The Lute in the German-Speaking Area 1450–1550
We are creating an open-access comprehensive and interactive edition of the lute tablatures (special notations for lutes) of the German-speaking area between 1450 and 1550. The corpus (2,000 pages) has not yet been investigated as a whole and is barely accessible to scholars and professional musicians as well as to the broad public, has not been deciphered and has therefore been evaluated only selectively. The reasons for this being the notation (‘German lute tablature’), which is little used today, the sites of the manuscripts scattered throughout Central Europe, and the fact that consistent adequate research methods have not yet been worked up.
The main aim is to create a novel form of music edition: an ‘open knowledge platform’ in which musicology, music practice, music informatics and literary studies intertwine and transform the ‘classic’ edition into a space of interdisciplinary and discipline-specific work. In order to create a comprehensive, complete modern scholarly edition, we synchronise high technology informatics in the fields of encoding, linking, recognition (OMR) and automatic transcription with manual music transcription and musical performance practice. We consider recordings of lute music a conceptual component of the edition. All components will be enriched with music-historical and performance-practical information and interlinked. The edition will be permanently hosted by the Austrian National Library and integrated into RISM Catalogue of Musical Sources. The edition we bring into being is dynamic: We are developing an annotation tool for posting and discussing comments, observations and interpretations that enables our users to co-edit. More…
