The nature of lute music and its notation
The principal goal of ECOLM is to store and make accessible to scholars, players and others (in so far as legal circumstances allow), full-text encodings of sources of music for the Western-European lute (and other sources insofar as they are relevant), together with graphical images of manuscripts and printed music, such codicological and paleographical detail as is helpful to the potential users, and bibliographical data, including, if possible, the texts of important studies where necessary permissions can be obtained.
Relevant ‘other’ sources might include keyboard versions of lute pieces, but would where possible also be full-text encodings. They would typically comprise music for keyboard, wind or string instruments, especially the viola da gamba, or vocal ensemble.
The technical resources of ECOLM would include facilities for online searching of the bibliographical and musical material (the latter to be provided by the results of a parallel UK/US collaborative research project here at King’s College, London, for which we hope to abtain joint funding from JISC and NSF via the International Digital Libraries Program), and complete access via the World Wide Web (with suitable restrictions according to the classes of material and user). Also viewing, playing (via computer sound-system or MIDI) of lute music, and printing (again subject to relevant permissions).
Return to top.ECOLM will be maintained in a form allowing:
The nature of lute music and its notation
Throughout its history the lute used a form of notation different from other instruments or the voice. This notation system, tablature, simply provides the information necessary for the performer to perform the music, rather than describing the music in any formal or structural sense. The point at which each string to be sounded needs to be stopped by the player’s left hand is indicated by a cipher - usually, in so-called ‘French’ tablature, by a letter (‘a’ representing the open string) - and the point in time at which it should be struck by the right hand is shown by corresponding rhythm-signs above the music. (The principle is identical with that adopted in China and elsewhere in the Far East for notating lute music from about the 8th century AD.) The notation says nothing about the names of the notes, nor their actual duration; it was assumed that a competent player would understand these aspects and perform accordingly. Thus there is a significant ambiguity in the notation which had beneficial artistic results for the original performers (some subtle rhythmic details simply cannot be notated in any system) and a correspondingly malign effect on the music’s acceptance by musicologists from the 19th century onward. Scholars have frequently engaged in heated debate on methods of transcription into standard musical notation, often ignoring the highly artistic results that can be obtained simply by sensitive and historically-informed performance from the original tablature.
The inherent ambiguity in lute tablature demands that any computer-encoding of lute music must be based as far as possible on the original notation rather than a transcription (which is inevitably a single interpretation out of several possibilities). Lute tablature has, however, the advantage that it can easily be represented in ASCII-text format, unlike standard music-notation. This can be done efficiently and reasonably transparently through the use of the TabCode scheme developed by Tim Crawford with this kind of use in mind.
Return to top.The extent of the lute repertory, although limited chronologically to the period c1480-1800, is very large. Even before 1551 a little under 2500 pieces for lute were published in about 60 printed collections (many of these are of course duplications of popular pieces), and publication continued unabated until about the outbreak of the Thirty Years War (1618); thereafter fewer collections of lute music were published, although a manuscript tradition (often associated with lute-teaching) continued to thrive. By the 18th century, most of the interest in the lute was confined to German-speaking countries, yet large amounts of music in manuscripts from this period are preserved, often in out-of-the-way libraries without facilities for reproduction or publication. The is also a significant number of parallel sources of music for other plucked-string instruments: cittern, bandora, guitar, and the 18th-century German mandora.
It is impossible at this point to calculate the total number of pieces that could be embraced in the wider scope of ECOLM, but a rough estimate suggests some 50,000 individual movements (in the later periods, these were usually grouped together into suites or sonatas). For example, Christian Meyer et al’s Catalogue des Sources Musicales en Tablature lists the contents of 131 manuscripts for lute (all other instruments are excluded), containing c7952 movements (roughly 60 movements per manuscript) in German libraries (vol II); and c4400 movements (c66 mvts per MS) in 60 manuscripts in France and Switzerland (vol I).
Return to top.The initial research project (a 5-year study involving one fulltime researcher, a part-time programmer and postgraduate assistance) cannot possibly hope to cover the entire lute repertory. Rather, the project for which funding is sought here will select a few coherent classes of sources from which meaningful musicological research outcomes may be expected. These sources will be encoded in full, with detailed bibliographical data, and detailed studies will be carried out using the technical facilities that are available at that point in the research. As further sources are added, and as the technical facilities become more sophisticated, it will be possible to repeat these studies with the additional data incorporated. By the same token, a study might be repeated on a different selection of sources, enabling a quite different ‘window’ on a historical repertory with different musicological objectives.
(Exactly how long each source might take to be encoded is very hard to estimate, although it should be possible to encode a complete typical piece of lute music of average length in under 30 minutes. Thus, the encoding of, say, 100 sources at an average of 65 pieces per source should take approximately 100x65/2 hours, roughly 3250 hours. This represents some two years of work by a single researcher. The five-year project, involving, say, two full-time researchers in encoding, might achieve something in the region of 400-500 sources, although it must be stressed that this is a very rough estimate and may be wildly optimistic. It would not be expected that any single researcher’s time would be devoted entirely to data-entry, and other aspects of the research would be carried out by all members of the team.)
Since the accumulation of complete sources will be highly time-consuming, it will be useful to test the technical methods of the system and organisation of the material in ‘real-life’ studies that do not necessarily require encodings of complete sources (since, by virtue of the selection of the materials being studied, the rest of the music in the sources is redundant to that particular study). It is proposed that four ‘case studies’, each with a different type of musicological research outcome, will be conducted on the limited pilot implementation. In each case, the research will be directed towards testing the outcomes of traditional methods against the results made possible by the use of the technology. (The list may change somewhat, depending on the progress made in the encoding procedure and on ECOLM’s technical facilities, but the broad objectives in terms of types of outcome will be similar.)
Common motives in the work of Silvius Leopold Weiss and related works by his contemporaries (data: c200 movements by SL Weiss, and c100 movements by JS Bach and others)
The versions of John Dowland’s ‘Lachrimae Pavan’ (data: c50 versions of the pavan for lute, keyboard, solo voice and ensemble)
The French duple-time gigue, its notation and performance (data: c30 complete encodings)
French vocal music of the 16th century and its instrumental arrangements (data: c12 popular French chansons and their arrangements)
Return to top.The kind of methodological flexibility demonstrated in these pilot studies is a major strength of working with an electronic corpus. The kinds of investigation that might be carried out are many and various, and cannot in fact be predicted, since ECOLM is intended to provide a lasting resource for scholars working in the future as well as for the studies outlined here. While the encodings of the lute music in the sources cannot replace the original manuscripts and printed materials - and many aspects of the sources are impossible to capture electronically - they at least allow some of the data-processing possiblities familiar from the larger discipline of Humanities Computing, which usually is concerned with electronic corpora or archives of (mostly) textual material.
A further benefit to the whole musical community is that ECOLM would make music that is notationally unintelligible to almost all of them at least in some degree understandable. Lute music’s notation has always been a major hindrance to its acceptance as historically significant. As a minimum the ability to play back tablature files aurally and simultaneously see some kind of translation into ‘standard’ notation will open this important repertory to an immeasurably wider musical public than at present.
Return to top.Since, as outlined above and in the TECHNICAL APPENDIX , below, the project is World-Wide-Web-based in nature, a significant degree of dissemination is inherent in its creation and development. However, the ‘case studies’ outlined will offer many opprotunities for publication, both of music editions and scholarly articles. For example, the final volumes of the Silvius Leopold Weiss Sämtliche Werke, ed. Tim Crawford, will collect together all the music by Weiss that is scattered through a large number of manuscripts, sometimes erroneously ascribed to Weiss, sometimes anonymous in the surviving sources yet intuitively identifiable as his. Any technical resources that can be brought to bear on the difficult matter of style-identification will help enormously in the editorial process, and it is in exactly this area that the data resource outlined here will be invaluable.
A number of articles listed in the application form (question 6, Public output) would have benefitted enormously from such a resource; their preparation highlighted the need for an initiative in this direction.
NB A TECHNICAL APPENDIX is attached as stipulated in AHRB guidelines for data creation projects.