Maninpasta minutes: MockupDesign#2 Carolina - Sources Cross Analysis

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Story: Carolina - Sources Cross Analysis

Story: Carolina - Sources Cross Analysis

With: Angelo Pompilio, Paul Mulholland, Francesco Baldi, Christian Colonna, Philo van Kemenade

Goal (from Story)
Carolina has to prepare a conference for the anniversary of the birth of the composer Giacomo Antonio Perti and she needs to collect some information about his career. She knows that Giacomo Antonio Perti is the author of “Masses” and she wants to dedicate a particular section to these compositions.

Scenario (from Story)

In order to accomplish her goal first Carolina must find the scores that constitute her primary sources. Thus, Carolina should find the places where these compositions were played for the first time how many musicians were involved, how many musical instruments, the names of the musicians. Carolina is also interested in the singers involved and the choir. Carolina has to find written evidence that says how these Masses were received. Carolina is also interested in finding out in which tonality the compositions were written.

Extended User flow

Carolina searches for scores by the composer Giacomo Antonio Perti. Results can come back from different countries and archives. The provenance of each returned result is shown (i.e. which repository it came from).

Possible Filters:

• Author: “Giacomo Antonio Perti”
• Dates / years
• Locations
  • Of physical object
  • Of publication
  • ...
• Type of document, e.g.
  • manuscript
  • Representation of music
    • musical score
    • Musical part(s) (one part per instrument)
  • modern edition of the same piece
    • Place
    • Publisher
    • Date
• Digital reproduction
  • Is complete or not?
  • Viewable online?
  • Available download
  • Resolution / quality: not very important
• Associated external sources
  • Modern edition(s) of the same score
    • “There are probably many editions of the same source”

Carolina has found a number of Musical Scores

• Next she reads and reviews
• How does she know which archive to go to?
  • Maybe she has done some musicological studies
• Can she go to a website?
  • There is currently no online catalogue, she has to go to Bologna
  • Carolina is having a hard time during the pandemic

“Scores are in libraries, Contracts are in archives. Now it is necessary to use separate archival systems”

Different Metadata systems:

• Libraries; ESBD (books)
• Archives; Folders in archive, administration point of view (each institution have an history with its kind of documents e.g. theatre, compositions played in the theatre)
• Museums; iconographic materials
• Dublin Core; common data between library, archive (mostly) and museum (less) (creator, title, description (not necessary for historian source)), but DC is too generic for Carolina’s needs.

Carolina needs to have knowledge about the specific metadata system of a particular archive.

Archive documents can be used to find the names of musicians and when played

• Archive documents
• Posters
• Records of contracts between theatres and musicians (salary or payment to musician)

“Masses” by Perti are a series of 10 compositions.

• All 10 compositions
• Multiple performances of multiple compositions in a specific period of time
  • (evidence of) Reception of performances
    • E.g. from:
      • (16-18 century) Archive documents (no comments on quality of performance in this period, so quantity of performances is essential information proxy for ‘reception’, big city/little city, how many time played in the same town)
        • Contracts, payments (names of musicians), (few document) chronicle of the performance (printed manuscript to describe event, e.g. document family history like high profile marriage -> indicative of fashion)
      • (from 19th century) Periodicals reviews (first time that “real reviews” are available)
        • Carolina still uses other types of archival documents (“material” situation) as well
        • Authors of reviews
          • Are considered experts
          • Sometimes periodical publisher (and reviewer) is same publisher as the score and vocal score
            • E.g. Ricordi (italian big publisher)
            • Publishers publish also scores, vocal scores, so they had interest in a representation to be well reviewed (especially first 1 / 3 representations)
          • Also independent periodicals exist
      • (from 20th century) amount of tickets sold
• How does Carolina consume this information?
  • “She needs to read each document”
    • I need to read, then it is my job to interpret it
  • Maybe for type of document, e.g. archives document, newspaper, etc
    • Visualisation of
      • amount per types could help
      • Other composers active
      • Theatres
      • Locations
      • Number of documents per institute (how many documents have each institute)
• Analysis of musical scores
  • Tonality of piece is useful
    • In some cases written in the score
    • Normally necessary to read (first and last chord) and interpret, establish the tonality
      • Can be done automatically based on digitised score or perhaps exists in metadata
      • Metadata field: “Uniform title” contains:
        • Title
        • Instrument and voices
        • Tonality
    • Modulation inside the composition is allowed (switch between tonalities)
    • References
      • https://guides.smu.edu/c.php?g=721718&p=5144936
      • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_title
      • https://libraries.unl.edu/music/tutorial/05
      • https://ifla.org/ main association for library metadata formats, including vocabularies
      • https://www.ifla.org/files/assets/cataloguing/IMEICC/IMEICC1/code_comp_2003_europe_5_uniform_titles.pdf
  • Melodic line & text
    • There is a connection between melody and the text
    • Calculated or annotated?
      • In the text there is a grammar,
        • can be NLP analysed
      • Melody: ‘Musical Phrase’ 4+4+4+4 scheme
        • Can be analysed computationally, based on cadence
• How might Carolina share outputs
  • Links to source materials in essay would be useful
• Is there a useful vocabulary / thesaurus, more specific to music than Dublin Core?
  • Not that I am aware of