Links for Digital Musicology

This wiki provides links to substantial projects of use to musicologists, particularly those involved with digital editions, music encoding, and topic-specific resources.

Databases

Repertories

Secular Vocal and Folksong Repertories

CLORI: Archive of the Italian Cantata

Website: http://www.cantataitaliana.it/

CLORI, which hosts cantata texts, manuscript source citations, and images that show characteristics of handwriting, has a number of sponsors and collaborators including the Italian Musicological Society (SIM in Italian), the University of Rome (Tor Vergata), the Italian Institute for Music History (IISM), and RISM. The project is headed by Teresa M. Gialdroni. Click the "ricerca" button to go to the search form.

VolksLiedWerke (Austrian Folksong Database)

Website: http://www.volksmusikdatenbank.at/

The VolksLiedWerke is assembled from collections originating in Austria's states. Search by title, personal name, or corporate name. Supported by the Austrian National Library (&Oumlaut;sterreichische Nationalbibliothek) and other entities. Some regions have separate websites, such as this one for the Tyrol: http://www.volkslied.at/lieder/volksmusik-db.php, where scores and recordings may also be found.

Deutsche Volksiedarchiv (German Folksong Archive)

Website: http://www.dva.uni-freiburg.de/

The German Folk Music Archive (in German) has evolved over a century (to 2014) as a central clearing house for folk songs from German-speaking lands. It contains several component parts including (1) a Lieder lexicon in which folksong texts are listed alphabetically (http://www.liederlexikon.de/lieder); (2) a listing of specific projects, mainly those with a critical dimension (http://www.liederlexikon.de/ueber_liederlexikon_de/projekte); and (3) a popular-music Song Lexicon (http://www.songlexikon.de/).

English Broadside Ballad Archive

Website: http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/

Six thousand English broadside ballads, mainly from the seventeenth century. A collaborative project that is still growing.

Old English Songs

Website: http://athena.uky.edu/oes/intro.htm

This collection, housed at the University of Kentucky, was once owned by the double-bass player Domenico Dragonetti. The contents mainly consist of opera arias (Handel, Bononcini, Purcell) and cantatas (rather than folksongs or sea shanties) in scanned images.

Sacred and Liturgical Music

Conductus: Online catalogue of poetry and musical settings

Website: http://catalogue.conductus.ac.uk/#m-columnbrowser@||m-informationcontrol@url=html/home.php

Content: Mark Everist's conductus cataogue, officially called CPI (Cantus pulcriorem invenire, contains 835 works found in 547 sources. It facilitates search by title, source, form, style of setting, stanza, poet, language, poetic structure (several subfields), and terminal accent. Sources listed are digitized and viewable online. Cross-listed to DIAMM and RISM.

Cantus Fractus Database (Raphael)

Website: http://www.cantusfractus.org/

An abiding problem in chant research is the evaluation of rhythm and proportion. This website (in Italian) by Marco Gozzi explores interpretative methods for repertories that are viewable online in early prints and manuscripts. A search form facilitates the retrieval of examples by source location.

Mass Database

Website: http://www.mdb.uni-mainz.de/

Content: Records for c.40,000 settings of the Ordinary of the Mass from 1400 to the present day. In process of migration (March 2014).

Motet Database

Website: http://www.arts.ufl.edu/motet/default.asp

Content: Guide to motets and Mass Propers in manuscript and printed sources from the period 1475-1600. 33,000 items, indexed section by section. Excludes Magnificats, Lamentation, canticle and strophic hymns. Extensive scribal and source detail.

Printed Sacred Music Database

Website: http://www.printed-sacred-music.org/pages/indexes.

This collection of metadata and musical incipits (1500-1800) has been developed over decades under the direction of David Bryant at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini Onlus, Venice, with significant contributions by many individual scholars, and is now served at the Institute of Musicology, University of Fribourg (CH) and implemented by the Swiss RISM office. Search by composers, publishers, musical incipits, and much else. The musical incipits are encoded in DARMS and are rendered in mensural notation.

Medieval Music Database (MMD)

Website:http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/MMDB/Feasts/l08065000.htm

The original database, a model of integrated presentation combined with independent search of text and music fields, was developed by John Stinson and John Griffiths at LaTrobe University (Australia) between 1987 and 1999, when the university's music department was closed. It was maintained over the next five years by the University Library and is still accessible (2014) at the above link. Plans to bring it under the umbrella of DIAMM are under discussion.

One of MMD's great strength, for students of liturgy, is the ability to scroll bilaterally through the temporal and sanctoral cycles, that is by feasts of the Ordinary and those of the Proper. Many other search fields are supported including text, composer, genre, manuscript, and melody. MMD is cross-reference to the CAO database.

The musical examples in MMD were produced with Scribe software, also developed by Stinson and Griffiths (c. 1990). It encoded neumes and ligatures (mainly for 14th century music) for printing on a color deskjet printer. It was designed the DOS operating system and could export to the SCORE music-notation program.

Instrumental Music

Classical String Quartets

Website: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/quartets/

Content: Duke University's Classical String Quartets website may not represent the largest collection of this repertory, but it is the largest collection of digitized prints currently accessible online. Its contents are characterized as "rare and unusual" rather than mainstream. If you are looking for variety, consider Förster, Gassmann, Pixis, or Wranitsky (a small sampling of composers represented).

Composers

Works of Ludwig Senfl

Website: http://www.senflonline.com/

The most important composer in Bavaria in the first half of the sixteenth century, Ludwig Senfl (c. 1490-1543) spent almost all his life in the Munich court chapel, first as choirboy, then as musician and composer. Polyphonic incipits in mensural notation are among the items that can be retrieved by genre, voicing, and so forth. Cross-linked to DIAMM.

Sheet Music Archives

Danish National Sheet Music Archive

Website: http://www.kb.dk/en/nb/samling/ma/digmus/index.html

The Danish National Sheet Music Archive is a model operation. Note the frame at the left, which identifies all digitized music; a special collection for flute; another for guitar; and the entire Carl Nielsen Edition available for download. Although Danish music is well served, the site includes a great deal more, including eighteenth-century manuscript, standard repertory in high-quality late nineteenth-century prints, and a special theater collection (libretti et al.).

Image Archives

Digital Image Archives of Medieval Music

Website: http://www.diamm.ac.uk/

Originally a site for viewing images of rare manuscripts at various levels of resolution, DIAMM is increasingly an umbrella site for diverse projects in medieval music. The core textual database is organized by source location. Registered users may add their own comments about individual works. List and faceted search capabilities are currently being added. Now includes an online teaching resource for musicians wishing to learn more about the notation of medieval music. Register at http://diamm.nsms.ox.ac.uk/moodle/.

Emblematica Online

Website: Emblematica Online

Content: The Herzog August Bibliothek in makes available 636 emblems books, which are rich resources for those interested in decoding visual information in early printed materials. Most collections are from the 17th and 18th centuries, although the history reaches back into the 16th.

Rare Music Manuscripts in the British Library

Website: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/musicmanu/

Content: See the Old Hall manuscript, Purcell's coronation anthem for James II, an excerpt from Handel's Messiah, Bach's autograph for Book Two of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Mozart's thematic catalogue of his composition, Beethoven's sketches for the Sixth Symphony ("Pastoral"), and much else. (Music manscripts make up just one part of the holdings viewable at this portal.)

Musica Sacra

Website:http://musicasacra.com

Content: notable collection of scanned chant books at http://musicasacra.com/music/ and http://musicasacra.com/resource-lists/. Includes the Liber Usualis and many other resources for modern use in traditional settings.

Resources for Chronology

Hofmeister XIX

Website: http://www.hofmeister.rhul.ac.uk/2008/index.html

Content: Database of 330,000 records from the Hofmeister Monatsberichte, 1829-1900, listing music publications of the period. Compiled by Friedrich Hofmeister and published in Leipzig by Breitkopf & Härtel. Well indexed for quick searches.

Libretto Portals

VifaMusik Libretto Portal

Website: http://libretti.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/start/static.html

The new (2014) VifaMusik Libretto Portal searches across component collections held in the Bavarian State Library, the Frankfurt University Library, and the Library of the German Institute in Rome. 5,600 digitized sources are available for viewing and downloading.

Corniani-Algarotti Collection

Website: http://www.braidense.it/cataloghi/catalogo_rd.php

Although the search form shows only four field, the name field (nome) will accept almost any proper noun (surname of composer, librettist, scenographer, city, theater, etc.). Most sources are digitized and downloadable. Holds 9,000 libretti (in Italian) from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Some were published and used outside Italy. Mainly opera, but includes some oratorio and serenata texts.

Search Engines for Music

Europeana: Search Engine for European (Music) Sources

Website: http://www.europeana.eu

This umbrella site for European digitization projects covers a great deal besides music. To start, limit the search by an obvious word for music (musique, musica, Musik, etc.). This will give you an idea of how to further limit the search. Europeana is updated often. Among the items that should be visible are music prints, manuscripts, newspapers dedicated to music, sheet-music, audio files, etc. Since Europeana is an aggregation, it provides links back to the sponsoring libraries that hold the original sources. The site can be searched in many languages.

Peachnote Music n-Gram Viewer

Website: http://www.peachnote.com/#!nt=singleNoteAffine&npq=62+0+1+2+0+-2+-1+-2

MIDI-based search by string.

Themefinder: Music-Incipit Search

Website: http://www.themefinder.org

Related literature: "Search-Effectiveness Measures for Symbolic Music Queries inVery Large Databases" (Craig Stuart Sapp, Yi-Wen Liu, and Eleanor Selfridge-Field)

The Themefinder search engine was prototyped at CCARH in 1996 by David Huron, Andreas Kornstädt, and Walter B. Hewlett. A large number of Stanford University students including Unjung Kim and Leigh VanHandel plus visiting students including Bret Aarden, participated in its early development. The search engine was originally developed to study user behavior. Over the intervening years it has been used for a large statistical study of search-efficiency. The current search engine is by Craig Stuart Sapp.

Themefinder contains several repertories, most of which are publicly viewable and searchable. The principal repertories are Folk, Classical, and Renaissance. Although more than 100,000 incipits and associated metadata are present in the database, users may select just one. "Hits" satisfying search-criteria can be collected on the Themefinder Clipboard and can be exported.

Incipits can be searched at five points on a continuing from the most specific to the fuzziest. Filter for meter, mode, and key may be used. MIDI files are available for each entry. Help menus area available at the website. Those interested in contributing an encoded repertory to Themefinder should describe the existing repertory and format in a query letter.

Music Theory Resources

Early Music Theory

Website: Early Music Theory

Illustration of the Sixth Rule from De imperfectionum notarum musicalium.

Contents: Early Music Theory subsumes the new digital edition of the works of Johannes Tinctoris. Twelve treatises are listed on the earlier Stoa site, and three are viewable.

Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum

Website: Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum

The TLG, based at Indiana University School of Music, was begun in 1990 and extensively developed by Thomas Mathiesen, with the collaboration of many scholars in the US and abroad. TML was one of the earliest databases (and likely to earliest in musicology) to be fully searchable in a single pass.

While this database is exclusively devoted to writings in Latin from antiquity to the seventeenth century, the rise of parallel efforts for digitizing the texts of music-theoretical writings in modern languages spawned several parallel efforts, which are now subsumed under the title CHTML (the Center for the History and Theory of Music Literature xx).

Giuliano Di Bacco, who now heads the project, is at work on new digital approaches to presenting and searching the material.

Thesaurus Musicarum Italicarum

Website: Thesaurus Musicarum Italicarum

Frans Weiring's Thesaurus Musicarum Italicarum, which is entirely separate from the TLG, representeda second incarnation of his CD-ROM encodings of all the treatises of Gioseffe Zarlino (1995). The CD offered all the musical examples as MIDI and DARMS files as well as modern notation. Its viability was undermined by the evolution of operating systems in the early 2000s. Other works of Italian music theory from the decades following Zarlino were encoded subsequentlyby students at Utrecht University.

Historical Maps

British Historical Maps

Website: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/maps/

The National Archives (UK) hosts a large collection of maps and also has links to parallel materials with similar content.

David Rumsey Map Collection

Website: http://www.davidrumsey.com

Contents: 18th and19th century maps of the Americas. All maps are geo-encoded to facilitate geo-spatial and past-time applications.

Perry-Castañeda Historical Maps

Website: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/index.html

Notable for its spatial and historical spread and the detail with which the maps are specified chronologically. Many sources are scanned from maps printed in then nineteenth (or earlier) century.

Resources in Parallel Disciplines

Digital Libraries Gateway

Website: http://international.loc.gov/intldl/find/digital_collaborations.html

This Library of Congress gateway for international projects gives an overview of collaborative projects with an American component and currently including Brazil, France, the Netherlands, and Siberia.

Digital Scriptorium

Website:http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/digitalscriptorium/

Content: Image database of medieval and renaissasnce manuscripts. Based at the University of California, Berkeley, it includes holdings from many US libraries, with extensive folio-specific information about each source.

Index of Christian Art

Website: ica1.princeton.edu/

One hundred twenty thousand (120,000) images from public and private collections in the English-speaking world plus additional indicies; roughly 100,000 are available to public via fee-sbased institutional subscriptions. Holdings from early centuries of Christianity to 1550.