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.

Printed Sacred Music Database (2014)

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. Contact: psmd@rism-ch.org.

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.

Europeana: Search Engine for European Manucripts=

Website: http://www.europeana.eu

This umbrella site for European digitization projects covers a great deal beyond 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.