November MDAP Seminar: Mapping music: Digital tools and collaborative communities
What is similarity in music? How can digital tools help us to understand the relatedness of works and styles? During this interactive presentation, we’ll explore some of the concepts, practices and challenges of modeling the quotable musical text in the digital domain, and how new tools for encoding, addressing and annotating music invite us to think across the disciplines (from musicology to data science) to map musical patterns both in their details and on a massive scale.
Speaker
Professor Richard Freedman, John C. Whitehead 1943 Professor of Humanities; Chair, Department of Music, Haverford College, USA
Seminar details
Tuesday 23 November, 2021
11am-12pm
The panel will be held online via Zoom.
Abstract
What is similarity in music? How can digital tools help us to understand the relatedness of works and styles? Borrowing, allusion and similarity have always been a part of musical expression, and thus are of intrinsic interest to musicians interested in any of a wide range of styles and composers, from Handel to Stravinsky, and from layered medieval motets to film music. And yet the challenges of citing, sharing and discussing such connections have always been conditioned by the limits of traditional print publication and the graphical conventions upon which it depends. During this interactive presentation, we’ll explore some of the concepts, practices and challenges of modeling the quotable musical text in the digital domain, and how new tools for encoding, addressing and annotating music invite us to think across the disciplines (from musicology to data science) to map musical patterns both in their details and on a massive scale.
Speaker bio
Richard Freedman is Professor of Music and John C. ’43 Whitehead Professor of Humanities at Haverford College (near Philadelphia, USA). He is the author of two books: The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso and their protestant listeners: music, piety, and print in sixteenth-century France (Rochester, 2001), and Music in the Renaissance, 2, vols. (New York, 2012; also available in Spanish translation via Akal publishers [2018]), as well as many essays in leading journals and encyclopedias.
Freedman’s record of work with digital applications for the study of music has involved a wide range of musicologists, information scientists, and developers from the Centre d’études supèrieures de la Renaissance (CESR) in Tours (France), from The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (University of Maryland, USA), from the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform (Melbourne University), and from the Digital Scholarship Lab of Haverford College, as well as a dozens of participating scholars and students from around the world. The Lost Voices Project (2012–2014; http://digitalduchemin.org) and now Citations: The Renaissance Imitation Mass (2014–Present; http://crimproject.org), have been supported by major grants from European and American agencies, including the Mellon Foundation, the Maison des sciences de l’homme, and the American Council of Learned Societes, Le Studium (the Loire Valley Institute for Advanced Study in Orléans), and the National Endowment for the Humanities,
He has served in leadership roles for major scholarly societies: as Digital and Multimedia Scholarship Editor for The Journal of the American Musicological Society, as Chair of the Technology Committee for the American Musicological Society, as Chair of the Digital and Electronic Media Committee (and member of the Board of Directors) for the Renaissance Society of America, and as member of the Board of Directors of Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (the leading bibliographical authority for writings on music).
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