Making Musicology in a Digital Age

Novel technologies of inscription have always complicated the relationship between authors and readers. This is especially true of the performing art of music. From the beginnings of western musical notation a millennium ago, to the advent of the printing press (around 1500), to sound recording about a century ago, new technologies of transcription and reproduction brought about means for controlling the effects and purposes of music, even inaugurating a new sense of it as intellectual property. Each was a new medium of its day, and each brought with it new ways for composers, performers, and listeners to interact around musical ideas.

Now the digital domain dominates our encounter with music, exploding notions of genre, history, and ownership in ways that we have yet to fully comprehend. Digital texts can help us imagine a time before the great collected editions and genre-bound monuments in our libraries, replacing them with layered, dynamic texts that exist (as they did five hundred years ago) in their variants. Analytic engines can crunch vast quantities of notes, exposing the art of combinations that lurks in every piece of elegant Renaissance counterpoint, and revealing subtle connections across genres, styles, and sources. Together we will consider some recent developments in the field as they relate to Renaissance music in particular, and look ahead to the work that lies ahead as we put machine and human modes of reading into counterpoint with each other.

Speaker

Richard Freedman

LE STUDIUM Visiting Researcher

FROM: Department of Music, Haverford College - US
IN RESIDENCE AT: Centre for Advanced Studies in the Renaissance (CESR)  / CNRS, University of Tours - FR