Summer 2018 I attended a conference of the Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis (KVNM) in Utrecht. It was their 150th anniversary and so they had a good excuse to come up with a special program: Editing the Past was the part I attended. Don't forget to check their anniversary website.
The theme was: The interaction between editors and performers in the world of new digital possibilities.
Editing music in the past, present and future. A lot of information about how ICT opens up new posibilities, indeed "to boldly go where no musician has gone before..." not only in the realm of editing, by the way.
I choose three contributions that inspired me most:
1. John Rink: Performing the Chopin variorum. With a really amazing website where you can compare many different editions and autographs, bar by bar (!). I give an example from the Etudes Op. 10, nr. 3. Compare the staggering differences between tempo/character marks, metronome marks, and metrone note values... Nice eh? ;-) "What do you make of this, dear Watson?"
And yes, this is the one we discussed in my course Music Philosophy and Aesthetics, where we compared performances by Murray Perahia, Amir Katz and Lang Lang. Check this playlist on Spotify (Pay also attention to the tempo of the middle section in comparison to the first and last section).
2. Stefan Morent: The digital future of early music: editing and performing. See his information on
- the website of Tübingen University
- the website of his ensemble Ordo virtutum
- the website of Fragmentarium, which enables libraries, collectors, researchers and students to publish images of medieval manuscript fragments, allowing them to catalogue, describe, transcribe, assemble and re-use them.
3. Marnix van Berchum: The future is now: innovation in processes and products working towards the new Josquin edition. Take a look at the site of the CMME project (Computerized Mensural Music Editing) especially the The Other Josquin: Music Excluded from the New Josquin Edition.
In my next blog I will share something about Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and the possibilities it gives us to conduct research on recorded material besides scores, with the help of very smart digital tools!
