Conference Agenda

Within the repertory of thirteenth-century polyphonic music (commonly known as “Notre Dame polyphony”), one of the key issues that most eludes contemporary musicological study is that of musical reuse. This is most frequently viewed through the process of “clausula substitution”, i.e. where sections of polyphony (clausulae) are replaced by alternatives, and clausulae are troped with new texts to form motets. Parallel to this, however, is a complex and largely unstudied network of more subtle interrelationships between settings of polyphony. This network extends beyond simple verbatim borrowing and raises difficult questions around what it means for music to be “similar” or “different”. In addition, the ambiguous and divergent notation present within the extant manuscript sources resists typical editorial practices that are contingent on chronology and an exact distinction between “composer” and “performer”. Instead of being rhythmically fully specified, Notre Dame notation often transmits only mild indications of latent rhythm and voice alignments, which differ wildly between sources. As such, scholarly opinion is undecided on even such fundamental issues as rhythm and alignment.

This paper presents and demonstrates the features of the “Clausula Archive of the Notre Dame Repertory” (CANDR), an online and open source database for thirteenth-century polyphony, augmented by an optical music recognition (OMR) and editing tool. Alongside this is a Python analysis programming toolkit specifically designed to study the problem of musical reuse in medieval polyphony within the limits of its ambiguous notation. CANDR provides a single graphical web interface to browse, search, and edit the sources of Notre Dame polyphony (in both facsimile and symbolic notation) by overlaying notational traces from OMR directly onto facsimile images. The database currently contains full manuscript tracings and symbolic representations of nearly 1,000 settings of polyphony. This symbolic notation can be directly exported from CANDR by way of a novel MEI customisation format that encodes the music as it lies in the manuscript sources rather than attempting rhythmic transcription and, importantly, respects the ambiguity and flexibility of the pre-mensural medieval notation. Finally, this paper presents first results from the novel Big Data corpus analysis which highlights possible connections between settings that were previously thought to be unrelated.

In this paper, we will present an anonymous project focused on the automatic analysis of plainchant found in some Portuguese manuscripts from the 12th to the 17th centuries. The chants to be analyzed are written in two music scripts: neumatic Aquitanian and square notation. This project aims to create a new experimental tool, a prototype interface that compares the same chant, or portion of chant, across the whole repertory of music sources from the selected geographical area. One of the main challenges of this project is to encode and retrieve musical information originally written in two styles of notation. While the musical repertory remained quite stable across the centuries, Aquitanian neumatic notation provided a limited degree of information related to the pitch. On the other hand, the later square notation was much more exact in terms of pitch precision but lost information on specific nuances of vocal delivery (conveyed by the various forms of earlier neumes). Because we are dealing with some old sources, the ones from the 12th – 14th centuries, many are in poor material condition (with wrinkles, holes, humidity, dirtiness, etc.) and a fragmentary state. Fragments from medieval codices of plainchant usually bear little music and display a wide variety of graphical features (decoration, scripts, size of the fonts, etc.). These two aspects make these sources difficult to recognize by optical music recognition (OMR) tools. We will present the encoding process followed to get a sample of 100 chants encoded to be used for analysis in our prototype interface.

This paper explores possibilities for greater interoperability among digital hymnody indices and between hymnody indices and digital libraries of musical sources. These findings stem from a comparative analysis of data models for leading hymnody indices and a higher-level comparison of hymnody indices and related resources and collections of digitized musical sources. I undertook this research in developing a plan to index the contents of the forthcoming Sounding Spirit Digital Library (SSDL), a thematic digital collection of 1,300 vernacular sacred music books from the southeastern United States published between 1850 and 1925. This analysis examines the three most extensive projects indexing hymnody in North America, the Hymn Tune Index (HTI), Southern and Western American Sacred Music and Influential Sources (SWASMIS), and Hymnary.org; the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM); the digital thematic collections American Vernacular Music Manuscripts (AVMM) and SSDL; and large scale aggregators of digitized works like HathiTrust and the Internet Archive (IA). The analysis illustrates a common interest across hymnody indexing projects in documenting hymn tunes, hymn texts, people responsible for these creations, and the sources in which hymns appear and documents the overlapping yet distinct approaches to encoding musical information and other data these projects record pertaining to these categories. The analysis also documents the lack of connectivity among hymnody indices and the uneven approaches toward connecting indexed hymnody to available digitized facsimiles of corresponding musical sources. This project includes a crosswalk detailing metadata fields shared among extant hymnody indices and a set of recommendations for bringing data from these indices and related resources together to facilitate discovery and research.