available digitized scores, including those at imslp.org, most are not in a format that can be used for computer-driven analyses. Optical Music Recognition (OMR) and the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) facilitate this type of analysis. See Fujinaga, Ichiro, Hankinson, Andrew and Pugin, Laurent, ‘Automatic Score Extraction with Optical Music Recognition’, in Springer Handbook of Systematic Musicology, ed. Bader, Rolf (Cham: Springer, 2018): 299–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Crawford, Tim and Lewis, Richard, ‘Music Encoding Initiative: Johannes Kepper, Administrative Chair, URL: http://music-encoding.org/’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 69/1 (2016): 273–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 SIMSSA, Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (https://simssa.ca) is a multi-institutional project led by scholars at McGill University that explores both the issues of transforming musical scores to machine-readable content and computer-driven analysis. One of the related projects (CANTUS) focuses on chant manuscripts, while another (ELVIS) deals with counterpoint. Other projects applying digital concepts to pre-nineteenth-century music were published in two special issues of Early Music (42/4 (2014) and 43/4 (2015)). These 27 articles embrace a wide variety of topics including sources studies, analysis, historically informed performance and organology, and they discuss an array of methodologies including text mining and information retrieval.

37 Katelyn Horn and David Huron, ‘On the Changing use of the Major and Minor Modes 1750–1900’, Music Theory Online 21/1 (2015): www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.15.21.1/mto.15.21.1.horn_huron.php. Jessica Narum and Andrew Watkins, ‘Musical Topics in Mozart's Piano Sonatas: A Data Science Approach’, Poster at the 2019 Society for Music Theory Conference, Columbus, OH.

38 ‘Humdrum Tools’, www.humdrum.org. Huron, David, ‘Music Information Processing Using the Humdrum Toolkit: Concepts, Examples, and Lessons’, Computer Music Journal 26/2 (2002): 11–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A number of projects have used Humdrum, including Kern scores, ‘a library of virtual music scores’ that includes nineteenth-century repertoire: http://kern.ccarh.org.

39 VanHandel, Leigh and Song, Tian, ‘The Role of Meter in Compositional Style in 19th Century French and German Art Song’, Journal of New Music Research, 39/1 (2010): 1–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar and VanHandel, Leigh, ‘National Metrical Types in Nineteenth Century Art Song’, Empirical Musicology Review 4/4 (2009): 134–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See William Thomson's critique of the latter on pp. 158–59 of the same issue.

40 Lieder Corpus Project: https://fourscoreandmore.org/scores-of-scores/lieder-corpus-project/. Mark Gotham, Peter Jones, Bruno Bower, Williams Bosworth, Daniel Rootham and Leigh VanHandel, ‘Scores of Scores: An Open Source Project to Encode and Share Sheet Music’, in Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2018): 87–95, https://doi.org/10.1145/3273024.3273026.

41 Other scholars have employed crowdsourcing for a variety of projects. Emily Erken's reception history of musical settings of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is particularly noteworthy because it examines responses to live performances of classical repertoire. These ‘spectator reviews’ were posted to online discussion groups, blogs and ticket-selling websites in Russia. ‘Constructing the Russian Moral Project through the Classics: Reflections of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, 1833–2014’ (PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 2015). Most of the other crowdsourcing projects concern popular music, as is the case with Çano, Erion and Morisio, Maurizio, ‘Crowdsourcing Emotions in Music Domain’, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Applications 8/4 (July 2017): 25–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Marsden, Alan, ‘“What was the Question?”: Music Analysis and the Computer’, in Modern Methods of Musicology: Prospects, Proposals, and Realities, ed. Crawford, Tim and Gibson, Lorna (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 137–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This volume was part of Ashgate's Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities series.

43 For an overview of the promise and challenges of the HathiTrust Digital Library as a dataset to be studied (rather than as a provider of publications) see J. Stephen Downie, Kirstin Dougan, Sayan Bhattacharyya and Colleen Fallaw, ‘The HathiTrust Corpus: A Digital Library for Musicological Research?’, in Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Digital Libraries for Musicology, ed. Ben Fields and Kevin R. Page (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2014), 8p. One of Unlocking Musicology's proof of concept demonstrations explores network analyses of RILM's data; see David Lewis, Yun Fan, Glenn Henshaw and Kevin Page, ‘Musicology of Digital Libraries: Structure in RILM’, in Proceedings of 4th International Workshop on Digital Libraries for Musicology, Shanghai, China, October 28, 2017, ed. Kevin R. Page (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2017): 59–62.

44 This study, a collaboration of Royal Holloway and the British Library, examined 16,000 bibliographic entries in order to understand trends in music publishing from 1550–1700; see Rose, Stephen, Tuppen, Sandra, Drosopoulou, Loukia, ‘Writing a Big Data History of Music’, Early Music 43/4 (2015): 649–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Ormas, Sergio and Sordo, Mohamed, ‘Knowledge is Out There: A New Step in the Evolution of Digital Libraries’, Fontes Artis Musicae 63/4 (2016): 285–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Cynthia C.S. Liem provides a brief overview of some of the technical challenges associated with computer-assisted research of digitized newspapers by discussing a project based on examples from the historical newspaper collection of The National Library of The Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KB). ‘Music in Newspapers: Interdisciplinary Opportunities and Data-Related Challenges’, in Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology (Paris 2018), ed. Kevin R. Page (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2018): 47–51.

47 I discuss some of these types of issues in ‘“For Any Ordinary Performer It Would Be Absurd, Ridiculous or Offensive”: Performing Lieder Cycles on the American Stage’, in German Song Onstage: Lieder Performance in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Natasha Loges and Laura Tunbridge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming): 111–31.

48 See, for example, Burrows, J.F., Computation to Criticism: A Study in Jane Austen's Novels and an Experiment in Method (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

49 Xiao Hu, J. Stephen Downie and Andreas F. Ehmann, ‘Lyric Text Mining in Music Mood Classification’, 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2009), Kobe, Japan, https://ismir2009.ismir.net/program.html.

50 Ryan Cordell and David Smith, Viral Texts: Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines (2017), http://viraltexts.org. This study focuses on newspaper notices that were reprinted in papers published in a number of different US states. Although it does not discuss music, it is relevant to the study of nineteenth-century musical life because viral texts played an important role in disseminating information about performances and musicians in major East Coast cities to readers in more remote locations, such as Lincoln, Nebraska.

51 For an example of another autoethnographic study related to music, see: Bartleet, Brydie-Leigh, ‘Behind the Baton: Exploring Autoethnographic Writing in a Musical Context’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 38/6 (2009): 713–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 The Roaring Twenties: An Interactive Exploration of the Historical Soundscape of New York City, by Emily Thompson and designed by Scott Mahoy: http://vectorsdev.usc.edu/NYCsound/777b.html. Thompson, Emily, ‘Making Noise in The Roaring ’Twenties: Sound and Aural History on the Web’, The Public Historian 37/4 (2015): 91–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a broader study of the use of mapping see Presner, Todd, Shepard, David and Kawano, Yoh, HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

53 Adelusi-Adeluyi, Ademide, of, ‘Historical Tours “New” Lagos: Performance, Place Making, and Cartography in the 1880s’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38/3 (2018): 443–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For her Cartographic Database, see https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/cartographic-database-new-maps-old-lagos.

54 Mia Tootill briefly traces the historical tradition that informs network visualizations and digital mapping projects in her dissertation: ‘Leaping Off the Page: Diabolical Technologies on the Parisian Musical Stage 1827–1859’ (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2017), 195–223.

55 Louis Epstein's mapping website includes a ‘gallery’ of mapping projects, some of which pertain to musical life in the nineteenth century: https://musicalgeography.org/the-maps/.

56 City of Light: www.philharmonia.co.uk/paris. The projects available at the Hampsong Foundation website include Song of America (multi-media resources designed for school teachers) and Song–Mirror of the World, a series of 13 programmes (originally radio broadcasts) exploring art songs of the long nineteenth century: https://hampsongfoundation.org/projects/.

57 www.antonin-dvorak.cz/en/introduction.

58 Pugin, Laurent, ‘The Challenge of Data in Digital Musicology’, Frontiers in Digital Humanities 2/4 (2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fdigh.2015.00004/full.

59 Frontiers in Digital Humanities was publishing a journal titled Digital Musicology, but its webpage now states: ‘This journal and section is closed for submission’, and the Special Chief Editor for the journal is not responding to queries. See www.frontiersin.org/journals/digital-humanities/sections/digital-musicology.

60 The Banjo Project is located at http://banjo.emerson.edu. Eileen Gardiner and Ronald G. Musto briefly discuss funding and tenure issues in the United States. See chapter 6 of The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

61 That there is a greater attempt to create a community of digital music scholars in the UK than in the US is demonstrated by the Digital Music Research Network, which maintains the Digital Musicology announcements and discussion list – http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/dmrn/. This site also includes a list of the numerous UK research groups engaged in the digital humanities.