Project Description
Synopsis
The first developmental phase of the Online Chopin Variorum Edition project was launched in November 2005 and ended in September 2009. Building on an eighteen-month pilot study, the new phase further exploited the possibilities inherent in an online medium to create a research environment for music with complex compositional or publication histories, recorded in both manuscript and published sources. The emergent system was intended not only to facilitate research on musical sources but also to encourage wider modes of comparison and the reconstruction of creative histories to an extent which could not be easily achieved outside a digital environment.
The project as a whole addressed four key research questions:
- What is a musical 'work', and how is the 'work concept' that has prevailed since the mid-nineteenth century challenged by the Chopin sources?
- What is the best means of capturing in an edition the creative history implicit in the sources, ranging from the earliest sketches through to the last impressions of the first editions and beyond?
- How can the intellectual and logistical difficulties routinely experienced by editors in handling disparate source materials be overcome by means of technological support?
- In what ways might technology change the mode of presenting information previously contained within – or, conversely, uncontainable within – printed editions? Moreover, how might technology fundamentally alter the musician's and the musicologist's understanding of individual sources, their often complex interrelationships, and their significance as artistic and cultural artifacts within a rich history of publication, pedagogy, and performance?
The aims of the first developmental phase accordingly were:
- to broaden the range of repertoire within the OCVE resource
- to expand the scholarly apparatus both in general and with regard to specific case-study pieces
- to develop annotation tools allowing individual users to construct text-critical apparatus of their own.
As a result of the latest research and technical development, the OCVE resource now comprises a broad range of primary source materials for Chopin's Ballades (Opp. 23, 38, 47 and 52), Preludes (Opp. 28 and 45) and Scherzos (Opp. 20, 31, 39 and 54) as well as the Fantasy Op. 49 and Polonaise-Fantasy Op. 61. These materials can be manipulated in a wide variety of ways, allowing new insights to be gained through extraction, comparison, juxtaposition and collation.
Outcomes and significance
The principal outcomes of OCVE's first developmental phase are as follows:
- an online musical edition demonstrating the ways in which scholarship and technology can interact to mutual advantage
- an interlinked archive of digitised manuscript and printed sources of a large body of music, all of which can be displayed in various formats
- detailed philological descriptions written by the scholarly team
- personal annotation tools allowing individual users to create their own virtual OCVE with personal comments at several levels of granularity, and pick-lists of scores or works which persist between access sessions.
The following features of OCVE are particularly noteworthy:
- An important body of primary source material has been comprehensively assembled for the first time, facilitating philological and style-historical investigation and encouraging new understanding of Chopin's compositional and publication histories.
- The OCVE resource – totalling some 2200 images – provides direct access to musicians and musicologists to Chopin's manuscripts and a range of impressions of the first editions of his music.
- The display features have considerable practical and scholarly potential but are simple to use and intuitive in design.
- The online catalogue excerpts and bar-level commentaries foreground the major differences between the manuscripts and multiple first editions, in addition to highlighting their chronological and filial relationships.
- The annotation tools provide users with unprecedented scope to construct their own 'critical commentaries' within what amounts to a uniquely 'dynamic edition'.
- The technical outcomes are generalisable to similar projects of a musical and/or non-musical nature and to other initiatives.
Methodology
The project consisted of four principal activities:
- Acquisition of digital images of Chopin's manuscripts and first editions
- Comparative textual analysis of these sources
- Adaptation and expansion of information derived from the Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions
- Development and refinement of the technical means to display these images and related text, whether generated by the project team or by individual users.
These activities were conducted by the Project Director and two Research Fellows at Royal Holloway, University of London, and by the technical team at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH).
Timescale
In Year 1, the technical team at CCH established standards and methods using nominated library collections for benchmark definition. Dr Grabowski began the analysis while Dr Craig-McFeely proceeded with library orders, database development, mark-up and XML text conversion. Years 2 and 3 involved further scanning, mark-up, text preparation/conversion and analysis of the sources, as well as further development of the extensive database and the web interface. The final year of the project was spent finalising the metadata, refining and testing the interface design, and disseminating the results of the project.
Technical methods
The project team at CCH set and monitored scanning standards, created metadata schemata, and developed tools for online display, manipulation and searching. The team also devised an image-display system allowing musicians and musicologists to search and browse images of different sizes, to move easily between and compare multiple manuscripts and editions of a piece, and to retrieve textual materials in appropriate contexts. They also constructed a set of annotation tools for use by individual musicians, musicologists and others.