Beethoven in the House: Digital Studies of Domestic Music Arrangements

Performance of music in the home was the means by which most works were received before the advent of audio recordings and broadcasts, yet the notation sources that form our primary record of this culture have not been the subject of comprehensive or methodical study. Choices made by arrangers adapting music for domestic consumption—of instrumentation, abbreviation, or simplification—reflect the musical life of the 19th-century, and can inform our understanding alongside contemporary accounts such as newspapers, adverts, and diaries.A study of Steiner editions of Beethoven’s 7th and 8th Symphonies and Wellingtons Sieg will make a detailed comparison between arrangements, systematically identifying a core common to multiple versions, and asking if this reflects the stated values of the publisher. A second survey seeks patterns across a larger sample of lesser-known and poorly catalogued scores, collating emergent indicators of arrangers’ motivations within a narrative of the domestic market - the music industry of its day. Both studies innovate digital methods which characterise arrangements as music encodings, including new ‘sparse’ approaches to notation and annotation. Optical Music Recognition and Linked Data will find and structure new knowledge. Results will be digitally represented using an ontology of musicological argument, providing reusable methods and research data for digital musicology, as well as informing the wider digital humanities.Leading experts and institutions from Germany and the UK will work together with combined collections from both countries for the first time. Doing so, they will jointly transform methods and tools in their field of digital musicology. Siegert (Germany Co-I) is the head of Beethoven-Haus research, General Editor of the Beethoven Gesamtausgabe and, as a musicologist, widely published on late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century music. Beethovens Werkstatt, a joint research project between the Beethoven-Haus and the Musicological Seminar Detmold/Paderborn, brings the concept of genetic editing to music, for which Kepper (Germany PI) leads its realisation through the ground-breaking music encoding technology for scholarly editions. Page (UK PI) leads the digital musicology team at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre, which combined Linked Data and music encoding to great effect during the AHRC funded Transforming Musicology project, and subsequently Unlocking Musicology and Digital Delius. Hankinson (UK Co-I) is Senior Software Engineer in Digital Research at the Bodleian Libraries, where he develops digital imaging systems, researches large-scale Optical Music Recognition and distributed music notation search, and serves on the Technical Review Committee for the International Image Interoperability Framework. All four investigators are leading members of the music encoding community, each having served as chair of the Music Encoding Conference.