Mike Heaney, Director. Bodelian Library Broadside Ballads URL: Patricia Fumerton, Director. ...

Digital and Multimedia Scholarship

Johannes Tinctoris: Complete Theoretical Works. Ronald Woodley, Director.URL: http://earlymusictheory.org/Tinctoris/

Johannes Tinctoris (ca. 1435–1511) is today widely recognized as one of themost articulate music writers of his generation and as a perceptive observer ofthe musical practices of his time. The sizeable body of musical tracts and trea-tises that he authored early in his career easily amounts to the most compre-hensive summa of the aesthetics and pedagogy of music from the decadesaround 1500 that has come down to us. Not surprisingly, then, modernscholars often turn to Tinctoris when seeking to piece together a “native” per-spective on both technical issues (such as mode and counterpoint) andbroader aspects of musical culture (such as the listening experience and theevolution of musical style). Tinctoris’s observation, around 1473, that themusical works older than forty years were no longer fashionable in his dayscontinues to inform the historiographic debate on the origin of the musical“Renaissance.”

Tinctoris penned his twelve extant musical treatises during the 1470s inNaples, where he was in the service of the court of King Ferrante of Aragonas chaplain, legal advisor, and—until 1476—music tutor of Ferrante’sdaughter Beatrice. The chronology of his musical writings is a matter ofsome debate. According to Ronald Woodley and Rob Wegman, most ofTinctoris’s treatises date to the period immediately after his arrival in Naples(ca. 1472–75).1 These include the Expositio manus, on the gamut and sol-mization; the Proportionale musices, on proportions and their application tomusical notation; the Complexus effectuum musices, on the benefits of musicand its effects on the soul;2 the first compilation of the Terminorum musicaediffinitorium, one of the earliest dictionaries of musical terms and the onlyfinished treatise that Tinctoris gave to the press, and the group of severalsmall tracts dealing with mensural notation, such as the Tractatus alteratio-num and De regulari valore notarum, which may reflect the author’s earlier

1. See Grove Music Online, s.v. “Tinctoris, Johannes,” by Ronald Woodley, accessed June 4,2014, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/27990; and RobWegman, “Tinctoris’s Magnum Opus,” in Uno gentile et subtile ingenio: Studies in RenaissanceMusic in Honour of Bonnie J. Blackburn, ed. M. Jennifer Bloxam, Gioia Filocamo, and LeofrancHolford-Strevens (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), 771–82, at 772.

2. An earlier version of this treatise, and possibly even of theDe inventione, may date to thepre-Neapolitan phase of Tinctoris’s career. See Wegman, “Tinctoris’sMagnum Opus,” 774–78.

musical activities in Orléans and Chartres. Albert Seay and, more recently,Cecilia Panti have proposed a slightly different chronology that assigns mostof these works more firmly to the middle of the decade, and the Expositiomanus to the second half of the decade.3

Unquestionably to the years 1476–77 date instead the treatises on modesand counterpoint, much discussed in modern scholarship because of theirreferences to the compositional practice of the generation of Antoine Busnoysand Johannes Ockeghem. Tinctoris’s last treatise, the De inventione et usumusice, was meant to offer a weighty account of the origins of music and musi-cal instruments. Only a few random chapters from this work appeared in printin Naples in 1482–83; an abridged version of theComplexus is transmitted in aCambrai manuscript as one chapter of book 1.

Three principal manuscripts, in Brussels, Valencia, and Bologna, preservevirtually all of Tinctoris’s theoretical writings; only the fragmentary Deinventione is missing in all of them. Individual treatises are also found inother manuscripts now held in Ghent, Florence, and Bologna. Because theyall originated in Naples during the last decade or so of Tinctoris’s Neapolitansojourn (from the late 1470s to ca. 1490), the readings of these threesources differ overwhelmingly only in relatively minor details of grammarand syntax. Only the texts of the Complexus and of theDiffinitorium, whichhave survived in different versions, involve significant textual variants. Pantihas argued that the later revisions to the Diffinitorium signal a conceptualshift away from the theories of Marchetto of Padua on the issue of the divi-sion of the tone, and toward Boethian doctrines.4

The Brussels manuscript was the primary source for the first modern editionof Tinctoris’s works, published by Charles Edmond Henri de Coussemaker inthe last of the four-volume set of his pioneering anthology of medieval musicaltexts, the Scriptorum de musica medii aevi.5 Coussemaker’s edition, whichdid not include the De inventione and was based on a limited number ofsources, was most valuable by mid-19th-century standards, and put Tinctorissolidly on the map as one of the most accomplished music writers of his time.Nevertheless, it wasmarred by textual inaccuracies, particularly in the transcrip-tions of the musical examples.

The critical edition by Albert Seay, commonly used by present-day scholars,was actually less complete than Coussemaker’s in that it featured neither theDe inventione nor theDiffinitorium, on the questionable argument that thesetreatises were already available in reliable modern editions.6 Although Seay’s

3. Johannes Tinctoris, Opera Theoretica, ed. Albert Seay, Corpus scriptorum de musica 22,([n.p.]: American Institute of Musicology, 1975), 1:7; Cecilia Panti, critical commentary toDiffinitorium musice. Un dizionario di musica per Beatrice d’Aragona, by Johannes Tinctoris(Florence: Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, 2004), xv–xxiii.

4. Ibid., xxxii–xxxvi.5. Paris: Durand and Pedone-Lauriel, 1876; reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1963 & 1987.6. Tinctoris, Opera Theoretica, 1:8.

842 Journal of the American Musicological Society

transcriptions of the musical examples are also far from flawless—one stillnotices missing rests, unnecessary clef transpositions, and wrong pitches—his readings of Tinctoris’s texts are on the whole accurate, and based on acritical examination of the textual variants. Thus, given that Seay’s edition maystill be regarded as adequate for modern research needs, and considering thatno new treatises or sources connected to our author have come to light inrecent times, one may reasonably wonder whether a new, comprehensiveedition of Tinctoris’s treatises is at all needed.

The scholarly initiative discussed here—Johannes Tinctoris: CompleteTheoretical Works [hereafter: JTW]—moves from the premise that a newTinctoris edition in digital format is indeed a desirable resource for scholarsof medieval and Renaissance music. As stated in the JTW home page:

This project, currently in its initial stages of development, presents a completenew edition of Tinctoris’s treatises, along with full English translations andmultiple layers of commentary material, covering a wide range of technical,historical and critical issues arising from both the texts themselves and the widercontext of Tinctoris’s life and the musical environment of early RenaissanceEurope. Combining the highest levels of historical, textual and criticalscholarship with innovative technological presentation, this open-access editionexplores new methods of relating text-based materials to the numerous, oftencomplex, music examples that punctuate the treatises.7

The scholarly merit of JTW, then, is to be judged primarily on its ability todeliver the well-known texts by Tinctoris in a dynamic new format thatenlists state-of-the-art technology for the purpose of eliciting “new methodsof relating text-based materials to . . . [the] music examples that punctuate[them].”An earlier version of JTW directed by RonaldWoodley (BirminghamConservatoire of BirminghamCity University), had likewise aimed at pursuingan in-depth investigation of Tinctoris’s notational theory by means of, forinstance, detailed commentaries to the musical examples of the Tractatusalterationum.8

The new digital edition marks a decisive improvement on the earlier oneat all levels. The transcriptions of the individual manuscript readings faith-fully retain even the colorful inks of the original sources, down to the alter-nating blues and reds of paragraph markers; thus, JTW users can taste againthe full meaning of the term “rubric.” But even more impressive in designand accuracy are the reproductions of the numerous examples of mensuralnotation, which also support the display variant readings through the samepop-up boxes used for textual variants (see below). The editors plan to makeall of the texts (and the musical transcriptions as well) available in TEI- and

7. Accessed July 8, 2014, http://earlymusictheory.org/Tinctoris.8. The Theoretical Works of Johannes Tinctoris, ed. Ronald Woodley, accessed July 8, 2014,

http://www.stoa.org/tinctoris/tinctoris.html. This “legacy” site remains temporarily accessi-ble from the home page of JTW.

Digital and Multimedia Scholarship 843

MEI-compliant encodings. The use of such standards in this and otherscholarly editing projects will do much to sustain such work in the future andto encourage collaboration among groups of scholars.9 On the other hand,the complexity of the input, markup, and layout of the data via a custom-built parser, compounded with the limited human resources involved withthe project, are bound to slow down somewhat the pace of publication ofthe texts—no doubt, a price worth paying for the added technologicalsophistication and flexibility. Yet, precisely because of its enhanced technology,the scholarly potential of the site seems destined to outgrow the relativelylimited objectives that originally inspired it, and gradually to support andstimulate more ambitious research agendas.

It is important to read the general programmatic intentions cited above inlight of the fact that the new edition is still very much in “its initial stages ofdevelopment,” having been officially launched as recently as December2013. Thus, the purpose of this report is not so much to evaluate the meritsand limitations of the site in its current shape, as to comment on its potentialfuture capabilities as a scholarly resource, as well as to offer a few suggestionson the possible shapes that it might take down the road. The announce-ments periodically posted on the site blog provide information on theupgrades being considered for implementation, pending the availability offunding. In addition, the director of the project, Prof. Woodley, has kindlyshared additional details in a personal communication with this reviewer.10

The contents of JTW are easily accessible through a series of tabs underthe main header (see Fig. 1). The tab “Tinctoris” leads to a detailed andup-to-date biography of the author, and to a bibliography of over twohundred titles (given its sheer length, this might perhaps be consulted moreeasily by dividing it up under subheads). Under “Commentary” users willfind two recent studies by Prof. Woodley (“The Dating and Provenance ofValencia 835: A Suggested Revision,” and “Syncopated Imperfection andAlteration in Tinctoris’s Theoretical Writings”). The core content of theedition is accessible from the “Texts” menu. Four treatises by Tinctoris arecurrently available: De notis et pausis, De imperfectione notarum musicalium,De punctis, and De inventione et usu musice (the counterpoint treatise is

9. The Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml) and theMusic EncodingInitiative (http://www.music-encoding.org/exist/apps/mei/home) are types of ExtensibleMark-Up Languages (XML) that permit the adaptive reuse.

10. E-mail letter of May 28, 2014. The other two members of the project team are JeffreyDean (senior researcher) and David Lewis (technology expert). The Birmingham Conservatoireprovides what should be a lasting administrative and technological support for the project,which is currently funded until December 2014 with grants from the Arts and HumanitiesResearch Council UK and the Birmingham Conservatoire. In the interest of full disclosure: theauthor of this report is to deliver a keynote address at the conference “Johannes Tinctoris andMusic Theory in the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance” organized by Prof. Woodley(London, October 9–10, 2014).


slated to be the next item on the list). Clicking on any of these titles activatesthe main text frame and a new set of menus and commands for visualizingTinctoris’s writings in various reading modes, each highlighting different fea-tures of the edition. The first menu on the left, on the title header, enablesthe selection of a particular version of the text from a menu that includesthe edited Latin, its English translation—a most valuable feature, consider-ing the unavailability of reliable English translations of musical treatisesonline—or any other manuscript reading available for that particular treatise.The option “Edited Latin” activates the cogwheel to the right, by whichusers can display or hide the textual variants, and select either the modern orthe original punctuation. The tab “Section” allows prompt access to a partic-ular book and chapter within a treatise. Moving the pointer over the text willactivate an additional section locator on the upper right corner of the header,which numbers the sentences, marked by full stops, in both the editedLatin and each individual reading. The plus sign (“+”) to the right ofthe cogwheel opens a new window for visualizing a different version of thesame treatise; it is possible to have up to at least five windows opened at thesame time.

The ability to visualize multiple copies of a text without recourse totedious critical reports—and, eventually, to consult the online facsimile ofthe original source, should anyone wish to second-guess the editor—is anotable asset of JTW. Simply put, the new edition already enables modes of

Figure 1 Main Text Frame of JTW in two-window mode. The color-coded portions of thetext on the left window highlight the terms with textual variants, while the right window showsthe available versions ofDe notis et pausis. URL, accessedMay 15, 2014, http://earlymusictheory.org/Tinctoris/texts/denotisetpausis/#pane0=Edited&pane1=Translation. This figure appears incolor in the online version of the Journal.


reading that are not possible with the printed book, and that thus far havenot been available to scholars and students of Renaissance music theory. Atthe same time, however, the traditional way of navigating a critical commen-tary is still an option— one that, for its part, has also been made easier: byselecting the tool “Show variants” in “Edited Latin”mode, users gain accessto the discordant readings shown in green. The variants are visualized in ayellow box that quickly appears on the screen when the pointer hovers onthe color-coded term (see the screenshot in Fig. 2, left window). By clickingon the green term, the box showing the variant reading(s) (and, in a plannedupgrade, the editorial annotations as well) stays alive even when the pointeris moved elsewhere, an option that also allows floating the box anywhere onthe screen (Fig. 2, right window).

Convenient and discreet to the eye as it is, the method of displaying thevariants via pop-up boxes presents the information in a way that is unfortu-nately not actionable by the user. Even in the age of online editions there isvalue to a critical apparatus accessible independently of the main text, laid outwith its own numerical sequence, and transferrable to a word processor.Adopting both “soft” and “hard” options for presenting the annotationsseems a desirable solution, in line with the different modes of reading the orig-inal texts that the edition encourages; the annotations could also be conceivedinteractively, as direct links to other resources. Likewise, the idea of pop-upboxes seems a possible, unobtrusive way of numbering the musical examples,which could likewise be listed elsewhere with their own captions in a format thatallows them to be retrieved and cited more easily than in the current format.

Despite the exciting new possibilities for displaying the edited texts onthe computer screen, the current version of the website is not taking fulladvantage of its intertextual potential. Firstly, the content of JTW, regret-tably, is still not searchable at all. This is no doubt the most noticeableshortcoming of the present site, which, however, is soon to be correctedin a new version of the site that will also introduce the TEI markup ofTinctoris’s texts.

Secondly, the current site offers no direct links to standard online resources inthe field, such as the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML) and the Lexiconmusicum Latinummedii aevi (LmL), which allow readers to analyze Tinctoris’stexts against the broader context of Latin music theory.11 The link to the TMLwould make Seay’s edition of Tinctoris’s texts, for instance, amenable to closecomparisons with the JTW readings (a somewhat similar result may of course beachieved already, if crudely, by using two adjacent browser windows). Discrep-ancies between the two editions could perhaps be flagged as variants. However,changes on this front are forthcoming, as the next public upgrade scheduled for

11. The TML can be accessed at http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/start.html; the LmLat http://www.lml.badw.de/ and, for the vocabulary of technical terms, at http://woerter-buchnetz.de/LmL/ (all accessed July 8, 2014).


Fall 2014will likely feature a direct link to the Tinctoris sources that are availableonline in facsimile editions.12 This is an important step which will allow studentsto gain familiarity with the scribal and book-making practices of Tinctoris’s time.

Closely related to the last point is the observation that the present version ofJTW does not yet allow for the simultaneous display of different texts orresources—including different treatises by Tinctoris—as the display window isconceived as a function of the chosen text, not vice versa. This upgrade, if im-plemented, will mark a significant enhancement over the present capabilities ofthe site that will, for instance, allow the user to compare quickly Tinctoris’sdefinitions of a technical term as they appear in theDiffinitorium and in othertracts, not to mention those found in the large body of Latin music theorysampled in the LmL.13 Another desirable feature, perhaps more appropriatefor the larger “Early Music Theory” portal than for the Tinctoris site per se,is a thesaurus of technical terms that might also illustrate their applicationto composition and performance, along the lines of the resource that isbeing developed for the Lost Voices Project as part of the broader Digital

Figure 2 Two-window frame showing the same text excerpt from De punctis on two parallelwindows, with musical examples and pop-up boxes indicating the textual variants. URL, accessedMay 15, 2014, http://earlymusictheory.org/Tinctoris/texts/depunctis/#showvars0=true&showvars1=true&pane0=Edited&pane1=Edited. This figure appears in color in the onlineversion of the Journal.

12. The Valencia facsimile is available via the Europeana Regia site, accessed July 8, 2014,http://www.europeanaregia.eu/en/manuscripts/valencia-universitat-valencia-biblioteca-his-torica-bh-ms-835/en.

13. Michael Bernhard, ed.,Dictionary of Medieval Latin Music Terminology to the End of the15th Century (Munich: Bavarian Academy of Sciences, 1992–). The online version of thedictionary is at http://woerterbuchnetz.de/LmL/.


DuChemin initiative, directed by Richard Freedman and Philippe Vendrix.14

Other planned improvements—introductions to the treatises, technical com-mentaries on the details of Tinctoris’s theory of notation, and the transcrip-tion in modern notation of the musical examples (soon to be available in apioneering treatment of the Mensural Music Notation module of the MEIstandard)—will further increase the pedagogical value of the edition.

Yet, the interoperability of the site need not depend exclusively on accesso-rial tools and technological improvements, if and when they become a reality.Some of Tinctoris’s own texts also present an ideal opportunity for tapping abit deeper into the interactive potential of digital technology. For instance,the Complexus effectuum musices is not only available in two different redac-tions, but it is also modeled after treatises by Gilles Carlier, Dean of CambraiCathedral and professor of theology (ca. 1390–1472), and by the DominicanHumbert of Romans (ca. 1194–1277).15 Thus, by expanding the scope ofthe forthcoming digital edition of the Complexus to include the network oftexts that relate to it more or less directly, JTW could serve as a catalyst foraddressing or revisiting key research questions having to do with, for instance,Tinctoris’s authorial practices, his relationship with Neapolitan intellectualcircles and other scholarly traditions, and his intellectual and religious leanings.In a similar fashion, a future online edition of theDiffinitoriummight contem-plate highlighting the passages from the treatise that were quoted by laterauthors—a relatively short list. This information would cast some light on thereception of Tinctoris’s text by drawing attention to the particular definitionsthat were cited, the context of citation, and so on. In short, theComplexus andthe Diffinitorium, and perhaps other treatises by Tinctoris, could be taken ascase studies pointing to medieval music theory not as a fixed disciplinary body(despite the stability of many of its basic doctrines), but rather as the productof a rather chaotic process of transmitting musical knowledge through publicand private activities, and by oral and written means. But whether or not itembraces this editorial philosophy, JTWmay already be recommended as awell-conceived and pathbreaking initiative that brings together rigorousscholarly standards and state-of-the-art technology, with much to offer topresent and future students of early music theory.

STEFANO MENGOZZI

14. The current version of the thesaurus, accessed July 8, 2014, is downloadable at http://duchemin.haverford.edu/editorsforum/ecole-thematique-2013. A similar project, led byMagnus Williamson of Newcastle University, aims at editing and reconstructing the “TudorPartbooks,” a major source of 16th-century English polyphony, accessed July 8, 2014,http://www.ncl.ac.uk/hss/about/news/item/grant-success.

15. See Reinhard Strohm and J. Donald Cullington, eds., On the Dignity and the Effects ofMusic: Two Fifteenth Century Treatises, trans. and annotated by J. Donald Cullington, with anintroduction by Reinhard Strohm (London: Institute of Advanced Studies [King’s CollegeLondon]: 1996), and Wegman, “Tinctoris’s Magnum Opus,” 774–76.


Bodelian Library Broadside Ballads. Mike Heaney, Director. URL: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/

English Broadside Ballad Archive. Patricia Fumerton, Director. URL:http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/

When I began my dissertation on seventeenth-century English music anddrama in 1996 at the University of Michigan, online databases were justbecoming available to scholars. I was fortunate to attend an institution thatwas directly engaged in these new digital initiatives, and U of M providedcutting-edge resources to those who sought new ways of doing scholarship.1

My interaction with these new web-based tools, particularly the Early EnglishProse Drama Database and the Early English Verse Drama Database,profoundly shaped my dissertation and first book, as they allowed me to dokeyword searches of a wide corpus of drama.2 If I wanted to find all the playsin which a particular character appeared (Venus), I could easily do so with afew keystrokes. I could even couple my initial search term (“Venus”) withanother search term (“sing,” “music”) to locate scenes in which a singingVenus appeared (i.e., perform a Boolean search). What in the past wouldhave required years of intensive work in the archives was now accom-plished in a much shorter span of time. It is no great exaggeration, then,to say that internet databases have shaped the kind of research I did andcurrently do.

With these new possibilities, however, came pitfalls and limitations. Mysearches were only as accurate as the underlying metadata. If things had notbeen properly (or sufficiently) coded on the back end, then my search wouldnot turn up all the needed results. I quickly discovered that my search results,while providing a good starting point, could not replace old-fashionedlegwork. In other words, my online database searches needed to be verifiedand amplified by reading printed sources and spending extended periods oftime in the archives.

Almost twenty years on and the situation for scholars of early modernEnglish music and culture largely remains the same, although we have signif-icant new tools at our disposal: Early English Books Online (EEBO) andEighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) allow searches of a broadvariety of early modern and eighteenth-century English books and musicand let the user view materials online or download them as TIFFs or PDFs.The EEBO-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP), an offshoot of theUniversity of Michigan’s aforementioned digital initiatives, allows keyword

1. In 1994 the University founded the Humanities Text Initiative, which encoded docu-ments using SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language).

2. These databases, which first appeared online in 1996, are now available via subscription aspart of the Literature Online database, accessed June 9, 2014, http://literature.proquest.com.


searches of XML/SGML3 encoded electronic text editions of early modernprinted books. XML, a metalanguage that was developed in the mid-1990s,facilitates new ways of searching, as it establishes rules for naming and defin-ing parts of a document and their relationships with each other. UnlikeHTML, there are no standardized tags; users can customize project- ordocument-specific tags. The flexibility of XML has allowed programmers toencode a plethora of metadata for documents, which facilitates accuratesearching. Furthermore, XML has improved accessibility and sustainability,as XML documents can be interpreted by many different software systemsand are compatible with all currently used browsers.4

All these resources have transformed the ways that scholars in my fieldwork, but our searches are only as good as the underlying coding. And whileimprovements have been made, there are still significant searching errors.Early modern spelling was notoriously fluid, and databases have difficultycoping with erratic syntax. The EEBO database has faced this problemhead-on. On the primary search page one can check a “variant spellings”box. Earlier this year, this function did not work very well, but when I re-cently tested the variant spelling feature by searching for “Davenant” (whichwas also spelled as “D’Avenant”), the search results pulled up both spellings,as advertised. Other databases have not yet tackled this issue, but as the caseof EEBO shows, these resources are dynamic and are frequently updated.Whatis a problem today may not be a problem next month (or even next week).

The two collections under consideration in the present review, the BodleianBroadside Ballads database (http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads), which hasbeen online since 1999, and the English Broadside Ballad Archive at theUniversity of California at Santa Barbara (http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu),which began in 2003, have many of the same benefits and drawbacks asEEBO and ECCO.While these broadside ballad databases are tremendousresources for any scholar of early modern England seeking to understandthis widespread genre of multimedia entertainment, they also suffer fromthe same problems of incomplete/incorrect searches. To summarize: if themetadata is faulty, then the search results will be incomplete.

The Bodleian Broadside Ballads Database

Any scholar who has worked at the University of Oxford (or for that matterhas even visited as a tourist) has some idea of the vast cultural and historicallegacy of this institution. Not surprisingly, Oxford’s Bodleian Library, one ofthe premier research libraries in the world, was at the vanguard of variousdigital initiatives in the 1990s, including the Broadside Ballads project.

3. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a subset of SGML. It is now more commonlyused than SGML.

4. For more on XML, its relationship to SGML, and its uses, see The Chicago Manual ofStyle, 16th ed., section A. 11–15, accessed June 9, 2014, www.chicagomanualofstyle.org.


The cataloging of 30,000 sixteenth- to nineteenth-century ballads in theBodleian’s collection was undertaken over a lengthy period of time. The firstcatalog was made on handwritten slips, but in the 1980s Stanley Gillam anda team of volunteers turned these slips of paper into a comprehensive list ofthe Library’s broadside ballad holdings. Computerization of the catalog wasbegun when digital technology was still in its infancy, and this stage of theproject was apparently conceived as a means to a printed end. John Jolliffeand Geoff Neate input 10,000 records of ballads, and the print-out from thisproject was, for many years, the only publicly available catalog of the ballads.

In 1995 The Broadside Ballads Project began with funding from the NFF(Non-Formula Funding) Specialised Collections Initiative. Broadside balladspresented a special set of challenges for those creating the database, for theycombine text, image, and music. Under the direction of Mike Heany, theteam started the arduous process of computerizing the entire ballad cataloginto the allegro database system as well as providing an index of the wood-cut illustrations of the ballads and scanned images of the printed balladbroadsides.5 There are two types of records in the catalog: 1) sheet recordsthat describe the physical object; printing, illustration, and any damage orother added elements such as manuscript notes, and 2) ballad records thatdescribe the text of the songs printed on the sheets: title, first line, subjects,authors, and performers if named.6 The scanned images were catalogedaccording to the ICONCLASS system, which assigns each image an alpha-numerical code. For instance, the ICONCLASS code for a “sailor” is45D323. Each number or letter has a relational meaning (4: Society, Civili-zation, Culture; 45: warfare, military affairs; 45D: insignia, division of armedforces, ranks; 45D3: ranks in the army, navy, air force; 45D32: ranks in thenavy; 45D323: “sailor”)7. This system facilitates classification string and key-word searching by image type. In addition,MIDI sound files were attached tothe records of broadside ballads that contained a musical score (a very smallpercentage of the collection, as broadside ballads generally use the rubric“to be sung to the tune of x” rather than printing musical notation).8

The search interface presents the researcher with a number of options.One can browse the index (see Fig. 1) do a simple search of the index usingone of eight delimiters (as seen in Fig. 2), or formulate a Boolean search,combining up to three search terms with the same delimiters (see Fig. 3).

5. For more information on the allegro database system, accessedMay 28, 2014, see http://www.allegro-c.de/allegeng.htm; allegro was probably chosen with sustainability and accessibilityin mind: it does not require additional software to run and is cross-platform compatible. The his-tory of the Broadside Ballads Project is summarized, accessed May 28, 2014, from http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/project.htm.

6. Taken from the description of the database, accessed May 25, 2014, http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/help/using.htm.

7. For more on ICONCLASS, accessed May 25, 2014, see http://www.iconclass.nl/home.8. The MIDI files were recorded at a lugubrious quarter note=96 with minor errors tacitly

corrected.


Figure 2 Search Interface with delimiters, from Bodelian Library Broadside Ballads, accessedMay 25, 2014,http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/help/using.htm. This figure appears incolor in the online version of the Journal.

Figure 1 Browsable Index of Ballads, from Bodelian Library Broadside Ballads, accessedMay 25,2014, http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/help/using.htm. This figure appears in color in theonline version of the Journal.


If the search pulls up results, one is taken to a brief record page, which maybe expanded by clicking on the “show records” button. The expanded re-cord page provides information about the printer, date, shelfmark/copy,and title. (see Fig. 4). The order on this page may be sorted by earliest orlatest publication date and there are three formatting options: standard,ICONCLASS (which will give the alphanumerical codes associated witheach image), or tagged (which displays MARC=Machine Readable Catalog-ing). Each record has a link to a scanned broadside ballad image, and, ifapplicable, the related sound file.

The Bodleian Broadside Ballads Database provides the researcher with amultitude of ways to search, and its scope is unsurpassed. Using it in my ownresearch, I have noticed several ways the database could be strengthened.The inconsistency of early modern spelling presents an issue; for this reasonsearches do not always turn up accurate results. Searching by ICONCLASSis also quite difficult. One must ferret out the ICONCLASS alphanumericalcode (available via the separate website referenced in note 7 or via theICONCLASS view on the search result page) before that search term canbe deployed. Even with these imperfections, the database is an invaluableresource for scholars interested in early modern English musical culture.BecauseMIDI recordings of some of the tunes are available, it also makes theballads with musical notation accessible to non–musically literate scholarsworking in other humanities disciplines.

Figure 3 Boolean search with delimiters, from Bodelian Library Broadside Ballads, accessedMay 25, 2014, http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/help/using.htm. This figure appears incolor in the online version of the Journal.


The English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University ofCalifornia at Santa Barbara

The English Broadside Ballad Archive (abbreviated EBBA) at the Universityof California at Santa Barbara corrects some of the flaws found in the olderBodleian database. Although the coverage is not as extensive as the Bodleian’s(5,975 ballads have been cataloged so far—or 59.75% of the extantseventeenth-century corpus), the cataloging is far more complete. Accordingto the history page of the database website, the project was conceived in 2003“out of sheer frustration.” The Director of the project, Patricia Fumerton,wanted to research and teach broadside ballads but her efforts were thwarted.Original copies were “highly guarded at libraries on either side of the pond,”microfilm copies were frequently illegible or difficult to locate, printededitions were flawed in numerous ways, EEBO did not (and does not) havemany of the extant ballads in their database, and those that were online werenot searchable by collection or “finer cataloguing details.”9

Figure 4 Sample bibliographical records, from Bodelian Library Broadside Ballads, accessedMay 25, 2014, http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/help/using.htm. This figure appears incolor in the online version of the Journal.

9. Accessed May 27, 2014, http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/page/history. Fumerton haswritten elsewhere about the digitization of broadside ballads; see, for instance, “Rememberingby Dismembering: Databases, Archiving, and the Recollection of Seventeenth-Century Broad-side Ballads,” in Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800, ed. Patricia Fumerton, AnitaGuerrini, and Kris McAbee (Farnham,UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 13–34; andher jointly authored article with Carl Stahmer, Kris McAbee, and Megan Palmer Browne,“Vexed Impressions: Towards a Digital Archive of Broadside Ballad Illustrations,”New Technol-ogies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 3 (2011): 259–87.


EBBA sought to fix these issues. It gathered together broadside balladsfrom many different collections, providing ballad sheet facsimiles, facsimile(i.e., diplomatic) transcriptions, recordings (where the tune is known andextant), and extensive cataloging, which allows both basic and advancedsearching capabilities. In May 2003, the process began with the PepysBallads, housed at Magdalene College, Cambridge and then moved ontothe Roxburghe Ballads held by the British Library, London. Other collec-tions archived to date are the Euing collection from the University ofGlasgow and 600 early broadside ballads at the Huntington Library in SanMarino, California. Current projects include archiving the Crawford collec-tion from the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. Given the intenseinterest in the digital humanities, as one might expect, the project has re-ceived substantial funding over the years, including multiple grants fromthe National Endowment for the Humanities.

The landing page for the site is dynamic and up-to-date, with a Twitterfeed in the right-hand corner and a shifting line-up of topics that uses thecollection to illuminate aspects of early modern popular culture. The lasttime I visited, the Twitter feed addressed the tragic mass shooting on theUCSB campus and presented news about current projects (in this case theEBBAMusic Team’s work on the Rosebery Collection—a group of Scottishballads; see Fig. 5). The design is clear and uncomplicated, and one can do asimple search of the collection right from the landing page.

Both the basic and advanced search functions are easy to use and thecataloging is certainly more extensive and complete than its Bodleian coun-terpart. My simple search on “sailor” turned up 86 entries. The records pagegives a clear sense of the information available for each ballad. (see Fig. 6).From the results page, one may click through to specific data sets about eachballad, or may view the complete record. In this case, the information is ac-cessible via menu tabs at the top of the page (see Fig. 7). Perusing each ofthe tabs in turn, one cannot help but be impressed with the attention todetail. The citation page presents the fields that have been cataloged. For thecurious (or the MARC-XML aficionado) one may view this entry as MARC-XML code. Unlike the Bodleian database, dates are given for most balladsand keywords are presented, allowing for keyword searching of content, andboth the first line and the refrain have been cataloged. Other ways in whichthe EBBA database transcends its Bodleian counterpart is its inclusion of afacsimile transcription for each ballad (for those who have difficulty readingseventeenth-century typescript) and an a cappella vocal recording is pro-vided for many of the entries. These ballad singers (just as in early modernEngland) are not all created equal. Some performances are quite pleasant,while others are a bit painful to the ears. (For a link to a pleasant one,go to: http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/31663/recording.) Despitethe inconsistency of quality, including vocal performances allows listeners(particularly non-musically literate ones) the ability to understand how


these pieces functioned in early modern England. Thus, the recordings,despite their flaws, are preferable to the soulless MIDI provided on theBodleian site.

Entries also include a text transcription that has been coded as XML, ren-dering it fully searchable and machine readable for the visually impaired.These XML documents have been developed to be compatible with TEI(Text Encoding Initiative) standards. According to the EBBA website:

TEI tags define elements of a literary text in terms of meaningful and search-able content rather than visual format. Within the Early Modern Center balladcollection, for example, TEI tags identify the poetic and bibliographic elementsof ballads explicitly as stanzas, lines, refrains, publisher, author, publicationdate, and so on.10

Furthermore, as TEI is a standardized non-proprietary text format, thechances of obsolescence are reduced.

Impressive advanced searching options are also available. One may searchby title, full text, first lines, date, author, printer/publisher, imprint, license,

Figure 5 Home page, from English Broadside Ballad Archive, accessed May 25, 2014, http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/. This figure appears in color in the online version of the Journal.

10. Accessed June 9, 2014, http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/page/tei-xml.


collection, and ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue) number. In additionto these more quotidian options, the adventurous researcher may also searchby EBBA keyword, Samuel Pepys’s original cataloging terms for his collec-tion, the tune title on the sheet, or the standardized tune title as given byClaude Simpson.11 Finally, the database provides an elegant solution forimage searching. Images have been organized according to subject, allowingkeyword searches (see Fig. 8). The possible keyword searches are, at present,too broad (i.e., “animal(s),” “woman/women”). As we have seen, searchingby alphanumerical code (as one does with ICONCLASS) is problematic, butallows for a more refined search than is currently possible on EBBA. Hope-fully in the future, EBBA catalogers will have time to further refine these sub-jects or bring them into line with iconographical cataloging standards such asICONCLASS. Ideally, one would merge the refinement of ICONCLASSwith the keyword searchability of EBBA.

Beyond the database, the EBBA project has provided three “visualiza-tions” that summarize data that emerged from the archiving project. The first,

Figure 6 Sample search results, from English Broadside Ballad Archive, accessed May 25,2014, http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/. This figure appears in color in the online version of theJournal.

11. Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music (New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press, 1966).


“Black-letter Ballads vs. White-letter Ballads” is an interactive graph, whichshows the number of each ballad type plotted by year. The second visualiza-tion provides a comparison between the number of ballads with and withouttune imprints (i.e., those that mention a tune vs. those that do not—this doesnot refer to the presence of musical notation). The third visualization is themost promising. Perhaps taking a cue from the EarlyModernMap of London(http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/), the “Geography of the London BalladTrade” provides an interactive mapped timeline of early modern ballad sellershop locations (1550–1700). Now available in a beta version, one can view ananimation that shows the locations of sixteenth-century, early seventeenth-century, mid-seventeenth-century and later seventeenth-century shops inturn. Unfortunately, the researcher and designer, Eric Nebeker, overlays hisdata on a modern map of London; however, as the timespan under consider-ation is so broad, no single early modern map would suffice for his project.Other kinds of “visualizations” would be tremendously useful, although it isnot clear if EBBA is pursuing new “big data” projects. For example, a visuali-zation of the most popular ballad subjects by year would allow researchers tounderstand how ballads responded to current events. One could also trace therise and fall of a popular ballad tune. For instance, “Fortunemy foe”may havebeen a big hit earlier in the seventeenth century, but by end of the century

Figure 7 Sample scanned ballad, with tabbed headings for display of transcription andbibliographical information, from English Broadside Ballad Archive, accessed May 25,2014, http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/. This figure appears in color in the online version ofthe Journal.


Figure 8 Search interface, with keywords and collections control, from English BroadsideBallad Archive, accessed May 25, 2014, http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/. This figure appears incolor in the online version of the Journal.


I suspect it had been supplanted by other songs such as “Lillibulero” or “Iflove’s a sweet passion.”

Ballad Database Integration

Beginning in 2011 the Bodleian Library, with funding from the JISC (JointInformation Systems Committee) began a project to link its extensive balladdatabase with the EBBA at UCSB as well as the Roud Broadside Index atthe Vaughan Williams Memorial Library,12 facilitating interoperability and“allow[ing] cross-searching via an open semantic cataloguing standard,which will be published.”13 Thus, the underlying data and metadata for allthree databases were made available and a common set of cataloging termswere developed. The project was completed in January 2013 and a newonline portal went live that same year (http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/).The new portal is far more user friendly than the older Bodleian BroadsideBallad Database and adopts many of the design elements found on EBBA(see Fig. 9). One immediately notes the basic search box on the landingpage as well as dynamic “News” and “Featured Ballad” sidebars. There isalso an associated blog, which keeps readers apprised of database develop-ments and associated events, although there were some broken links (e.g.,the link to “The humours of bow Fair”) and the blog appears to be infre-quently updated. Furthermore, the Ballads Blog does not replicate the menustructure found on the main site, making it more difficult to navigate betweenthe ballad database and blog.

Beyond these updated features, there are also many improvements tofunctionality. The database holdings are browsable according to one ofeleven content areas (subjects, themes, dates, locations, printers/publishers,authors, performers, tunes, imprints, shelfmarks, collections) and one mayperform an advanced search combining up to eleven search terms (includingRoud number) (see Fig. 10). A collections page lists the different collectionsincluded in the database, and one may click through to find additional infor-mation regarding the history and scope of each collection (see Fig. 11). Onemay also perform an illustration search by ICONCLASS via a more user-friendly mechanism than the older Bodleian Broadside Ballads Database. Byclicking on a subject area one can automatically see the ICONCLASS code, in-stead of changing formatting view or visiting an external site. Finally, image-searching software created by the Department of Engineering Science’s VisualGeometry Group at the University of Oxford allows the researcher to matchone image to another, purely on the basis of visual likeness. In theory, one may

12. The JISC is a joint organization set up by the Higher Education Funding bodies ofEngland, Wawles, Scotland, and Northern Ireland to fund information technology investmentin UK Universities, accessed May 28, 2014, www.jisc.ac.uk.

13. Accessed May 25, 2014, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/content2011_2013/broadsideballads.aspx.


Figure 10 Advanced search page for multiple databases, from Broadside Ballads Online,accessed May 25, 2014, http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. This figure appears in color in theonline version of the Journal.

Figure 9 Integrated search page for multiple databases, from Broadside Ballads Online,accessed May 25, 2014, http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/. This figure appears in color in theonline version of the Journal.


find all the ballads that reuse a particular woodcut or image.14 At present 916images are searchable via this software. Unfortunately, performing this searchalso takes the user to another site and, as with the Blog, it has a different layoutand menu structure that makes it difficult to return to the ballad databasehomepage.

Overall, the Broadside Ballads Online interface is far superior to the BodleianBallads Database in terms of accessibility, accurate searching capability, and theimpressive use of image-matching software to facilitate new kinds of research.However, there are still some kinks to be ironed out. Ideally, Broadside BalladsOnline would have a login mechanism, which would allow users to savesearches or documents to an online account.15 At the very least, the ability toaccess one’s search history would be useful. It is also unclear whether previouslycataloged Bodleian materials will be reworked to bring them into line with thestandard found in the EBBA. Will new recordings be done of the Bodleianholdings (to replace the old MIDI recordings)? Will TEI compatible XML

Figure 11 Sample collection scope and history description, from Broadside Ballads Online,accessed May 25, 2014, http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/. This figure appears in color in theonline version of the Journal.

14. Dr. Anders Ingram describes a discovery he made using the image match technol-ogy in an April 2014 blog entry, accessed May 28, 2014, http://balladsblog.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/blog/1071.

15. EBBA also does not have a mechanism for logging in or saving searches. DIAMM (Dig-ital Image Archive of Medieval Music) is an example of a database that does facilitate this kind ofaccess. After registering and agreeing to terms of service, users can login, comment, and savesources to their account; accessed June 17, 2014, see http://www.diamm.ac.uk.


coding be done on the Bodleian ballads to facilitate more detailed keywordsearching? Will transcriptions be made to render the ballads accessible for visu-ally impaired users? Will the musical notation that infrequently appears onbroadsides be encoded and if so, what standard will be used? How might thatbe integrated into these transcriptions?

The integration between the two databases is also flawed. When a searchpulls up an EBBA entry, the user is redirected to the EBBA website, causingsite navigability issues, as one must use either the browser history or the backbutton to return to the Broadside Ballads Online landing page. Finally, thesearch functionality on the EBBA site is still superior to that on the Broad-side Ballads Online site. As an experiment, I did a basic search on BroadsideBallads Online for a Pepys Ballad that is archived on the EBBA site (“Down-Right Dick of the West”). My basic search turned up no results on BroadsideBallads Online, while the exact same basic search on EBBA produced threeresults. In sum, it appears that there are still some problems that need to befixed before Broadside Ballads Online (despite its superior scope) can be aseffective a research tool as EBBA. Still, the integration project, once thebugs are resolved, promises to bring together the substantial resources ofthese two extremely useful databases.

Conclusion

Earlier this year I was writing an essay on music and sailors in early modernEngland. I used the aforementioned databases extensively for this research,as many broadside ballads recounted tales of sailors and their naughtyexploits. I cross-checked EBBA, Broadside Ballads Online, The BodleianBroadside Ballad Database, and EEBO. I found a plethora of resources thatin the past would have required a lengthy and costly archival research trip. Inthis age of reduced funding, increased numbers of contingent faculty withlimited resources, and diminished research accounts, these online databaseshave become even more crucial to our project as musicologists. And becausemusical recordings are available for quite a few of the ballads on these data-bases, the usefulness of these resources extends well beyond our discipline.Non-musically literate scholars in other fields can hear how these balladssounded, allowing them to experience them as multimedia works. Onecould also use these databases in the classroom, teaching students how towork with materials from the distant past. It is not hyperbole, then, to statethat freely available digital resources such as the Bodleian Broadside BalladProject, the English Broadside Ballad Archive, and Broadside Ballads Onlinedemocratizes knowledge, allowing access to those who would have beendenied access in the past. A seventeenth-century balladmonger advertised hisor her wares through public performance, making the ballad’s content avail-able to the literate and illiterate, those who could afford to buy them andthose who could not. In a sense, then, these database projects do a similar


kind of cultural and political work, facilitating the engagement of a widersegment of the population—academic and non-academic, musicologist andnon-musicologist—with rare primary sources. I commend Oxford andUCSB for supporting these projects and hope they will continue to refinethem in the years to come.

AMANDA EUBANKS WINKLER

Arnold Schoenberg Center. Christian Meyer, Director. URL: http://www.schoenberg.at/

Britten Thematic Catalog. Chris Grogan, Project Manager. URL: http://www.brittenpears.org/

John Cage Unbound: A Living Archive. John Haim, Curator. The New YorkPublic Library for the Performing Arts. URL: http://exhibitions.nypl.org/johncage/

My goal here is to survey the ways in which archival materials are being madeavailable online for three composers: Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten,and John Cage. These three may seem an unlikely trio; indeed their works,ideas, and their relationships to the past and to their audiences represent verydifferent trajectories in twentieth-century music. But one thing they allshared was a profound and life-long interest in preserving their sketches andmanuscripts, correspondence, writings, libraries, and much of the minutiaeof their creative and personal lives. Their own collections—subsequentlysustained and developed through the efforts of their families, partners, andcolleagues—became the basis for the archives now housed at the ArnoldSchönberg Center in Vienna, the Britten-Pears Foundation in Aldeburgh,and the major Cage holdings in several libraries, including the New YorkPublic Library for the Performing Arts. While no doubt the three composershad different reasons for preserving so much, they all seemed to have had apronounced self-consciousness about their roles as composers. I have writtenelsewhere about how Schoenberg’s sense of someone always looking over hisshoulder as he worked could be seen as setting the stage for the fullyequipped replica of his Brentwood studio we can now observe in Vienna.1

But in the same way, a visitor to Britten’s Red House can also examine a res-toration of his carefully designed composing room. And of special relevanceto the topic at hand, the John Cage Trust has recently released a 4’33” app

1. Auner, “Composing on Stage: Schoenberg and the Creative Process as PublicPerformance,” 19th-Century Music 29 (2005): 64–93.


that allows listeners anywhere to eavesdrop on the sounds of Cage’s NewYork apartment.2

While we can only speculate which of the three would have been the mostlikely to maintain a webpage or Twitter feed about their works and workingmethods, we can observe the dramatic impact of the Internet on how theirarchives are being made accessible to the world. The Schoenberg Center hashad a robust web presence since its founding in 1998.3 The NYPL’s JohnCage Unbound: A Living Archive was launched in 2012 as part of the com-poser’s centenary celebrations.4 Britten’s thematic catalog, along with theredevelopment of the archive and library at The Red House, was made avail-able to coincide with his centennial in 2013.5

These remarkable resources for research and teaching represent quitedifferent models for how websites and interfaces can be designed, reflectingthe particular nature of each composer’s Nachlaß as well as their contrastingcreative personae. These sites illustrate how digital tools for organizing andsearching massive amounts of data can provide different ways to approachfamiliar problems as well as new research methodologies and paths ofinquiry. This in turn points to the increasingly crucial interactions amongarchivists, librarians, web designers, and programmers in shaping how infor-mation of every sort can be organized and presented.6 Just as important, withtheir emphasis on accessibility and new forms of interactivity facilitated bythe online environment, the three websites show what can be achieved byexpanding the possibilities of a truly public “public musicology.”

Given Schoenberg’s long life, the experience of two world wars, and hismany addresses in Vienna, Berlin, Boston, and Los Angeles, it is astonishinghow much he managed to preserve. After he moved to Berlin in the fall of1911 he wrote to Alban Berg:

I very much count on having you and Linke or Polnauer pack the things in myroom. My books, manuscripts, scores, etc. Of course if necessary I will employa packer to help. But it has to be done with intelligence and love. So that ab-solutely nothing gets lost! Unfortunately I am terribly pedantic in this regard.

2. http://johncage.org/4_33.html, accessed July 8, 2014.3. Schoenberg’s archive was housed in the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at the University of

Southern California in Los Angeles from 1977–1997.4. According to a communication from the curator John Haim, the URL will be changed in

the near future to http://digitalcollections.nypl.org as part of the library’s effort to consolidateits digital resources in a single portal.

5. The thematic catalog is currently in Beta status; it is anticipated that the catalog numbersand other aspects will be finalized in early 2015.

6. I wish to express my gratitude to the archivists who responded to inquires regarding thisessay: Jonathan Haim from the New York Public Library, Lucy Walker of the Britten-Pearsarchive, and Laura Kuhn, director of the John Cage Trust. I am especially grateful to ThereseMuxeneder and Eike Fess of the Arnold Schönberg Center for their invaluable assistance overthe years. Of course, none of these scholars is responsible for any errors or omissions in this survey.


You know I can’t throw away an old pen without “a quiver of the heart!”That’s why I am very anxious.7

The Center’s website offers a portal into Schoenberg’s personal Nachlaß, aswell as a great deal of material that is held in other collections, in particular thelarge body of letters that Schoenberg donated to the Library of Congress in1951.8 In addition to the archive and a large research library, the Centerincludes a gallery with changing expositions (documented on the webpagewith videos and photos), a performance hall with an active series of concertsand masterclasses (many of which are also streamed live), and a shop thatmakes available an extensive selection of scores, recordings, books, andjournals, including the Center’s own publications, such as the Journal of theArnold Schönberg Center and an extensiveCatalogue raisonné of Schoenberg’spaintings and drawings.9

Combatting the common image of Schoenberg as a lonely and mis-understood prophet—an image that he himself sometimes embraced—it isnoteworthy that the Center’s home page includes a wide range of materialsintended for the general public, much of which is accessible in both Germanand English. A biographical timeline includes a link for each work withbackground information, details on the performance and publication history,a discography, and a streaming recording. There are also links to a databaseof more than 3,500 photographs, Schoenberg’s paintings, and other multi-media materials posted on the Center’s YouTube channel. Introductions toSchoenberg’s music, thought, and influence are provided through a collec-tion of interviews he conducted throughout his life, along with short writingsabout him by other composers and artists from Wassily Kandinsky to DanielLiebeskind. Further resources for the reception of his music can be found in acollection of more than 500 concert reviews.

One of the most innovative features of the website is a virtual topography,accessible on a computer or mobile device, that maps photos, films, and docu-ments on to the globe making it possible to trace where Schoenberg lived andtraveled, along with his vast network of relationships around the world. Thiscomplements the massive database of correspondence, which numbers morethan 20,000 letters to and from Schoenberg, all represented by scans andtranscriptions. Many Schoenberg letters have been published, and a multi-volume set of the complete correspondence of the Second Viennese Schoolis underway. But the ability to search the entire database online, using many

7. The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence: Selected Letters, ed. Juliane Brand, ChristopherHailey, and Donald Harris (New York: Norton, 1987), 15.

8. Information on the location of sketches and manuscripts of Schoenberg’s musical andliterary works is provided in Gerold Gruber, ed., Arnold Schönberg: Interpretationen seinerWerke (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 2002).

9. There is a satellite museum in Schoenberg’s house in the suburb of Mödling, which alsoincludes rooms for guest scholars supported by the Center’s research grants.


terms such as to/from, date, address, and any word that appears in the text,obviously makes this a powerful resource.

Throughout his life Schoenberg expended enormous energies explaininghis music in print, lectures, and through the radio. It is thus fitting that somuch of the material he preserved and cataloged is now readily available toanyone with an Internet connection. The text manuscript section includesaround 12,000 pages, which include published and unpublished writingsand lectures on a vast range of topics. As with his correspondence, whilemany of his unpublished writings have been made available and a criticaledition of Schoenberg’s complete writings is now underway at the Center,the online environment facilities quick searches for terms and names as wellas an exploration of Schoenberg’s often extensive revisions to his writings ashis ideas developed and changed over the years.

Of central importance are themore than 8,000 pages of sketches, drafts, andfair copies relating to his published and unpublished compositions. Thisincludes a large number of fragmentary works, several of which, like the ThreePieces for Chamber Orchestra, Die Jakobsleiter, and Moses und Aron haveassumed important places in Schoenberg’s oeuvre. The musical works can besearched chronologically, by genre, instrumentation, date of publication, andmany other factors such as the type of paper. It is also possible to browsethrough his several large sketchbooks, which each contain material for multipleworks.

The kinds of sources available vary considerably depending on the size ofthe work, when he wrote it, the use of a text, and other factors. Records foreach item are based on the format of the critical edition of Schoenberg’s music,which now includes seventy-one volumes published since 1969.10 As a result,these sections are somewhat less immediately user-friendly, especially for thenon-German speaker, but with a quick tutorial on terminology undergraduatestudents have no trouble navigating the interface. The listing of sources forthe Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (Fig. 1), gives a sense of the extent ofmaterials available for many works, documenting every stage of the creativeprocess, the publication, and in this case the early performance history withSchoenberg’s 1931 radio lecture on the work (a recording of which is availableunder “Voice Recordings”). Clicking on “Skizzen,” for example, brings youto a page that gives the option of working with high resolution scans using aconvenient interface online, or downloading the documents to your own com-puter. Scans of first drafts and fair copies are available in the same way. Thewebsite includes information on requesting permission to reproduce archivaland published materials; it is also possible for researchers to embed links intheir texts that will take readers directly to individual sources.11

10. http://www.schoenberg-gesamtausgabe.de/informationen.html, accessed July 8, 2014.11. Here, for instance, is the link to the fair copy of the unpublished atonal songAm Strande,

with Schoenberg’s notes to future scholars in the margins about the chronological placement of


In light of how much is available online, it is important to remember thateven the best scans do not capture all information of potential importance,as well as the fact that significant sources, such as Schoenberg’s annotated“Handexemplare” of the printed scores, are generally not scanned. Thereare also sources that resist representation in the virtual environment, such asSchoenberg’s various row devices—including slide rules, informationwheels, and cut-out templates designed to be used together with rowtables—that can be understood only through physical manipulation. Explor-ing Schoenberg’s extensive marginal notes in the books and journals in hislibrary also requires a trip to Vienna; though there are very helpful lists avail-able online of which sources feature annotations.The Britten-Pears archive holds similarly rich resources, thanks to whatthe Director of Music Colin Matthews, describes as Britten’s trait as an“inveterate hoarder,” “keeping not just all of his early manuscripts—perhapsas much out of nostalgia as for any musical reason—but also everyday thingssuch as cheque stubs, bills, and receipts. He was reluctant to throw anything

Figure 1 Partial database listing for Schoenberg’sVariations for Orchestra, op. 31, fromArnoldSchoenberg Center URL, accessed May 15, 2014, http://www.schoenberg.at/compositions/werke_einzelansicht.php?werke_id=230&herkunft=allewerke. This figure appears in color in theonline version of the Journal.

the song, including a clarification of an address stamp that he added later, accessed July 8, 2014,http://www/schoenberg.at/compositions/manuskripte.php?werke_id=142&id_quelle=388&id_gat=&id_untergatt=&herkunft=allewerke. See Bryan R. Simms, The Atonal Music of ArnoldSchoenberg, 1908–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 37.


away, useful or not; he was still using his old school exercise books at the endof his life.”12

In addition to approximately 98% of his music manuscripts, it includesother compositional materials such as libretto drafts, designs for costume andstaging, photographs, reviews, Britten and Pears’ library of books and scores,and papers pertaining to the Aldeburgh Festival, the English Opera Group,and other organizations. The collection has already served as the basis forlarge-scale publication projects including Britten’s selected correspondenceand his diaries.13 At this point the photograph collection, the work’s list, andthe Thematic Catalog are the most developed online resources, but thewebpage includes detailed catalogs of the full research collections, and thereare plans to make more manuscripts, letters, and other sources available.14

Reflecting Britten’s commitment throughout his life to composing formany different audiences, and always with a keen interest in a work’s func-tion, venue, and performers, the Britten-Pears website has a welcominghome page.15 There are links to introductions to Britten’s music, his rela-tionship to Peter Pears, the importance of the Aldeburgh environment for hismusic, and an interactive timeline of his life and career. A particularly innova-tive resource for the general public is an Audio Sampler that allows users tolisten to pieces selected on the basis of genre, instrumentation, date, as wellas by “mood,” chosen from terms in a word cloud, such as “Flowing, Pas-sionate, Playful, Stirring, Gentle.”There are also links to Teaching Resourcesconcerning Britten’s life and music, with downloadable items targeted forpupils in various age groups; they have also made available an interactive appfor children based on The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.

The section on “Britten’s Music” will be of great value to both beginningand advanced students of Britten’s music, providing basic information abouteach of his compositions, with catalog information, and links to documentarymaterials such as a recording of a 1983 discussion withMyfanwy Piper aboutthe creative process of The Turn of the Screw, a beautifully animated scan of anotebook Britten kept while composing the War Requiem, and a newsreelfrom 1945 about the upcoming premiere of Peter Grimes.

The Thematic Catalog, builds on several earlier catalogs, including liststhat Britten compiled at various points in his life. But it has been designed

12. ColinMatthews, “Going behind Britten’s Back,” in Benjamin Britten: New Perspectives onHis Life and Work, ed. Lucy Walker (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2009), 8–16, at 11. Thisbook grew out of a 2008 conference organized around the creation of the Thematic Catalog.

13. See Jonathan Manton, “Studying Britten: The Current Landscape of Published BrittenScholarship,” Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 70 (2013): 229–41.

14. The British Museum also has digitized scans available of several Britten manuscripts,including his score for the 1936 documentary filmNightMail and major works like The Turn of theScrew and theWar Requiem, accessed July 8, 2014, http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/About.aspx.

15. Philip Rupprecht, “Introduction: Britten’s Music and Its Audiences,” in RethinkingBritten, ed. Rupprecht (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), xv–xxxi.


from the start to take advantage of the online environment, with every pageable to be individually searched and cited. Each listing includes basic infor-mation about the work and its composition, a description of manuscriptsources, and the first performance. Of special value, the listings include asubstantial score incipit, each of which will eventually be paired with arecording. In the case of works that have been professionally recorded, anexcerpt corresponding to the score is provided. For all the rest, the archivehas developed “The Incipit Recording Project,” a clear illustration of theinteractive possibilities of the online environment that is also so important tothe John Cage Living Archive. In addition to an open call for submissions onthe webpage they have facilitated recording sessions with local and far-flungmusic schools and university departments.16

The catalog includes nearly 1,200 works, a striking quantity since Britten’sofficial opus numbers extend only to 95. Mathews notes that the largernumber includes items such as early versions of revised works like Billy Budd;compositions that were withdrawn; arrangements; a substantial body ofincidental music for theater, radio, and film; and unfinished pieces likea Clarinet Concerto for Benny Goodman (several of which, includingthis score, have been subsequently reconstructed for performance).17

Of special interest in the Thematic Catalog is the massive body of juvenil-ia Britten composed between the ages of six and eighteen, representingmore than 1,100 sources for nearly 800 compositions. These spans the itemsfrom BTC 1: Do You No That My Daddy Has Gone to London Today from1919 ([the six-year-old’s spelling] for two or three voices and piano), pieceswritten during Britten’s early years of study with Frank Bridge which beganin 1928, through the Sinfonietta Op. 1 (BTC 746), composed in 1932when he was 18.

The juvenilia provides a vivid testament both to Britten’s talent and hisdetermination to become a composer, as is clear in the pace of his output,which reached a high point in 1925 with 127 pieces.18 But the breadth andrange of these works and fragments also offer a window into Britten’s expe-rience of a broad swath of the British musical world in the years after war.There are pieces in many genres, including a large number of string quartets,songs, choral works, organ music, and parlor pieces that summon up a nine-year-old’s sense of “exotic” styles (and spelling) like the Three Songs fromOther Countries, BTC 43 (1922), for piano, cornet, and banjo: “The EygptainSong,” “The Indian Cheege Song” and “The Song of the Banjo.” In his study

16. Lucy Walker, “The Benjamin Britten Thematic Catalogue: An Introduction to theOnline Resource,” Fontes artis musicae 56 (2009): 138–49. It is noteworthy that developmentof the project was also interactive with user input in the early stages leading to modifications inthe design.

17. Matthews, “Going behind Britten’s Back.”18. Lucy Walker, “How a Child’s Mind Works: Assessing the ‘Value’ of Britten’s Juvenilia,”

Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 64 (2008): 641–58, at 647.


of the juvenilia, Christopher Mark notes Britten’s growing awareness of con-temporary music, including that of Delius and Holst when he was 13, and—thanks to influence of Bridge—works by Berg and Schoenberg by the time hewas 16.19

Part of the value of the Thematic Catalog relates to Britten’s reticence,especially in contrast to Schoenberg and Cage, to discuss his music or crea-tive process. In one of his few statements, the brief “How a Musical WorkOriginates” (1942), he notes the importance of an external stimulus such asa special occasion or a commission, but he emphasizes the necessity for a“purely musical idea or germ.”20 There are, of course, many works and frag-ments that are not particularly interesting, as Britten noted when near theend of his life he reworked some of his piano pieces from the ages 10–12 asthe Five Waltzes: “Since the composer was a very ordinary little boy, they areall pretty juvenile (here was no Mozart, I fear).”21 But there are many earlypieces and fragments that allow us to hear some of these stimulating musicalideas in something close to their original form, such as BTC 58 (1923), aeight-measure recitative in A minor with a strange Peter Quint-like melody(see Fig. 2); Britten marks the final cadence pppppppppp, along with anindication for the una corda pedal.

Britten himself clearly greatly valued his early compositional efforts, keepingthe collection with him wherever he traveled, and returning to the pieces assources of inspiration and material throughout his life, notably starting as earlyas the Simple Symphony (1934) when he was twenty. Pointing to the impor-tance of the theme of childhood that scholars have noted in many of Britten’sworks, the composer wrote of the 1969 collection of songs written four de-cades earlier, Tit for Tat: Five Settings from Boyhood of Poems by Walter de laMare: “Although I hold no claims for the songs’ importance or originality I dofeel that the boy’s vision has simplicity and clarity whichmight have given a lit-tle pleasure to the great poet, with his unique insight into a child’s mind.”22

Although the general public is likely to have had less exposure to per-formances of John Cage’s music than to Britten or even Schoenberg, theinclusion of his scores and artworks in museum collections around the worldhave made them unusually visible in the contemporary cultural scene. Therecent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, There WillNever Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4’33”, focused on the museum’s newlyacquired manuscript of one of Cage’s attempts to notate the work usingproportional notation. Forming a context for the manuscript, the exhibitionincluded scores by La Monte Young, Mieko Shiomi, a large collection of

19. ChristopherMark, “Juvenilia (1922–1932),” in The Cambridge Companion to BenjaminBritten, ed. Mervyn Cooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 11–35.

20. Paul Kildea, ed., Britten on Music (Oxford and New York; Oxford University Press,2003), 42.

21. Preface to Five Waltzes (1923–25, rev. 1969), in ibid., 355.22. Ibid., 356.


Fluxus materials, and foundational works of sound art such as RobertMorris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making.23

Cage had a life-long interest in scores and music notation, in particular theways that new forms of notation could represent andmotivate newways of cre-ating and hearing sounds. The more than four hundred scores he solicited forthe 1969 bookNotations, as part of a fund-raising project for the CunninghamDance Foundation, became the core of amassive collection of correspondence,programs, clippings, and other musical ephemera he began donating to theNorthwestern University Library in the 1970s. Deborah Campana, who wasthe music/public-services librarian at Northwestern, notes that he started inthe 1960s to organize his personal archive: “Not merely would he maintainhis music manuscripts and organize correspondence received, he would keepanything anyone sent him much like a time capsule.”24

In contrast to the Schoenberg and Britten archives, which gather in oneplace significant portions of each composer’s Nachlaß, Cage himself madesure that his papers would be more widely disseminated. In addition to thematerials he sent to Northwestern, he donated his writings to Wesleyan

Figure 2 Britten Thematic Catalog, incipit for BTC 58, accessed June 1, 2014, http://93.93.131.5/works/BTC58/incipits. A color version of this figure appears in the onlineversion of the Journal.

23. There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4’33” (October 12, 2013–June 22,2014), accessed July 8, 2014, http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/. And see KyleGann,No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4′33″ (NewHaven. CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

24. Deborah Campana, “Happy New Ears! In Celebration of 100 Years: The State ofResearch on John Cage,” Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 69(2012): 9–22, at 12. Martin Iddon notes, however, that much of Cage’s early correspondencehas not survived. Iddon, John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation andPerformance (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), x.


University Press (which had published Silence and other books), while hisbooks on mycology and gardening went to the University of California,Santa Cruz.25 The scores and other materials made available through theJohn Cage Unbound: A Living Archive came to the New York Public Librarythrough the efforts of the John Cage Trust, founded by Merce Cunninghamand musicologist and Cage’s assistant Laura Kuhn. After a team of scholarsgathered and cataloged Cage’s music, an anonymous donor purchased thecollection for the library.26

The emphases of the Living Archive, created by New York Public Library incollaboration with the John Cage Trust and Cage’s publisher C. F. Peters, areon interactivity and accessibility.27 Virtually every page includes places for usercomments, as well as links to share the information through myriad forms ofsocial media; as I discuss further below, a defining feature of the site is the abilityfor users to upload videos of their own performances of Cage’s music. Thegraphically pleasing design of the home page encourages a sense of explorationthrough a selection ofmore than eightymanuscripts, videos, and othermaterialsthat appear to hang on threads like a mobile (Fig. 3). While some basic back-ground information onCage is provided, including a short biography and time-line, the site serves more as an invitation into his music and thought than acomprehensive overview. It is possible to browse the various categories ofobjects: manuscripts, videos, and “ephemera,” which includes concert pro-grams, photographs, and a receipt he submitted to the League ofComposers forthe cost incurred in buying the bolts, screws, and other items used to prepare thepiano for his Sonatas & Interludes. For those wishing to dig deeper, every itemincludes links to the NYPL catalog, the John Cage Trust, and C. F Peters.28

The site currently includes individually citable manuscripts of thirty-sixpieces selected from throughout Cage’s life. Clicking on the image opensa window onto high resolution scans of materials ranging from fragmentarysketches to complete manuscripts, accompanied by a short description andcataloging information; many works are represented by multiple pages, such

25. Campana, “Happy New Ears! In Celebration of 100 Years,” 12–15. Campana provideslinks to the online catalogs of these and other collections of Cage materials, including A JohnCage Compendium, maintained by Paul van Emmerick, accessed July 8, 2014, http://www.cagecomp.home.xs4all.nl/. The John Cage Research grant offered by the NorthwesternUniversity Library provides support for on-site use of the Cage Collection, accessed July 8,2014, http://www.library.northwestern.edu/node/7001.

26. The sale benefited the Merce Cunningham Foundation; after his passing Cunningham’spapers were also donated to the New York Public library.

27. Portions of the Living Archive along with other multimedia materials were also pub-lished as free iBook as part of their series Point, accessed July 8, 2014, http://www.nypl.org/point. In a personal communication John Haim indicated that the plan to maintain theLiving Archive for perpetuity, while expanding the number of items included and providingmore information for scholarly research.

28. The “Database of Works” maintained by the John Cage Trust, provides more detailedinformation about each of Cage’s works, along with discography, accessed July 8, 2014.http://johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Works.cfm.


as Cartridge Music, with twenty-three scans. The collection is full offascinating items, including five pages tracing the development of 0’00”.Composed and premiered in Tokyo in 1962, the piece is dedicated to YokoOno and Toshi Ichiyanagi, illustrating the rich international networks ofexperimental music that are being charted by Benjamin Piekut and others.29

Manuscripts with heavy performance annotations like the nine pages for theImaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) for piano and two turntables, also illus-trate the fluid boundaries in Cage’s music between work, the creative process,and the act of performance.

The most innovative feature of the Living Archive is the inclusion of morethan thirty videos of performances of Cage’s works that have been submittedby professionals, students, and amateurs. Eschewing any sense of a restrictiveperformance practice of these pieces, or what Judy Lochhead has describedas “an experimental sound ideal” in Cage’s circle,30 the call for submissionsencourages a spirit of openness and play:

John Cage believed that anybody can feel and play music. His guidelines forcreating it allow for infinite possibilities. What instruments do you use to playCage? Do you pluck a cactus? Slam the lid of a piano? Crumple a piece of

Figure 3 Homepage from John Cage Unbound: A Living Archive, accessed June 1, 2014,http://exhibitions.nypl.org/johncage/. A color version of this figure appears in the onlineversion of the Journal.

29. Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and ItsLimits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

30. Judy Lochhead, “Controlling Liberation: David Tudor and the ‘Experimental’ SoundIdeal,” (presentation, 2001 Getty Research Institute Symposium, “The Art of David Tudor,”accessed July 8, 2014, https://www.getty.edu/research/exhibitions_events/events/david_tudor_symposium/pdf/lochhead.pdf.


paper? We invite you to share a video of yourself playing excerpts from Cage’smusic—and, within your video, we encourage you to explain how you choseto interpret Cage as well as any lessons you learned from the process.

An especially interesting video intercuts three performances of the indeter-minate piano piece TV Köln (1960) by doctoral students at the University ofIllinois, Urbana-Champaign. This makes it possible to hear and see howdifferently musicians can interpret the score, as well as the degree to which thethree versions are all clearly still the same piece. Also noteworthy is a version ofCage’s Balinese gamelan-inspired prepared piano piece Bacchanale (1940)reinterpreted by the Ceraken Balinese gamelan ensemble. The 4’33” app,released in early 2014 by the John Cage Trust, demonstrates the potentialfor interactivity on a global scale.31 In addition to the sounds of Cage’sapartment, hundreds of users have uploaded their own versions of the piecedocumenting their local soundscapes around the world.

With the increasing number of online archival materials for manycomposers, and the ever-expanding interest in the creative process in allareas of the arts, it is clear that we are only in the early stages of explor-ing the possibilities for how archives can use the Internet to facilitateresearch, teaching, and performance. It is also likely with growing pres-sures towards public access by funding organizations in many countriesthat online accessibility may become more of a requirement than an en-hancement.

The three websites considered here provide useful models for very differ-ent ways that archives can provide access to huge amounts of informationand materials through our computers and mobile devices.At the same time,as more archival materials become available online it will be important tomake clear the limitations of even the highest quality scans, as well as thestubborn materiality of objects that resist any sort of virtual representation.In none of the cases considered here are the online resources meant toreplace actual work in the archive; similarly no matter how detailed thecatalogs are, interacting with archivists remains crucial for substantialresearch projects. The question of the long-term stability or sustainability ofthese or any digital resources–in comparison to the centuries we use tomeasure the lifespan of traditional archival holdings–is emerging as anincreasingly urgent question. 32 Indeed even during the few months I have

31. They have also issued an app with high quality samples of a piano prepared with Cage’sown materials, accessed July 8, 2014, http://www.johncage.org/cagePiano.html.

32. I have explored related issues in the context of digital music in the essay, “Wanted Deadand Alive: Historical Performance Practice and Electro-Acoustic Music from IRCAM to AbbeyRoad,” inMusic in Print and Beyond: Hildegard von Bingen to The Beatles, ed. Craig A.Monsonand Roberta Montemorra Marvin, Eastman Studies in Music 105 (Rochester, NY: University ofRochester Press, 2013), 312–37.


been involved in this project, various aspects of these three sites have been influx, and more substantial changes are on the horizon.33

Finally, as with the incredible convenience and breadth of JSTOR, it willbe increasingly necessary to remind students and ourselves that even themost extensive website can only represent a fraction of what is available inthe archives. Indeed, arguably the most significant contribution of thesewebsites is the incentive they provide to make the trip to the archives them-selves in order to experience in new ways the much richer resources of thenon-virtual world.

JOSEPH AUNER

33. Thanks to an investigation by JAMS editorial assistant Adam Crandell, it is also clearthat three sites vary considerably in how they handle the structure and accessibility of the meta-data for their online catalogs and other materials. For one example of a plan to make the data setfor the Britten Thematic Catalog available see the “Technical Documentation,” accessed July 8,2014, http://www.brittenpears.org/content/edjCUVNkn_u1Q.pdf.


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